Salvation

SWUUD Spring Conference

27 April 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY:

Once there was a girl who had an amazing dream. She dreamed that she could see a house in the next village, see into its back yard, and see a big tree there. And she knew – she just knew that buried beneath the tree there was great treasure! The village was separated from hers by a river, so it wasn’t a great walk there, but still she had never visited the village in her life.And yet she saw this house so clearly, and felt that she knew just where it was – and then the tree and the buried treasure. It was a very odd dream, she told herself the next day – she’d never had anything like that before!

But the next night, she had it again – the same exact dream! Same house, same tree, same treasure. This time she could see a little more of the village, a little more of where the house was. The next night, she had the same dream, and the night afterwards. She dreamed that same dream for five nights in a row – nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Monday through Friday, every night, the same dream of buried treasure.

On Saturday when she got up, she was determined to go see that house. She took a shovel with her. She crossed over the bridge, and had seen so much of the village in her dream, she felt she knew just where the house would be – and it was! She even looked around the side into the back yard, and sure enough, there was that same big tree she had dreamed about. Now you can’t just go digging a really big hole in somebody”s back yard without their seeing you do it, so she decided to be honest. She knocked on the door, and when a woman answered, she explained about the dreams she had had for five nights, and how she wondered if it would be all right if she dug up the treasure, and split it with the woman.

The woman was very kind to her.”Oh my dear,” she said,” I’m afraid there is no treasure buried here! But this is so very strange, because my son had exactly the same dream for the last five nights! Except he dreamed that his treasure was buried in the village across the river, behind a red garage. He left to walk over there this morning.”

“My gosh,” the girl thought, “that sounds like my house!” The girl thanked the woman, took her shovel and headed for home.

In the meantime, the boy had found her house. He had also taken a shovel, and also decided that he might as well just tell the truth, because he’s surely get caught digging a big treasure hole behind their garage. So he went to the door, and when the woman answered, he told her his story.

Again, the woman was surprised, and said, “Oh, my boy, I’m afraid there is no buried treasure here, but my daughter had the same dream, and went off to find a house across the river.” She wished him a good walk back home.

But it made the boy mad. “How foolish I feel!” he muttered. There must be some kind of silly epidemic going around, where kids are all dreaming these ridiculous dreams! How foolish!” He went home, was tired and felt foolish, didn’t talk to his mother about it (he said he couldn’t find any such house), went to bed, read a Batman comic book, went to sleep, and by morning he had forgotten most of the story about his dreams. Within a few weeks he’d forgotten it all together.

But the girl thought about it in bed that night, and thought about it all the next day, too. Maybe the boy didn’t have buried treasure – though she wasn’t sure of this – but that didn’t mean there wasn’t real treasure behind her garage, where he had seen it! The more she thought about it, the more certain she was, until finally she talked with her parents about it. After some arguing, they agreed to let her dig, on the condition that she would have to fill in the hole when she was done.

It was a lot of digging! She dug and dug, until she had dug a hole about five feet deep. Then she struck something hard. As she cleaned it off, she found it was a large heavy wooden box buried under ground behind her garage. She dug more dirt out to expose the whole box – it was almost five feel wide – and then she opened it.

And inside of the box was – more gold, jewelry, diamonds and rubies and emeralds than she had ever seen in her life! It was a huge treasure, big enough to last her for her whole life. Soon her father got another job in another state, and they moved – after she had filled in the treasure hole.

After they were settled in their new city, she sometimes wondered about the boy, and whether or not he ever found the treasure buried in his yard – she was positive he must have some too. But the boy never wondered about it again, and within a few years they too sold their house and moved away. Would anyone ever find it? One thing was for sure – they wouldn’t find it if they didn’t dig for it!

READINGS: THREE BIG STORIES

1. “On Size”

The first big story is really a fairly scholarly definition of the kind of “bigness” that matters most in life. You’ll hear more about this later, but here’s what this man wrote:

By “size” I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle. This is the size that matters.

That’s a lot of big words. The second story is easier.

2. “The Little Tin Fiddle”

This is a story about the world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who died a few years back. When he was only three years old, he heard a solo violinist at a concert and found his calling. He asked for a violin for his fourth birthday. His father bought him a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. Young Menuhin burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it. (James Hillman, The Soul”s Code, p. 17)

There was something in him even at age four that was insulted by being offered a toy instrument, as though he had no better music in him than that. The little tin fiddle didn’t have the range, the depth or the nuance, and nobody would want to listen to it for long even if it could be played well.

3. “A Magnificent Calling”

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? we’re carpenters. we’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

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 wellsprings of love.

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 so 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 paltry ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our shortcomings. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to accept lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

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

Amen.

SERMON: Salvation

This word “salvation” may make some of you want to run screaming out of here, reminded of a religious upbringing you”d rather forget. And I know it’s a scary word. But actually, it is a very down-to-earth word, completely at home among religious liberals. It came from the Latin meaning “to save,” but it also has the same root as our word “salve,” and has the meaning of health or wholeness. It’s about serving and being defined by big ideals rather than small ones. I did this in yesterday morning”s sermon by quoting from some ancient religious writings. But since most of you weren’t there yesterday morning, today we’ll do it through other stories that make this special kind of “bigness” more clear.

