Divine Madness
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
3/21/04

 

 

Meditation “Out of the Stars” by Robert T. Weston

 

Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity,
here we have come,

Stardust and sunlight, mingling through time and through space.

 

Out of the stars have we come, up from time;
Out of the stars we have come.

 

Time out of time before time in the vastness of space,
earth spun to orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn, the boiling of seas.

 

Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight:

This is our home;
Out of the stars we have come.

 

Mystery hidden in mystery, back through all time;

Mystery rising from rocks in the storm and the sea.

 

Out of the stars, rising from rocks and the sea,
kindled by sunlight on earth, arose life.

 

Ponder this thing in your heart;
ponder with awe:
out of the sea to the land, out of the shallows came ferns.

 

Out of the sea to the land, up from darkness to light,
Rising to walk and to fly,
out of the sea trembled life.

 

Ponder this thing in your heart,
life up from the sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing,

Mates to love.

 

Life from the sea, warmed by sun, washed by rain,
life from within, giving birth, rose to love.

 

This is the wonder of time, this is the marvel of space;
out of stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love.

 

This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;

Out of your heart, cry wonder:

Sing that we live.

 

Reading   

This morning’s reading comes from a meditation anthology written by various Unitarian Universalists entitled “How We Are Called.”  

The author of this meditation is Patrick Murfin.

 

I do not have a Personal Relationship with God.
I’ve lost his phone number;
he never answers his mail.

 

We did not, as young men,
hang out on Wednesday nights,
cigarettes dripping from our lips,
at pool halls.

 

He is not there like an old neighbor
to fix my broken lawn mower
and hand me a soda
on a blazing hot day.

 

When I rip my shin on a jutting shelf
and cry out his name,
he does not rush to me
with Band-Aids and peroxide.

 

He does not, at times of vexation,
when my world lies shattered,
my relationships ruptured,
my children insolent,
my finances hopeless,
come with soothing counsel to my side.

 

He does not take my requests
like a long-distance dedication
on America’s Top Forty,
or deliver within five business days
or my money back
on my catalogue order--
           my business is not important to him.

 

I do not have a personal relationship with God.

 

But in quiet moments—
in the familiar whistle
of a red-winged blackbird on a cattail,
or in spider webs glinting with dew
in the grass of a clear sunrise,
or the passing attention of an old cat—
He/She/It/Whatever does not
speak
   or do

                 or answer…
but admits me to fleeting union
with the Greater.

 

Sermon

When people visit a Unitarian Universalist church like ours for the first time, they are sometimes caught off guard.  The sign out front says this is a church so visitors and guests may carry with them some assumptions of what goes on in here…assumptions based in whatever their personal history and experiences have taught them that church is.  In many ways, they will find in our services some familiar elements.  The basic liturgy is typically not that far off from what one might find in many Protestant churches in Des Moines.  We light candles, we sing from a hymnal, we’ve got responsive readings, a time for prayer or meditation, an offering, a sermon. 

 

What they do not find in our services is oftentimes more striking than what they do find.   We do not share a creedal statement, nor do we partake of anything resembling a traditional communion (though sometimes we do eat food together as part of a ritual during the service.)  But perhaps the most conspicuous thing missing from the service most Sundays, in this church at least, is mention of the word God.

 

Occasionally you might hear it in embedded in a hymn or a reading.  But you can be all but certain that there will be little mention of “God” in this church the way you will hear the word spoken in most other churches in Des Moines.

 

When newcomers leave our services, then, I imagine that they usually have one of two reactions to the lack of God language:

 

“What in the world is wrong with those people?”

 

…or…

 

“Thank God they didn’t talk about God!”

 

While the people who are intrigued by the lack of God-language may find it easy to stick around (in fact, it may be what brought them through the doors in the first place), there are others who find the whole experience of church without overt mentions of God difficult to reconcile with their past or even their present realities.  Some of these folks eventually discover and accept that our weekly services are focused on pondering and celebrating the sacred and the holy embedded in our existence on this planet and the universe itself after all…whether we say the word God or not…and that there is room in our church for those who believe in a higher power, whether that power be nature, creative interchange, human agency, or something else all together…even God!   Of course, there are some people who just can’t make sense of what we do here, some that need to hear the comfortable lexicon of another more orthodox faith.  That’s ok. We recognize that our way of doing church may not appeal to everyone.  Inherent in Unitarian Universalism is gratitude for and a celebration of religious pluralism, and we encourage a free and responsible search for truth and meaning even when this search leads people away from our church.  So we wish the seekers who do not find a home with us well in their quest. Lucky for them there are at least 100 other churches in the area that do rely on traditional religious language to carry their message.

 

You see, the majority of us who have stayed in a UU church appreciate the alternative to traditional religious language offered here and take it as a primary feature of our liberal religious way of doing church. 

