Being Human Religiously

March 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors. Let us not fail to be mediocre when we could instead fail to be absolutely brilliant. Let us not fall short of being moderately compassionate. Let us rather fall short of being fully compassionate.

Of all our failures in life, perhaps the saddest are those in which we failed even to try and serve the highest and noblest ideals.

It is a sin to fail at low aims. Not because we failed, but because we aimed too low.

But it is not a sin to fail at very high aims, like aiming for truth, justice, compassion and character. Because even our failure puts us into the company of the saints, the company of those who also believe that rising to our full humanity and rising to our full divinity may be the same rising.

Striving after low and mean ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our failures. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to settle for lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

We will all fail at some things. But let it not be a failure of vision, a failure of aspiration. If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors, and then let our failures bless us – for they will.

Amen.

SERMON

Today’s sermon is really prepared as a companion to the program I’ll be doing here in two weeks, “Being Human Religiously,” which is a look at the soul of what the liberal style of religion – as opposed to literal religion – has been about for more than 2500 years.

I’m also continuing to think about the idea of Spirit that I started last week with the sermon about bringing the horse in the house. That story has now been written out for the first time, and posted on our website – along with the photograph.

Last week the treatment was partly in fun. There is a spirit of life that can appear without warning and break through our boundaries like all the trickster figures in all the world’s religions, opening us to some unexpected and life-giving possibilities. And since we can find stories about it everywhere, we can call it transcendent, enduring, maybe even infinite and eternal.

But religion is about deciding to live in relation to that transcendental spirit. Religion is, as one great Hindu mystic put it, “the whole soul becoming what it believes.” (Vivekananda)

This morning, I want to think about what on earth that means, why anyone would want to do it, what we could get out of it, and how we do it. That’s a lot of area to cover; I have tried to cut the sermon down from its original length of nine days.

Many would say that being human religiously is about standing before God, and that’s one way to put it. You could also say that Well, that would depend on what sort of a god you meant; and that’s also true. If you think of the God of Western religions – at least the version that makes the world media most often – this could be a pretty unattractive idea – frightening, even.

That God so often seems to be about judging and punishing, even wiping out whole peoples who displease him. And the thought of being judged by the God who created the whole universe and has these terribly high standards and this fearful punishment – it’s no wonder so many people don’t want to go to church or take religion very seriously. A lot of what passes for religion, and for God, doesn’t deserve to be taken very seriously.

Many people think it would make a lot more sense to reverse it and try to be religious humanly, to take religion down to a human scale, to reduce it to what we understand, even what we like.

And there is a lot of that going on. God and religion are dragged down to echo and endorse what we come up with, including some of the worst of what we come up with. Then religion is used not to expand us, but to strengthen our own biases and dangerous behaviors.

Sadly, you can see this by looking at almost every single instance where religion has become combined with the power of the state, both at home and abroad. Again, it’s enough to turn people completely off on the whole subject of having anything at all to do with religion, and you can’t really blame them.

Think of the Muslim women in Iran who have been shot in the face by men for refusing to cover their faces with a veil. Or what may become several states following South Dakota’s lead, criminalizing women who get abortions, while also cutting social support programs, pre-natal care, post-natal care, and health care. It’s good to be pro-life: I think it’s even a sacred command.

But to be pro-life means to honor and be willing to pay for all the social structures and services that are needed to support, nourish and honor human life. These include sex education, because it is so much easier to take advantage of ignorance than of knowledge. They include pre-natal care, post-natal care, universal health care, day care, and a host of things that are done much better in some European countries who have a much higher notion of serving human life than we do.

The programs are expensive, and have to be provided for all, especially for those who need them the most. But without them, criminalizing abortion is little more than a vindictive policy that turns some of our poorest and most defenseless girls and women into just breeders. And that isn’t pro-life. That’s an anti-life program, wrapped in misleading religious rhetoric, and we should all be ashamed of it.

But in any country where the power of religion is combined with the power of the state, we see people dragging religion down to the lowest level of human greed and bigotry, rather than trying to be human at a level of high and loving ideals.

So let’s put it another way. If religion is about choosing to live in a commanding kind of relationship with very high ideals, why do it? What do we get out of it? Isn’t it like sailors following the North Star, even though they’ll never reach it? Why torment yourself with ideals higher than you’ll ever be able to satisfy?

Once we ask it this way, the answer is kind of surprising. I’m going to say some things this morning that may seem surprising, and you may want to check them out against your own life this week. Here’s the first one. The reason we put our lives in the service of the very highest and most demanding ideals is that it is the only way to become fully human, and we know it. We choose this route over and over, whether we care about religion or not – I’ll convince you of this. For example, let’s take a few secular professions.

Lawyers, I’ve been told, are really supposed to be committed to serve three different levels of responsibilities. First, but lowest, is the responsibility to serve their client’s wishes. Second is the responsibility to serve the law, and the quality of law. They shouldn’t act in ways that will weaken the rule of good laws. And that leads to the third and highest level of allegiance, which is to the good of society. They shouldn’t take cases that can set precedents that are likely to weaken our civil boundaries or make our world a worse place.

