Freely and Responsibly Searching

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber Van Zandt at First Unitarian Church of Alton, May 18, 2008;

after a reading of  the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver

 

You may have noticed that the UUA’s Principles and Purposes are usually listed on the back of your order of service.  The fourth one of them says:  “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”  You may know that I’m not usually one to dwell overmuch on our Principles and Purposes - I tend to take them as suggestion rather than as scripture, as policy promoted by committee rather than as law handed down from on high, wherever ‘on high’ is. 

But this fourth one jumps out at me from the middle of the pack, and I’m intrigued.   It asks us to go on a search, and does so as if we don’t already know the truth, as if the meaning hasn’t already been whispered to us, as if it’s up to us to find these things rather than up to an ecclesiastical council to teach us.

That is of course right in line with our cherished Free Religious roots and traditions.  And that’s the difference between us and many other churches:  We don’t invest our church hierarchy with supreme power second only to God.  We don’t bow down to our elected church leaders just because they tell us to.  We don’t put our called ministers up on high pedestals, at least not as far as I can tell.  As much as my ego might appreciate it if you did, I’m also aware that the higher the pedestal, the farther the fall when the thing shatters, as (is the case with all things of human construct) it surely will.

But I’ve been on a search for truth and meaning myself for quite a while, and I detect that many of you have as well, and I think it may be well worth exploring this fourth principle, especially on a day when we’ve scheduled an after-church meeting (to which all you who are members are invited) where the truth about the budget will be revealed and the meaning of what we plan to do about it will be debated.  Truth and meaning may be illusory, but one thing I’m fairly certain of:  A free and responsible search for truth and meaning should be as free (meaning without restriction) as possible but such a thing is never free (meaning without cost).  So, come to the budget meeting and see what you might do to contribute to the discussion if not to the solution.

 

At any rate, back to this fourth principle of ours.  This one seems the most individualistic of the seven:  not concerned with the community or what we do together or how we treat each other, it concerns itself with what we do on our own time and with our own lives.  Your search is yours to undertake.  I can’t do it for you, you can’t do it for me, you and I are generally on our own when it comes to this search. 

What kind of benchmarks might we use to tell when we’ve found the truth or discerned the meaning of something?  Traditionally in Unitarianism, we’ve used a rather holy Trinity - experience, reason, and revelation - to take the measure of ideas that are up for discussion.  These three – experience, reason, and revelation – have jockeyed for position down through the decades:  for a long time, revelation was seen as the principle path to the Truth (capital ‘T’), sometimes as the only way for humanity to learn about the meaning of life and the ways of the inscrutable.  This reliance on scripture led to the bumper-sticker theological claim, “God said it, I believe, and that settles it.”

Then along came the Enlightenment, shoving past the God of Revelation and raising up the god of Reason.  At this juncture in our history, we still lean heavily on our human ability to apply the rules of reason and to explore ideas intellectually.  Even with so much evidence to the contrary, we still like to believe that we can think our way through life and its challenges.  “I think, therefore I am”;  I think, therefore revelation has nothing to do with it.

More recently – say, in the last couple of hundred years – experience has come into vogue as the most important leg of this three-legged workbench of ours.  The rugged individualism that has pervaded the frontier in these American centuries has brought us to imagine that without the profundity of direct personal experience, reason and revelation take us nowhere we want to go, and are part of an ongoing discussion that we have no entree into.  Experience is key, we say;  until I can feel it for myself, it probably doesn’t exist.  “Whatever feels good” is all that matters.

Now, with the horserace among these three yet in process, I would humbly suggest that we look to all three in more or less equal measure.  Rather than being mutually exclusive, I see this trinity of experience, reason, and revelation as complementary, each one a lens through which to examine the information gleaned through the other two.  To count on one’s experience alone seems so limited and limiting;  why not at least ask others what they’ve experienced and see if you can learn from them without having to go through all that they’ve been through?  To count on reason alone without at least beginning with the ideas left behind by those who came before means constantly reinventing the wheel, slowing down progress, increasing frustration.  To count on revelation alone can leave us wishing the revealer had at least spoken the Truth in an idiom we could comprehend, in a narrative form we might experience in our own way and in our own time.