 

That’s why, last year around this time, UUA president Rev. Bill Sinkford caused a stir within UU congregations all over the country when he suggested in a sermon (and later in our denominational magazine, the UU World) that Unitarian Universalists need to cultivate a “vocabulary of reverence.”  He reported that after re-reading our principles and purposes—the list of seven things we generally agree that we covenant to affirm and promote—he was struck with “wonderment” that there is “not one word of traditional religious language” to be found.  He says that while the principles “frame a broad ethic…they contain no hint of the holy.” [1]

 

With all due respect, I couldn’t disagree more.  The broad ethic these principles frame, assuming we never give up our striving to live accordingly, is in and of itself, holy. 

 

Let’s look at these principles now.  You can find them in the first few pages of the hymnal.  Let’s look at them through the lens of President Sinkford’s concerns.  I find here several words that I think are expressive of the religious language found in several faith traditions.  Words like, worth, dignity, justice, compassion, truth, conscience, peace, interdependent, acceptance, encouragement, even spiritual growth.   So what is it, exactly, that our UUA president is up to with this vocabulary of reverence stuff?

 

Before I attempt to answer this question, I need to share some background information with those of you who are relatively new to Unitarian Universalism.  The UUA is short for the Unitarian Universalist Association.  It is the Boston-based resource body for the over 1000 UU congregations in the United States.  These congregations are totally independent, the masters of their own affairs. Most of them, like this church, gladly choose to pay dues to the UUA so that they can have access to UUA-developed religious education curricula, as well as UUA administrative and organizational consultants and assistance.   Still, what gets decided in Boston has little bearing on what happens in our church in Des Moines or anywhere else in the country.  Therefore, the only real power the president of the UUA has outside of public relations and general oversight of the administration of resources, is to get people fired up by suggesting something controversial, like we might want to cultivate a vocabulary of reverence.  (He’s got to create work for himself, somehow, right?) In the end, though, the president of the UUA’s suggestion that we need to cultivate a vocabulary of reverence, holds about as much real weight as my suggestion that what we do on Sunday is worship:  each of you can take it or leave it.   That’s the beauty of our free and democratic approach to religion.  We each get to decide what we believe, and each congregation gets to set its own course. 

 

So why, you may be wondering, did so many people get so bent out of shape when word of Sinkford’s quest for a “vocabulary of reverence” got around?  (And many people did get bent out of shape.  The ensuing debate even made the New York Times, which reported that the controversy generated more e-mail, letters and telephone calls at the UUA than any other issue in the denomination’s history.)

 

I think people reacted so strongly to Sinkford’s comments because they assumed he was asking UUs to get more comfortable with God-talk, the very thing that would make many of them the most uncomfortable. 

 

In the sermon that set off the debate, Sinkford says that “religious language” doesn’t have to mean “God talk.” However, throughout the address, he keeps bringing up God.  He explains his UU elevator speech…the way he would describe UUism in between the sixth floor and the lobby: “one God, no one left behind.”  He tells the story of how he used to be a humanist…until his family faced a crisis and he felt held in the hands of something greater…something he calls God.  He ends by wondering aloud if Unitarian Universalism is “secure enough, mature enough to find a language of reverence, a language that can acknowledge the presence of the holy in our lives.”

 

To those looking for a theological fight (who are not difficult to find in Unitarian Universalism), especially those who believe that their humanist, or at least non-theistic, approach to religion is reverent enough, thank you very much, Sinkford’s message comes across as condescending, as if he is suggesting that those who have well-reasoned difficulty with traditional religious language need to grow up and accept the words they may have discarded.  

 

Most curious to me was that Sinkford borrows heavily in his remarks from UU minister the Rev. David Bumbaugh, including the phrase that seemed to ignite so much controversy: “vocabulary of reverence.” I am well acquainted with Rev. Bumbaugh.  I studied with him in theological school, I consider him one of my mentors…he even preached the sermon at my ordination several years ago. So believe me when I tell you that he is one of the most devout humanists I know.  I’ve heard him say on many occasions that he rarely, if ever, uses the word God in the pulpit because he believes, as I do, that it is so loaded with baggage as to be of little constructive use. Knowing David the way I do, I couldn’t imagine the context in which he would have been pressing for a return to traditional religious language.  When I wrote to ask him to send me his thoughts, he forwarded the sermon Sinkford had drawn from and added, “Needless to say, I am not in total sympathy with the twist that Sinkford seems to have given my original concern.”