That first Big Story, “On Size,” was written over thirty years ago by a liberal theologian named Bernard Loomer. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for a decade, then finished his career teaching religion in California, where he also began attending, and joined, a Unitarian church. Some may think he was one of us because he once joined a Unitarian church. I don’t care what church he joined; I think he was one of us because he understood just what kind of size matters, and why it must be a commanding presence in our lives.

And the touching story of young Yehudi Menuhin. If he’d been given an 18th century Guarneri violin for his fourth birthday – like the one he played later in his life – he wouldn’t have done justice to it. An instrument like that really takes your measure. To pick up a first-rate violin then just fiddle around with it can mark you as some sort of a tourist, or a fool. But that violin would have been good enough that he could have spent years growing into it, and even someone with his gifts would never be likely to outgrow a first-rate instrument.

Then that peasant woman in the cathedral! Her job was bigger than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons. Not “bigger” in the sense that it was more important to the cathedral, but in the sense that it was more important to her. She lived in a world where her simple role was part of a calling that transcended even her time and place. And living within a perspective that big absolutely blesses us.

The treasure is buried within and among us, which is also where Jesus said the Kingdom of God was located. But it’s usually buried fairly deep, and requires some honest and often hard personal work.

It doesn’t require great talent, only a great soul. The carpenters and stonemasons were connected, in their imaginations, only to petty causes: building pews or just feeling smug because they belonged to a cool club. And whatever satisfactions or gifts of life they got from that would have to be equally shallow. We need more.

All three of these stories are metaphors, and I want to add a fourth story, to bring them together and tie them to religion, and to us. Fifteen to twenty years ago I belonged to an ecumenical ministers” group of about forty ministers. Every Thursday, we had lunch together, and the different churches took turns hosting and preparing it. One Thursday I arrived fairly early at the small rural Presbyterian church that would serve us, and got to overhear a remarkable conversation between three Presbyterian woman who were setting the tables.

I entered in the middle of it, and pretended to ignore them, so that they would keep talking and I could eavesdrop. They had been trashing some religion – either Baptist or Catholic – and finally one woman exclaimed, “Well, thank God we’re Presbyterians!” There was a silence. After a few seconds, the second woman said, “I don’t think we’re supposed to be Presbyterians. I think we’re supposed to be Christians.” Another awkward silence, and after a few more seconds the third woman spoke. “No,” she said, “even that’s too small. we’re supposed to love one another, that’s all.”

In this story, you have both first- and second-rate instruments. Actually, the first woman, the mere Presbyterian, was clutching about a third-rate fiddle. If she had a religion, it didn’t show. She treated the church as a club – like the stonemasons in the other story – where just being around people like her made her superior to those damned Baptists or Catholics. If you asked her what these Presbyterians of hers believed, she may have done no better than giving you a half-memorized list of third-hand beliefs she had learned the way you learn the rules of a sorority or an Elks” Club.

Like the little tin fiddle, there’s no moral range here, there’s a bad tone to it, and it couldn’t even sound good if it were played well. If all she has is that self-important hand-me-down identity of being a Presbyterian, you have to hope she’ll be led around by somebody using a far better instrument in the service of a much bigger vision.

The second woman was also holding a toy instrument, though a larger one. Her second-hand identity was called “Christian.” If you asked her what she meant by that, she too would probably have recited a tattered list of other people’s beliefs. Maybe that list would include a set of prescribed chants on things like Jesus, God, the Bible and two or three favorite teachings. But the odds are they’d be someone else’s beliefs, especially if she expressed them in the same words as everyone else in the club: she would just be chanting. So she might have picked up the instrument, but had never actually practiced it. Once more, you”d hope she’ll be led around by somebody coming from a much bigger and richer place.

But that third woman – she made music. You assume she also belongs to the Presbyterian club and the Christian club. But she would not settle for such a paltry calling, any more than the four-year-old Yehudi Menuhin would pick up the tin fiddle. She made music because she was the only one who seemed to know that religion was about behavior, not belief – it’s about being, not saying: deeds, not creeds. After all, only members of our club or some rival club care what we believe. Those are only turf battles. And doesn’t conformity of belief prove that we haven’t thought any more deeply than the other club members? In any tradition, that’s just the second-hand religion for their masses – whether it’s called Presbyterianism or Unitarian-Universalism. It’s exalting our group because they’re Our Kind of People. But this is a definition of narcissism, isn’t it? Those outside our club don’t care what we believe; they only want to know whether we can sing them a song of active caring rather than a self-righteous little ditty.

Now you see how this mixed metaphor of finding salvation by making big music on first-rate instruments can work in religion. It works pretty well. But it’s more complex, because religion adds a dimension that must command us. Honest religion isn’t about anything as shallow as belief. It’s about who we most deeply are and how we should live. You can prove it within yourselves, right now. And if you can do that, then you can be saved, be made bigger and more whole. And you can, because you knew when you heard the story of those three women that only that third woman even got it. And I suspect you may also have felt that there is something very wrong about posing as a religious person but not getting it. You know this. You’re built this way. Almost all of us are. It is built into who we are and must be if we are to come into our full humanity.