The popular conception of lawyers is often that they only care about doing what their client wants. And there are some like that. But I’ve never talked with any of those, and am not sure I’d enjoy it, though it could be interesting to challenge them on this. However, I have found a lot of very high idealism in the lawyers I’ve known. They believe that if they serve the highest of these ideals to the best of their ability, it is a noble profession that will make the world a better place and fulfill them both as professionals and as people. And I think they’re right.

Teachers also hope to serve different levels of ideals, but are the most fulfilled when they feel they have served the highest ideals. At the lowest and perhaps least satisfying level, they teach students to pass the tests that will rank their schools.

But good teachers also have a love, a passion, for education, learning, growing, expanding their own horizons and the horizons of their students. They love the pursuit of truth in one form or another, and give their lives to serving it, one one class at a time, one student at a time. I’ve not met many teachers of whom this wasn’t true.

If there are teachers who don’t care about anything but getting students through the tests, I can’t imagine that teaching is a very deeply fulfilling profession for them. At the highest level, teachers hope and believe that they can be positive influences in forming the character of their students, helping to make them better people, partners and citizens. I’ve had teachers who absolutely did that. So have you. And we will never, ever forget them, will we? So this too can be a noble and fulfilling profession, but only when it is striving to serve very high ideals. Nobody gets much credit for just putting in time – they don’t get much fulfillment from it, either.

Doctors have the same kind of ideals that drew them to give their lives to medicine. Not pushing pills, but serving health, being part of a profession that cares for the quality of the lives of their patients, one patient at a time.

We could go down the list with more, but the most important things in life – things like justice, truth, health and character – must always be served by holding ourselves responsible to these terribly high ideals. The higher the ideals we serve, the more gratifying we can find the act of serving them. See if this isn’t true in your own life.

And all this is true on a more personal level, too, in our personal lives rather than our jobs. All weddings, oaths of office, all professional and personal standards we make a big thing of or dress up to do, are always committing us to serve only the very highest ideals. If they weren’t, it would feel tacky, and we wouldn’t be interested.

I’ve never officiated at a wedding where the couple swore to more or less like one another for awhile till they got bored, then to split. There was a hit song in the 70s that sold millions of records, where the lyrics said “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day; we’ll sing in the sunshine, then I’ll be on my way.” I never heard it sung at a wedding.

At a wedding, couples make bold and daring promises, amazing promises. These two people who really don’t know anywhere near as much about each other as they think, stand in front of all their best friends and families and all that is holy to them. They stand there and promise to love, honor and cherish, keeping themselves faithful to the other for as long as they both shall live. Without aspiring to a commitment of that quality, it wouldn’t even be worth attending a wedding. If all they aspire to is to sing in the sunshine then be on their way, most of their friends and family would suggest they just get on their way. But nobody does that.

Without the transcendent promises that call us to become more, the whole idea of a wedding loses its magnificence of spirit, its nobility of human aspiration, its magic and its blessing.

Still, why do we do it? These aren’t even religious examples I’ve been using, but any time we do something that feels deeply important to us, we seek out the highest ideals we can find, and swear to put ourselves at their service. If that isn’t a religious commitment, I don’t know what is. But why? What do we get out of it? Why bother?

This isn’t just a rhetorical question; there’s an answer to it. Here’s the reason for being human religiously. It’s because – and see if this doesn’t ring true for you – the highest satisfaction and deepest comfort in life come from being committed to the highest and most compassionate ideals, because it is the act of commitment that transforms and blesses us. This is expressed in so many ways in different religions.

It is seeing ourselves as being beloved of God, knowing Jesus loves us, feeling engulfed in the compassion of Allah, the Buddha or Kuan Yin. Just trying to serve these things blesses us, even if we don’t do it perfectly. Because perfect ideals, and perfect gods, have forgiven us in advance for being merely human, as long as we’re trying to be the best kind of humans. This sounds all poetic and foofy, but it is absolutely true. Compassion, acceptance and forgiveness are key attributes of every god worthy of the name.

You may know Christians, as I do, for whom one of the most profoundly loving facts in their lives is the fact that they can say “Christ has accepted me just as I am.” If they hadn’t felt that, they would probably have just kept looking. It’s ironic. We can fail at trying to serve high ideals and still feel blessed by our aspirations. But if we just try to get by, get away with what we can, drag religion down to our lowest expectations so it will be easy to meet them, then when we look back on it there is no blessing for us at all.

When a Buddhist tries to see all others through the eyes of the Buddha’s or Kuan Yin’s boundless compassion, it rubs off. They also come to see themselves through the eyes of that boundless compassion; it rubs off. They have become what they tried to serve, and it transformed their lives. A Jew, Christian or Muslim who tries to serve the God of Love in honest and earnest ways, lives a far more loving and beloved life than they might otherwise. As the Hindu mystic Vivekananda put it, “Religion is – the whole soul becoming what it believes.” Not what it achieves, what it believes. We become what we most truly believe. If you believe the search for truth trumps lesser concerns, you become a person with more truth about you. The magic of serving high ideals – truth, justice, health, compassion and the rest – is that in part we become what we serve, even when we fail to serve it perfectly.

