Religion is Like an Airplane

5 September 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

One of the most famous short prayers is ‘Lord, I believe – help my unbelief!’

That prayer speaks for more of us more of the time than we may like to admit. We do believe. We believe most of the important and necessary things: that life is good, people are fair and honest, and we matter. But when you listen to the news, or any political attack ads, it’s so easy to disbelieve.

We believe we are good people with a lot to offer. But let a relationship go sour or a close friend drift away, and how quickly unbelief comes. We trust in a basic humanity and compassion in everyone ‘ then we hear about the slaughters in the Russian school this week, and we wonder.

We think we’re smart enough for life, until someone calls us stupid. We remember that remark for years, even decades, and during our dark moments it makes us wonder.

We’ve got a good education and a good job where we know we are making an important contribution. We feel confident and secure – until we are laid off. Then Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief!

We have our guiding values and beliefs tied securely to our will and purpose, we have no serious doubts about them. Then something happens that our answers don’t fit, and again we doubt.

In a hundred ways, the old prayer is our prayer: Lord, I believe – but help my unbelief!

Sometimes we just need to remember some very basic things that we already believe; need to be assured they are really true, and that the most important ground beneath our feet is solid, rather than shifting.

So let us remember:

— Life is a gift, and it is good.

— We are precious parts of life, and the world needs the compassion and generosity of spirit we have to offer.

— We are never condemned by our mistakes. We’re not supposed to be perfect; we’re supposed to be more fully human. We’re supposed to be alive, aware, courageous and compassionate toward ourselves and others.

We believe these things. We know them to be true. But not always.

So if we would make life harder by trying to play God, let us at least try to play a God of love, understanding and forgiveness, rather than a mean little deity of anger and blame.

And let us always remember – in the words of another of history’s most famous short prayers – that all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.

Amen.

SERMON: Religion is like an airplane

Oh, there are lots of ways that religion is like an airplane. We’ve got an aisle and a choice of sitting beside or away from a window. We both have people making announcements before we start; once in awhile there’s food, though ours is better. Airplane passengers get a little bag of nuts, and churches usually have a few of those, too, on both sides of the pulpit. You generally trust the pilot to take you up and bring you down safely, though once in a while pilots crash, and so do preachers.

You have to leave a lot of your baggage behind when you fly. And you can’t bring some of your old baggage on spiritual journeys, either. Some churches even offer the theological equivalent of Frequent Flyer Miles, where those who attend regularly feel more sure they’ll get a free flight to the universe’s best vacation spot after they die. And like an airplane, we use religion to get someplace we weren’t before the trip, someplace higher, with a better view of life and everything ‘ though some religions, like some airplanes, don’t fly very high and the views aren’t always good.

And a sermon is like an airplane ride too: sometimes both of them seem to taxi around so long you wonder if they’ll ever take off. So let’s get up a little higher, and look at some other ways that religion is like an airplane.

Higher, more inclusive visions

An airplane ride can give us a broad, wide, inclusive view of things we just can’t get from the ground. And when religion is working, it too is about giving us a broad and inclusive view of ourselves, life and everything else. At its best, it is a vision of life reunited with its own depth and integrity. I’m not talking about religion in a narrow sense here; I’m talking about religion in a very broad sense. And some of the best insights are really quite spectacular in their simplicity, and their ability to see right to the heart of life itself.

– In the Old Testament, the ancient Hebrew sages wrote that all the commandments can be summed up in just two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love what is most high, most holy, most life-giving, with everything in you, and when you look at your neighbor, see yourself, and love accordingly. Spectacular!

– Jesus of Nazareth taught a Kingdom of God that’s still beyond apparent human achievement, but still dazzling in its simplicity. It isn’t anything supernatural, he said: it isn’t coming, isn’t something in the future. It’s potentially already here, within and among us, spread out on the earth. And it’s a simple thing. The Kingdom of God is the state of the world when we all learn to treat each other like brothers and sisters, like fellow children of God. Period. Amen. End of sermon, end of religion. I don’t know how it could be defined any better.

– The Hindus – who do ‘cosmic’ better than anyone – take their advanced students by the hand, and take them up in their Hindu version of the airplane. They point to everything that is, everything in the whole universe: all the dynamic forces that create, sustain and destroy the universe. Everything. Then they look at the student, point out to eternity and infinity, and they say ‘That art Thou.’ A whole graduate religious education in just three words.

– The great Chinese sage Lao Tsu lived five centuries before Jesus, and he really soared! There are so many treasures in the Tao te Ching it’s hard to choose: ounce for ounce, I think it’s the wisest book ever written. But one favorite would be his saying ‘What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.’ Neither religion nor ethics get much better than that. That’s flying! These are simple, true, insights we almost never hear on the daily news or in schools, and they’re among the most important our species has ever produced.