Salvation is about that kind of size and that quality of spiritual vision that can make us useful and content rather than merely decorative. In liberal religion it is about digging deep enough to find the treasure, the spirit, rather than staying on the self-satisfied surface. You know what I mean, I’m sure.

The spirit of liberal religion – which is opposed to the spirit of literal religion – is between about two and four thousand years old. It’s not new at all, and it had multiple births. It was born in the Hindu Upanishads, where they saw that Brahman, the creative and sustaining force of the universe, is present in each of us just as the taste of salt is present throughout the oceans.

It was born in the Buddha, who saw that the secret of life isn’t about gods or supernatural end-runs. It’s available to all of us here and now, if only we will wake up to life’s less dramatic but more authentic possibilities – and if, once awakened, we will understand that compassion is the only appropriate and life-enhancing response to all other creatures.

The spirit of liberal religion was born at about the same time in some of the ancient Hebrew prophets, who attacked the self-important rituals of the priests, and said God was not interested in what we believed or how we bowed and scraped, but only in how we treated one another, especially the most vulnerable among us.

It was also born at least twice in China. First, in Confucius, who was concerned not with gods but with our selves here and now. And he saw that our mistake was that we conceived of ourselves as far too small, whereas our biggest and most necessary self only exists as part of the larger society around us. So our job, he believed, is to learn the care and respect that make our relationships with others flow smoothly.

Lao Tzu also gave birth to the spirit of liberal religion, the spirit of deeds not creeds in Taoism, when he wrote one of the finest moral teachings in history:

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.

(Stephen Mitchell translation)

The spirit of honest religion, of being human religiously, was born at the deepest and most nuanced levels of all great religions and philosophies.

And then, more than a thousand years before any of these others, the spirit of liberal religion was born in the world’s oldest story, the still-magnificently modern story of Gilgamesh. He ruled over 4700 years ago, and the earliest texts of the story are from 4100 years ago – before any of today”s great religions, gods or philosophies had been born. They saw themselves as living in the “modern age,” because writing had just been invented there a hundred years earlier. And they asked of what use were the old gods to modern people. They decided the gods had become impotent ornaments, but that the meaning and purpose of life – now up to us – were still immeasurably rich, and close at hand: through the deeds we do, the positive differences we make, the art and music we create, the love and joy we can share with families and friends, and the influence we can have on those who will come after us. There in that most ancient story was a religious vision more courageous and unfettered than that of any Western religion.

You can feel how big all of these ancient liberal visions are – a bigness that doesn’t insult the human spirit by offering the religious equivalent of little tin fiddles.

All of these were among the births of the multiple spirits of liberal religion. Any one of them, or any good combination of them, can offer a commanding vision big enough to let us feel that we are building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God – or the legitimate heir to what was once called God, as Gilgamesh, the Chinese, the Buddha, the Greeks and many moderns would put it.

That rich and ancient history is the tradition I stand within and try to serve as a religious liberal. I’m not a “Unitarian-Universalist,” and I hope you’re not either. Understand that I don’t mean that in a cheap way. I mean it in an expensive way, a demanding way. Denominational identities like the banalities of creeds or official “principles” are just too paltry to do justice to the human spirit. they’re little toy instruments on which no interesting music is ever going to be played, and which will drive the more aware and gifted people away, as it did the four-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. I suspect that tin-fiddle spirituality is the chief reason why we have lost almost 70% of our market share in the U.S. since 1961, and still don’t have many more members than we did then.

We owe ourselves and our people this kind of spiritual and intellectual bigness – not something to let us think we’re smarter or more special than others, but something character-based and commanding. We each need to offer our people and our communities deep and nuanced spiritual instruments that can challenge even the most gifted among them, and an understanding of the human condition big enough both to contain our spirits and to command them. If what we offer can’t take its place proudly among the world’s most profound religions, we should be ashamed to offer it.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we call our spiritual center God or something else. What matters is whether we can call it forth, and invite it into our lives, our churches, and our world. The people who trust us need to feel that their best efforts are helping to build a magnificent cathedral to God – or the legitimate heir to what was once called God. That kind of a vision, that kind of an instrument, is big. And that kind of size matters.

Salvation is about a healthy kind of wholeness that is buried within and among us – not on the surface, but deeper. As in the children’s story, we first have to get beyond ourselves, because it isn’t about us. But always, after the road that leads us outward, there needs to be another that leads us back home – as T. S. Eliot put it,

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

As a religious movement, we also need to get beyond our comfortable biases as social or political liberals, because it isn’t about us either. It’s about finding an avenue to a deep and true perspective on our life and on life itself – a perspective that can not only empower us but can also command us. And if it is an honest and profound kind of liberal religion, what it commands us to do is to dig, to find that treasure buried within us, to arrive where we started, and perhaps to know the place for the first time.

And then to do something – to come alive, to recognize that we are children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and the hope of our world. Then the transformation and miracle of salvation has occurred. We have been born again, born of the Holy Spirit, born of the joy of life that has found us at last. And with that, a whole new world has begun. A whole, new, world has begun.Hallelujah!