 

So what in the world was his original concern and what was he doing calling for a vocabulary of reverence anyway?  As it turns out, he was challenging humanists to return to their religious roots. That’s right.  He was preaching to humanists.  But not to say that they should adopt traditional religious language.  Not even close.  He was reminding his audience that there is an inherent religiosity in humanism, a reverence implied in its foundational assumptions, particularly as expressed in the writings and ideas of the earliest religious humanists, people who didn’t seek to do away with religion, but who sought to revitalize it, to make it more relevant to our contemporary, ever-evolving understandings of the universe and more useful for our lives in it.  Those thinkers (including an early twentieth-century minister of this church, Curtis Reese) didn’t wish to deny the possibility of God; in fact they encouraged humanists to remain open to the idea.  However, they strove to build a liberal religion that “would not be shaken even if the very thought of God were to pass away,” [2] and in the process they welcomed and encouraged the creation of, in Bumbaugh’s words, a “vocabulary of reverence which is drawn from and depends upon the ongoing scientific enterprise, the enlarging exploration of the universe and humanity’s place in the universe.”[3]

 

The key to this humanist vocabulary of reverence is found in its affirmation that the universe is self-existing and not created and that humans are part of nature and have emerged as the result of a continuous process.  So the vocabulary of reverence to which Bumbaugh is pointing us has little to do with Sinkford’s “wonderment” over missing traditional religious language…much less God…and more to do with the kind of message expressed in this morning’s meditation:
“Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity,
here we have come,

Stardust and sunlight, mingling through time and through space.”

 

And yet…

 

there is still a part of me that wonders if Sinkford’s challenge to us isn’t worth more consideration.  Not that we need to adopt traditional religious language ourselves, but that all of us who are defensive, reactive, even surly, when faced with discussions of religious language…might want to tone down our rhetoric and listen for the poetry inherent in any attempt to describe that which cannot be simply described…even if it involves God-talk.

 

Billy Collins has a poem entitled “Introduction to Poetry” that makes a similar point.  He writes:

 

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

 

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

 

But all they do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

 

They begin by beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

 

 

One of my colleagues in UU ministry wrote recently, in response to the vocabulary of reverence debate, that he is “glad that language is getting some attention among us…because …our concern with religious language is perhaps the most essential aspect of our faith.”[4] 

 

The most essential aspect of our faith.

 

If this is true, I have one word to offer in response.  YIKES!

 

If our faith, our system of religious belief, is fundamentally about language, then we really do have little to offer the world other than an occasional defensive and vituperative semantic debate. 

 

Indeed, I think it is our obsession with language, our tendency to “tie certain words to a chair and beat them with a hose,” that may be keeping us from real engagement with those outside our fold.  We end up locked in a never-ending dialogue amongst ourselves, which is perceived by those outside our minority as an arrogant and pointless monologue.  I almost don’t blame those of other faiths for asking about us, “What is wrong with those people?”

 

A few weeks ago, member Chancy Bittner, in his “sharing the light” presentation, referred to Unitarian Universalism as a church for those who, for one reason or another, cannot mold themselves to fit into more orthodox faiths.  He explained that much like schools sometimes put students who don’t fit into regular classrooms into programs called “gifted and talented,” Unitarian Universalism offers a religious home for the religiously gifted and talented.  Those in attendance that morning laughed at his quip, even as some of us nodded in agreement.  “Yes, we are gifted and talented, aren’t we?”

 

Or perhaps we are just developmentally disabled. 

 

All depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?

 

Again, this is not to say that I think we have to adopt or re-incorporate traditional religious language into our services or even into our personal theologies to be relevant.  I do think, however, that we would do well to challenge ourselves to be as open as possible to the metaphors that others use to describe the mystery of this life we share…that we shouldn’t shy away from religious language but instead get to know it…translate its terms (if we dare) into ideas and concepts that make sense to us…and that we should attempt to stay at the table long enough to find the commonalities between ourselves and our companions…even amidst the differences.

 

To lay my own thoughts on the table, I think of God in two ways:  God the concept and God the reality (if you will pardon the expression).  God the concept is a human project aimed at naming what cannot possibly be named…at least not in simple terms.  I read it as pure metaphor…poetry even.  Phrases like ground of being, spirit of life, creative interchange, and countless others, are additional ways humans have attempted to talk about that which transcends understanding.  Meanwhile, God the reality, the ineffable mystery that cannot be proven nor denied, is nothing less than the story of the universe. A story told through science and poetry and life as we experience it day by day.   A story not at odds with a humanistic perspective.  A story that is self-evident, always in process, and forever beyond our understanding.  A religious story because it presents a vision of reality in which we are not only interdependent…we are all related…on a sub-atomic particle level at least…to every living thing on this planet.  A religious story because it tells us that the universe itself is striving for understanding, and though we are just one component of that striving, our wide-ranging ability to effect change in our own lives and in the life of this planet cannot be denied and carries with it an enormous responsibility.

 

That’s why I would rather we allow ourselves to be open and encouraging of the ways in which language can reveal perspectives on the mysteries of existence we might otherwise miss.

 

And why I would hope that we could mirror the attitude expressed in a poem by David Whyte, [entitled “Self-Portrait,”] with which I close this morning.  He writes:

 

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many Gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.

If you know despair or can see it in others.

I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you.  If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand.  I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing.  I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

 

I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.