Soul Force

Welcome!

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

March 7, 2010

^Readings

^{“Invocation: The Cathedral of
the World,”}^{in The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology, Forrest
Church, pp. XV-XVII.}

Imagine yourself in a … vast cathedral, .... as ancient as humankind, its cornerstone the first altar, marked with the tincture of blood and blessed by tears.... The builders have worked from time immemorial, destroying and creating, confounding and perfecting, tearing down and raising up arches in this cathedral, buttresses and chapels, organs, theaters and chancels, gargoyles, idols, and icons....

Above all else, contemplate the windows. In [this] Cathedral of the World there are windows beyond number, some long forgotten, covered with many patinas of grime, others revered by millions, the most sacred of shrines. Each in its own way is beautiful. Some are abstract, others representational; some dark and meditative, others bright and dazzling. Each window tells a story about the creation of the world, the meaning of history, the purpose of life, the nature of humankind, the mystery of death. The windows of the cathedral are where the light shines through....

But the windows are not the light....

We shall never see the light directly, only as refracted through the windows of the cathedral. Prompting humility, life's mystery lies hidden. The light is veiled. Yet, being halfway in size between the creation itself and our body's smallest constituent part, that we can encompass with our minds the universe that encompasses us is a cause for great wonder. Awakened by the light, we stand in the cathedral, trembling with awe.

^{Some people have trouble believing in a God who looks
into any eyes but theirs. Others have trouble believing in a God they cannot
see. But that none of us can look directly into God's eyes certainly doesn't
mean God isn't there, mysterious, unknowable, gazing into ours through the
windows of the Cathedral of the World.}

^{NRS Matthew
15:29-38}^{After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the
Sea of Galilee, and he went up the mountain, where he sat down.}³⁰^{Great crowds
came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and
many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them,}³¹^{so that the
crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame
walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.}³²^{Then Jesus
called his disciples to him and said, "I have compassion for the crowd,
because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and
I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way."}³³^{The disciples
said to him, "Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so
great a crowd?"}³⁴^{Jesus asked
them, "How many loaves have you?" They said, "Seven, and a few
small fish."}³⁵^{Then ordering the crowd to sit down on
the ground,}³⁶^{he took the seven loaves and the fish;
and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the
disciples gave them to the crowds.}³⁷^{And all of
them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven
baskets full.}³⁸^{Those who had eaten were four thousand
men, besides women and children.}

^Sermon

^{I grew up in a church
where we believed that it was important to send missionaries wherever we could
to share the good news of our religion to whomever we could. My family would
often welcome our church’s missionaries into our home to stay while they were visiting,
and they would tell wonderful stories about the exotic places they were
posted: Borneo, Africa, India, China and others. I loved the tiny elephants
Miss Grieger brought back with her from India, often made of wonderfully
fragrant sandalwood. There was one little hitch in this wholesome picture:
the gospel we were spreading held that anyone who believed as we did would be
saved and go to heaven, but anyone who did not would be sent to hell.}

^{Now, I’m not sure how
I concluded that there must be some escape clause from this up or down, heaven
or hell division, but somehow someone agreed with my innate sense of justice
which led me to believe that God couldn’t possibly condemn those who had who
never even heard our gospel to eternal damnation – after all, how did it come
about that we who were born into this religion were so privileged as to know
the truth while they had never even heard it? So I came to believe that those
who had never been reached by our gospel wouldn’t be condemned eternally, and I
wasn’t sure what would happen to them but I was pretty sure they weren’t going
to hell. I suppose I came up with something like Limbo to account for their
fate – not Heaven like us, the righteous, nor Hell for those eternally damned,
but something in between.}

^{But then, when I was
fourteen or fifteen, I began imagining an encounter between one of our
missionaries and some people in China. I imagined the missionaries preaching
on a street corner and using the kinds of language used in our church and in
many others, something like, “You must be washed in the blood of the lamb,
which taketh away the sins of the world.” This was language which made perfect
sense to us as a metaphor, but then I imagined a venerable Confucian gentlemen
walking by the street corner and hearing this snippet of a sermon, muttering to
himself, “Crazy foreigners,” and walking on. Now, up to that point, our
doctrine allowed that since he had never heard our gospel, he couldn’t very
well be damned; on the other hand, having heard the gospel and rejected it
(“Crazy foreigners!”) he was now subject to judgment, having spurned our good
news. I began to think that sending missionaries might not be such a good idea
after all, since it might result in condemnation for innocent passers-by. I
didn’t have a name for it at the time, but in that moment I had become a
Universalist.}

^{Our roots here at
Second Parish go back to the Puritans who came from England and established a
church in each town to provide spiritual instruction to all those who had
immigrated. By the time this congregation was formed in 1746, Hingham had
grown large enough to support three churches – First Parish, better known today
as Old Ship; what is now First Parish in Cohasset, which eventually became a
separate town, and this parish in South Hingham. By around 1800, this parish
had begun to align itself with the movement of Liberal Christians,
de-emphasizing some of the difficult doctrines of the more Calvinist
conservative congregations like predestination and total depravity, and
ultimately becoming Unitarian when the churches of New England split into
conservative – or Congregational – and liberal, or Unitarian, churches.}

^{Forrest Church speaks
of our dual heritage of Unitarianism and Universalism this way:}

We Unitarian Universalists have inherited a magnificent theological legacy. In a sweeping answer to dogmas that divide the human family, Unitarianism proclaims that we spring from a single source; Universalism that we share a common destiny. That we are brothers and sisters by nature, our Unitarian and especially Universalist forebears affirmed as a matter of faith: Unitarianism by positing a single God, Universalism by offering the promise of shared salvation.[i]