When I say the word ‘revelation,’ I see some arms crossing reflexively.  But revelation is nothing for us to turn up our noses at per se.  As I tell the students over at the Christian seminary across the river, Unitarian Universalists don’t deny scripture, they just have a broader definition of what constitutes scripture than do other religious seekers.  When I tell those students I’ve based some sermons on old books like the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, they don’t flinch, that sounds normal to them.  When I tell them, however, that I’ve based a sermon on the relatively recent novel, The Secret Life of Bees, and another on “The Simpsons’ Movie,” some recoil in horror but some are intrigued.  Some minds are open enough to see that the truth wasn’t revealed in one set of books many centuries ago, never to be revealed again.  Other minds are open enough to see that not only new books are worth reading;  some of the ancient stories resonate deeply as well.

Let’s move on to the free and responsible portion of our fourth principle:  our search for truth and meaning is to be free and responsible.  One celebration of our movement has been that it is based on the concept of human freedom:  we have set ourselves free and helped to break the chains of many others who were enslaved either literally or figuratively. 

But a laser-beam focus on freedom can be a basis for criticism as well;  some say, and rightly so, that we may have taken our freedom too far, that we consider ourselves free to do whatever feels good regardless of our freedom’s cost to others.  Hence the addition of the word responsible:  yes, we are free to engage in a thorough search, to explore to the ends of the earth and beyond if need be, as long as we take into consideration any adverse effects on our neighbors and on our environment.  It used to be that “living large” and tromping around the world in seven-league boots was something to aspire to;  now shoe companies offer green options to help those of us who care to keep our literal footprints as small as possible.  Sure, we’re free to go wherever and however we want, but should we exercise that freedom when the price of our doing so is high and paid by others?  Free is not cheap;  responsible implies that your conscience is engaged and that you are acting in a trustworthy manner.  A free and responsible search for truth and meaning is not without some cost and not without some limits.

We have forebears who have searched for truth and meaning freely and responsibly, who have held their ground for the things they believed. 

Katherine Vogel was a woman who grew up in Poland during the Reformation.  She stated publicly that she had come to believe in the unity of God and in the humanity of Jesus.  Imprisoned by religious authorities for ten years, she would never recant her heresy, and in 1539, at the age of 80, was hauled into the public square and burned at the stake. 

You may also have heard of the Spaniard Michael Servetus who wrote a treatise “On the Errors of the Trinity.”  He, too, was branded a heretic, imprisoned, put on trial, and burned at the stake by John Calvin in Geneva in 1553, copies of his book used as kindling for the fires that would consume his flesh.

 

In our day and time, we’re probably not about to be burned at the stake for professing a belief in the humanity of Jesus or for denying a biblical basis for the Trinity.  In fact, we meet right here in this building every week practicing and teaching things that would have gotten us killed in centuries past.  Look through our Adult Religious Education programming.  Sure, we’ve offered Bible study and ecumenical gatherings based on the tenets of Christian faith.  But we also talk about history from Jesus to Constantine using a non-Christian author and presenter.  The Forum offers topics of a philosophical nature for wide-open discussion.  Some ARE classes come at issues of social justice from our own particular interfaith point of view.  Atheists, agnostics, theists, non-theists, Buddhists, even Christians are welcome in the God/NotGod series.  The pagan group still meets intermittently.  All these things and more available in one place and under one roof.  It sounds to me like we have a good place to start from right here on a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  If you have other suggestions for other programming, come see me or Beth Nalick or John Herndon – we want to be in the business of giving permission for people to try new things and start new initiatives and teach new classes.  Free and responsible:  You’re free to volunteer, we’re responsible to try to make it happen.  And if you don’t want to lead it, you’re welcome to come and participate.  Exercise your freedom, act responsibly, begin your search, and share with others what you find along the way.  If you don’t know where to start, show up at 9:30 on Sundays and we’ll point you in a direction in Adult Religious Education where you’ll have plenty of fellow travelers interested in going far and leaving small footprints.

 

But I finally want to go with you somewhere else this morning, beyond inviting you to Adult Religious Education, beyond exhorting you to follow the fourth Principle, beyond a free and responsible search, to a deeper place of truth and meaning that lies beyond all that.  Beyond educating ourselves more and more, believing that we will somehow be saved by what we know;  beyond striving to work harder and harder, believing that we will somehow be saved by what we do;  there is a place that Mary Oliver speaks of in her poem Wild Geese, a place where: 

You do not have to search,

you do not have to know,

you do not have to do;

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

Know that you are loved. 

Know that you are known. 

Know that you are lifted up not by how much you know or by how much you do but simply because you are you, and you have a place in the family of things.

May all be well with you on this beautiful day and beyond.

 

So may it be.