We say this to ourselves in so many ways. “At least I tried; it was worth trying; Well, I did my best”.” Think about this. There is some deep magic here, in the fact that just choosing to serve high ideals is transformative. We’ll never do it perfectly. I suspect no marriage has ever quite lived up to the poetic vows of the wedding day, and no professional ever really finished a whole career without being able to remember several times, maybe a bunch of times, that they failed, even failed pretty miserably, to live up to what mattered so much to them. But in the long run – and hopefully even in the shorter runs – we don’t condemn ourselves for the inevitable failures that come with being human. We are blessed by the ideals to which we give our lives, the compassion to which we give our hearts, the gods in whose service we enlist our souls. Think about it this week, and see if it isn’t true for you too.

It is one of the greatest miracles in life, really.

It is kind of like that picture of sailors steering their courses by following the North Star. No sailor will ever reach the North Star. It isn’t possible. But just following it changes their course completely. And when we align our hearts with the promise to love till death do us part, it changes our course as far as you can get from just wanting to sing in the sunshine then be on your way.

And it doesn’t take great wisdom; we don’t have to be saints, or like Mother Theresa or Gandhi – almost nobody can do that! We just have to try to be human in the best way we know how, try to follow that path, like steering on the North Star. Just that is transformative. And that is one of the greatest miracles in life.

I’ll tell you about a young couple I met during my first years in the ministry. They weren’t members of the church, didn’t have a church, but asked if I would marry them. They were both eighteen years old. I asked them to write their wedding vows, as I ask all couples. We don’t have to use those vows – many couples prefer more traditional vows, and sometimes what they are promising each other is really too personal to share in a public ceremony. But I want them to know what their vows are, what their promises are.

All couples find this is harder than they thought, but this young couple found it to be nearly impossible. One or the other of them phoned at least three times, asking more questions. Finally, they asked to come back in and talk about it. They were completely frustrated! “We can’t do this!” he said, and she agreed. “We don’t know enough to write anything good enough for a wedding.” In fact, they agreed, they hardly knew anything. “Well,” I said, “this does sounds serious. But you must know something. Tell me, what do you know about yourselves and what you’re bringing to this marriage?”

Between them, it started tumbling out. “We don’t know anything about the future. We don’t know what we’ll be doing for work even in two years, let alone in forty. We don’t know yet if we’ll have children, or even if we want children. We don’t know where we’ll live. We just know we love each other like the other half of our own souls, that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives, that together we can figure out anything we need to, and by God, that has to be enough!”

Yes, that’s what they decided to use for their wedding vows, and I suspect nobody who was there will ever forget it. I don’t know what happened to that young couple. He had just enlisted in the armed forces, and they were leaving in a week for some military post. But I hope they’re still together, and still know those wonderfully profound lessons they had already learned as 18-year-olds in love. High ideals bless and transform us, even if we serve them haltingly.

But when we reverse it, and drag religion down to the level of our most undeveloped parts or our greed, bigotry or the rest of it, then we’re not serving anything big enough to cherish us, or cradle us, or forgive us our sins, since we”ve not tried to forgive the sins of others, or serve them. That’s when God becomes a fearful and capriciously vicious judge and punisher. Because it isn’t God at all, but only our own smallest untutored biases, writ large. As contradictory as it sounds, we rise or shrink to the size of the ideals we serve. Just serving high ideals is transformative.

It’s all about living more wisely and well here and now, not elsewhere and later. As you’ll learn when you come to the program at the end of the month, almost all of the best religious thinkers from all religious traditions for the past 2500 years and more have tried to help us become human religiously, by orienting our lives to ideals as high, as luminous, and as beyond our reach as the North Star. When religion is taken seriously, as I think all the best styles of liberal religion have done, it is never about pie in the sky. It’s about pie here. And love here. And justice, compassion, truth and salvation by character here. It’s what Jesus meant when he said that the kingdom of heaven isn’t coming, isn’t in the future, but is within and among us. It’s here, or it’s nowhere. The magic, the miracle and the transformation are also here, or nowhere. There’s really quite a lot at stake for us.

The attraction of becoming human religiously is simple, and I think it’s powerful. Understood correctly, it is saying, “Here’s the deal. If you will believe in very high ideals, the kind that make high demands on you, and if you use your life to try and serve them, you will be blessed, accepted, and forgiven for your failings. You don’t have to earn salvation. You just have to enlist in the service of the highest ideals of truth, justice, love, health and character, and let them direct you. Even when you fail, you will be blessed for trying, and you will feel it.

The power of faith, and living that faith, can transform you, and your whole soul may become what you believe. And that may be the greatest miracle of all, now or later, here or anywhere.

I can’t guarantee to persuade you. I can only testify, which is what I’m really doing here. The rest can only happen inside of you, as you turn these things over in your heart and mind. If it happens, you might experience it as a kind of miracle. And those kinds of miracles, luckily, do happen: every day.