– The Buddha told us – in his good-news/bad-news message – that both our comforts and our fears come from our own illusions, and that real freedom is growing beyond the need for our illusions. Hardly anyone is ever able really to do this, but it’s right. Buddha had another simple picture. In his most famous sermon, he simply picked up a lotus blossom and held it in his hand. Everything in life, everything you need to know, he said, is contained even in this simple and beautiful lotus blossom. Some of the most profound religious insights are condensed into such small statements that we can take them home, care for them for years, and they never stop opening up to reveal more and more, like a lotus blossom in bloom.

– Even the stories of great religions offer us views of ourselves and life that take us to dizzying heights. I’ve spoken before here of the ancient Greek story about Psyche and Eros, as one of these. Here, from over three thousand years ago, is the story of the soul’s search for divine love that lies at the heart of nearly all Western religious traditions.

– And you probably all know the story of the eagle raised by chickens, who spent his whole life thinking he was a chicken but feeling uncentered, disconnected from his true calling – until the day when eagles circling high overhead finally visited him to show him his true calling. Then he flew up above the sky where his true calling really was. That’s a religious story, too. It’s real message is that we’re all eagles, all capable of flying so much higher than we want to believe

– And one last story, of the thousands of high-flying myths and tales out there, comes from the Jews. Like many Jewish stories, it comes wrapped in wit. One day God, the story says, decided to play a trick on humans. So he went to his favorite rabbi to ask his advice. ‘I want to hide from people,’ God said, ‘and I’m not sure of the best place to hide. Should I hide on the dark side of the moon? at the edge of the galaxy? What do you think?’ To which the rabbi replied ‘You always make it too hard. Just hide in the human heart: it’s the last place they’ll think to look.’ And God has been hiding there ever since.

These are some of the sights seen on a good religious trip. Like an airplane ride, they are views of life from high above it. So high above it, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to identify with any of these people. That must have occurred to you, during the week when you’re remembering some teaching like these from one of religion’s great prophets and sages. That world they’re talking about seems a long way away from the kind of life we really live.

Prophets aren’t regular people

If the first lesson of religion is the wisdom and power of its most gifted prophets and sages, the second lesson is that these were pretty strange people, all of them. We don’t usually talk about them this way, but people who flew that high and offered such wonderful views to us during our little airplane rides weren’t much like us. They lived in rarefied air. In some ways, they could see our world so clearly because they really didn’t live in it.

One of the most popular themes in classic literature is that unbridgeable gap between humans and gods, the danger in wanting to fly too high, in taking that eagle-raised-by-chickens story too far.

In the Hebrew scriptures, as in most religious scriptures, it is taught that no one can look on the face of God and survive ‘ a theme turned into a movie, in Indiana Jones and the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ The Greeks told the story of young Icarus, whose father invented wings so he could fly, and attached them with wax, only warning his son not to fly too high. The youth did, flew too close to the realm of the gods, and the heat of the sun melted the wax and he plunged to his death. This has been a common theme of artists for two thousand years, the plunge of young Icarus into the sea. The Greeks retold the story in the tale of young Phaeton, who talked Zeus into letting him drive Apollo’s chariot through the sky. But he couldn’t handle the horses, pulled the sun too close to the earth, the earth caught fire from the heat, and he was finally thrown to his death. Again, the Greeks tell of the time Hera was jealous of Zeus’s affair with the human woman Semele, and tricked Semele into demanding that Zeus show himself to her without disguise. The undisguised sight of the god burned the human woman to ashes immediately.

And the sages and prophets who fly so high and seem almost to speak for the gods, they’re a strange bunch too, and not much like us.

A century ago, there was an Austrian journalist and social critic named Karl Kraus. His fame has dimmed a lot since then, but he was one of these people who always seemed to see things as though he were up in that airplane, and he knew it. He once wrote some lines that speak for all great sages and prophets who have ever lived:

‘I hear noises which others do not hear’

‘And they disturb for me the music of the spheres

‘ which others don’t hear either.’

I think that’s right. I think people like Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tsu and the rest of them were really disturbed by those ‘noises’ that most of us don’t hear. I also think they could hear, in the background, a kind of ‘music of the spheres’ that we don’t hear very clearly either.

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was another of these. He was really fifty years, maybe a century, ahead of the other philosophers at Cambridge with him seventy years ago: Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, John Maynard Keynes. No one understood him, and he never seemed to care. One of his admiring students once said that he too wanted to be a philosopher like Wittgenstein and try to deliver these great visions that others don’t understand. Wittgenstein said ‘No, you can’t do it.’ Then he added ‘I can only live here because I manufacture my own oxygen.’

All this is a variation on the old religious insight that we can take our chariot rides, or our airplane rides, but we have to come back down and land. We have to live down here on earth, not up there where we would have to make our own oxygen.