Our Unitarian Universalism calls us to adopt an attitude of respect and curiosity toward religious traditions other than our own. We recognize that we share a Cathedral of the World with equally precious people who honor their own traditions, who devote themselves to maintaining their own particular windows through which the light of the sacred shines. We need to follow our particular path in humility and openness. At the same time, we don’t believe that it’s enough to simply sample from among the many religions of the world; we have our own particular window which we venerate; as our covenant here says, we gather “in the spirit of Jesus.” We take as our particular task to live out our lives in view of the teachings of Jesus while remaining open to wisdom and insight from other traditions. We call ourselves followers of Jesus, and we work to discover and establish what Jesus refers to as the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. In this more democratic age, when the notion of a “Kingdom” is somewhat alien to our ways of thinking, we might better speak of the Commonwealth of Heaven as the goal that we seek, or, as Martin Luther King, Jr., termed it, the Beloved Community.

We understand, as Forrest Church puts it, “that religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing we must die.” In light of that reality, we wrestle with the ultimate questions: “who we are, why we live, what the purpose of our life is, where we come from, and where we are going.”[ii]

We recognize that ways of expressing these realities vary over time, that language and metaphors change, and so we must always be reforming our ways of describing the reality of our lives, the nature of the religious quest we are embarked on. Many of us understand ultimate reality by speaking of God, though we understand that the notions we have of God can never be nailed down, fully described and presented as ultimate truth; rather, each of our descriptions points toward an ultimate reality, speaks of a particular window in the Cathedral of the World which is our special mode of understanding the light of the transcendent which shines through to us. Others among us, who might instead describe themselves as humanists, find the concept of God less useful, and prefer to think of the ultimate in terms of a broad understanding of the sum and destiny of all humanity rather than the less-well-defined notion of a deity. Each of these shares characteristics of the particular window which we venerate and share together. For myself, the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth have a particular place in practice and devotion.

Consider for a moment the story of the feeding of the four thousand in our second reading this morning. At first glance, this is a miracle story in which Jesus somehow – almost magically – conjures up enough food from seven loaves and a few small fish to feed the multitude. The story understood this way might remind us of the way God provided manna to sustain the Children of Israel as they wandered through the wilderness – another desert – on their way to the Promised Land. But another way of interpreting this story is to understand it instead as a parable about what the Kingdom or Commonwealth of Heaven might be like. It’s hard to believe that no one among those four thousand souls had made provision for their own journey to learn from the teachings of Jesus. Perhaps some of them had brought enough for a fine picnic but intended to keep what they had for themselves and their own families. One young boy offered all that he had with him to feed others, and in that way demonstrated open-hearted generosity rather than selfish concern only for ensuring that he could fill his own needs. We can imagine that this example – this little bit of food offered and then blessed by Jesus – opened the hearts and hidden reserves of many others in the crowd, who were inspired by the example of the one who showed generosity to share as well, so that the Kingdom Jesus spoke of was present among them already, so that all might eat and be satisfied, so that all could sit at the Welcome Table. Some had nothing, some had more than enough, but in that moment the teachings of Jesus were embodied in the actions of his listeners and everyone had enough all of them received their daily bread. In this way we see that it is our own hands which carry out the work of bringing into being that Kingdom, that Commonwealth. As we sit together at the Welcome Table we find that all can be satisfied, all can have enough for their needs.

We believe that we have a faith uniquely suited to the needs of our day. Our tolerance of religious diversity in our own ranks – our choice to walk together in love rather than to insist upon a particular creed in which everyone must believe – provides a model for dealing with the reality of diversity in our society and in the world around us. As a religious tradition, we have emphasized deeds, not creeds, and we are much more concerned about how we practice our faith, how we apply it in our daily living, than in exactly how we formulate the words with which we choose to express our faith.

We believe that such a religion is especially needed for a time like this, when religious fundamentalists from many traditions insist that their own understanding of religion is the only acceptable understanding, that they alone have the truth.

I believe there is a hunger in our land for the kind of faith we offer. Americans are lonelier than ever before. Peter Morales, president of our Unitarian Universalist Association, cites a study about changes in the number of close relationships Americans had in 1985 and the number they had in 2004.

In 1985, the … response given most often was having three people in whom one could confide. In 2004, the [most common] response was zero.

The percentage of people who said they had no one with whom they could confide jumped from 10 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2004. That means that in just 20 years the percent of people who said they have no one to talk to went from one person in ten to one out of every four. This is simply shocking.

I know that this can sound like just numbers. Listen more carefully. Hear the cry of pain in these numbers. This study reveals a level of human isolation that is unprecedented in American life–and perhaps unprecedented in human history. Americans are lonelier than they have ever been.[iii]

There are many causes of this growing isolation and loneliness, including the commodification of leisure, the lure of television, and fear of the stranger. I also believe that churches that have identified themselves with rigid doctrines and ideologies are repelling many who would want to be part of a faith community if they could find one which didn’t require them to check their own question at the door. I believe that’s a gap we can fill, and I believe it’s our job to let people know that we offer a Beloved Community which welcomes diverse beliefs rather than squelching them, that all are invited to sit at the welcome table.

We have a story to tell. We have a light to shine. We have a Beloved Community of memory and hope to share. We invite all of you to join us on the journey. May we grow in love as we extend our love in ever widening circles. Let’s all let our light shine.

Amen www.secondparish.org