Coming back to earth

We go to church and listen to the Good Samaritan story, and fancy ourselves in the role. Then we go out into the street and play the roles of those who walked by because, after all, it isn’t safe out there and we might get hurt. We can’t fill our whole life with these noble causes, or we’ll have no time left for living down here on earth. Trying to be like Jesus or Buddha would be like young Icarus trying to fly too close to the sun.

We listen to stories about Jesus’ idea of the Kingdom of God, and we’re uplifted. We hear about the eagle raised by chickens, and we like the idea, though back home we’re not sure we really believe it.

Then we hear stories about some of the great martyrs in history: Jesus, St. Paul, many early Christian Church Fathers, or thousands of Tibetan Buddhists in our own time, who gave their lives for their beliefs. We’re not like that! We just don’t live at that level, the flame doesn’t burn that bright in us.

So religion is like an airplane because after the high-flying visions and insights of history’s great teachers, after being inspired on Sunday by stories of chicken-flavored eagles and the rest of it, we have to land. We have to come back to earth. We just don’t live lives that pure, and there’s wisdom in being able to admit it without feeling like a loser.

Some people dismiss the great religious figures because of this, asking what good it does to follow teachings so far above us we can never live up to them. But their teachings survive just because they are so high above the everydayness of our lives. I think of the millions of sailors who have steered at night by sighting on the North Star for more than three thousand years. You know, not a single one of them has ever reached it! Yet I suspect that without it to go by, their courses would not have been as true. High religious and ethical teachings are like that.

And I think of great religious figures like cathedrals: like the giant and elaborate cathedrals of medieval Christianity all over Europe and Mexico. It’s like all the really sacred and precious and rare stuff is concentrated in them, the way cathedrals are made of gold and marble and wonderful stained glass, surrounded by regular old villages of regular old folks like us. People go to the cathedrals to take a little airplane flight, to let their spirits soar, to rise above themselves for a bit, in that exquisite atmosphere. Religious giants like the Buddha, Jesus and the rest of them are like those cathedrals, too. There’s something precious concentrated in them, but in a form so strong, so all-consuming, they represent standards too high for regular people to live out.

Why is it worth the trip?

You might wonder why it’s worth taking these religious flights into the stratosphere, where we see cathedral-sized visions, hear stories with more promise and hope than we are likely to realize in our regular old down-to-earth human lives. I’ve certainly wondered, both as a preacher and as a person.

There are two reasons, I think.

First is the contrast between the high ideals of good religion, and the low ideals that seem to run so much of the real world. A Bible with the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ in a religion where envy and greed are considered deadly sins, used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the slaughter of thousands of its women and children and the theft of its oil. A Jesus who said not to judge, and that God’s grace, like the sun, shines on all ‘ this Jesus is used as a blunt instrument to beat down ambitious women, gays, lesbians, and whole rafts of people who don’t fit simple cookie-cutter molds.

These examples could be multiplied a hundredfold, just making it even more clear why we so desperately need to keep in mind the higher visions, what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’

There is something magical about these flights to the visions of our higher natures. There is something transformative. These stories – to use another kind of metaphor – are like little seeds that sometimes take root in us and grow to immense size. They’re like a little bit of yeast in a mound of dough, invisibly making the whole thing a lot bigger than it would have been otherwise. That was another of Jesus’ images for the Kingdom of God: yeast, that nearly invisible stuff that makes bread rise so high.

We take these flights, we hear these stories about the lotus blossom, about God hiding in the human heart, about the eagle among chickens, about that Hindu teaching that we are a part of everything alive and wondrous in the whole universe. We hear all these fantastic stories from a vantage point far above our own usual vision. Then we go home, go back to our down-to-earth lives, and it seems we’ve left the cathedral behind.

But we haven’t. When we go on vacations in airplanes, we return from our trips with pictures and memories. Our flights into the cathedrals of our souls to hear the angels of our better nature leave us with pictures and memories too ‘ and those amazing, magical stories.

And someday, in ways large and small, we will be at home in our world, and the seeds planted on our religious flights will begin to bloom. We’ll remember a story like the one about the eagle raised with chickens. We’ll smile to ourselves, and silently say ‘I wonder’.

Or we think of the whole infinite and eternal universe, remember the Hindu sages pointing to it, and to us, saying ‘That art Thou.’ And silently, we say to ourselves ‘I wonder’.

Then one day we become aware – I don’t know how it happens, but it does – that there is something hiding in our hearts, something we hadn’t been aware of before, and that Something hiding in our hearts is God.

And suddenly, like a holy ritual being enacted in a huge ancient cathedral built over the sacred depths of life, that lotus blossom finally begins to open.

And so do we.