HOME
SUNDAY SCHEDULE
NEWSLETTER
CALENDAR
DIRECTIONS
LEADERSHIP
PROGRAMS
OUR BELIEFS
SERMONS
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
SOCIAL ACTION
ABOUT US
CONTACT US

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel set the bar high when he wrote:

Our life on this Earth is not just a random event among billions of other random cosmic events that will pass away without a trace...It is an integral component or link, however miniscule, in the great and mysterious order of Being, an order in which everything has a place of its own, in which nothing that has once been done can be undone.
(The Art of the Impossible)

Hmm... High stakes, and no Control-Z "Undo" feature on the keyboard of life.... How do we make choices? How do we know the best course of action? Calling to mind this morning's meditation, remember that what we think or believe has its ultimate expression in what we do. What we see as the truth matters, for ourselves and for the people we interact with every day. Like ripples in a pond, the ones we affect in turn go on to affect others. We'd better get it right!!

Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it might seem. Objective truth is pretty elusive, riddled with unknowns and ambiguities. Remember Donald Rumsfeld's award-winning quote:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.

This bit of wisdom earned Rumsfeld a Foot in Mouth award. In a perfect follow-up, a spokesman for the British Plain English Campaign on the occasion of giving the award said that they thought they knew what he meant, "but we don't know if we really know." So....In a world filled with knowns, known unknowns, and even unknown unknowns, how are we to know what is true, good, and life-serving? Most often, we have to move forward with, at best, imperfect knowledge, sometimes to our peril.

Near the end of Walden, Henry David Thoreau related an experience he had at a bog. Seeing a boy nearby and presumably not wanting to sink in, Thoreau asked the boy if the bog had a hard bottom. With the boy's reassurance that the bog in fact did have a hard bottom he strode confidently out into the mushy ground. You can imagine what happened next. Turning to the boy, he exclaimed "I thought you said it had a firm bottom!!!!" To which, the boy replied..."It does...you just haven't reached it yet."

More than a hundred years later, the legendary Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies made the same mistake as Thoreau, coming upon a man reading a paper with a dog at his foot. As Clouseau bends down to pet the dog, he asks the man "Does your dog bite?" Assured that the man's dog in fact did not bite, Clouseau pets the dog, only to experience a fairly major chomp on the arm. Taken aback, he exclaims "I thought you said your dog didn't bite!!" only to have the man look over his newspaper and reply non-chalantly "That's not my dog."

Like Thoreau and Clouseau, we need to move forward, making even our most important decisions based on partial knowledge and all too often blinded by the assumptions we make. After all, both Thoreau and Clouseau thought that they were being prudent and safe before they ventured forth. Can we do any better?

Faced with uncertainty, people often turn to religion, the "Rock of Ages" for guidance. Whether you consider yourself a religious conservative or liberal, this isn't a bad way to go. In addition to enormous amounts of personal fulfillment and spiritual direction, much suffering has been alleviated through religiously motivated social services, and in many large cities church-affiliated schools provide a safe and sane alternative to profoundly dysfunctional urban school systems. Motivated by a sincere desire to affirm life, much good has been done by people holding a wide variety of religious identities.

If we go down this religious path in search of enlightenment, though, we need to tread lightly, always careful just what we are looking for. Alan Jones, dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, offers a useful dichotomy, suggesting that religion is often turned to by some as a source of answers and others as a means of deepening the questions.

Answers, framed as the ultimate, eternal truth, can provide a much-needed stability, but they also pose a danger in the hands of a zealot. In addition to past holy wars, modern terrorism and ethnic cleansing across the globe is driven by people who feel that they - and only they - possess the ultimate truth. On a smaller but still significant level, our claims to truth divide us as much as they unite us. Just yesterday on cnn.com, I read a story about a Christian orphanage in the U.S. that wouldn't entertain applications from Catholics, since they weren't doctrinally pure. Better to be an orphan for Jesus than be adopted by an infidel, apparently.

Even here at Eliot, we've had protesters outside, suggesting that as a church we don't support Biblical truth like we should. In an effort to rehabilitate our image in the community, I'm wearing 100% cotton today - no mixed threads for me!! If people are really serious about the Bible, perhaps we should go down Kirkwood Road after the service and stone the people at Long John Silver's. It's a shell-fish kind of thing.…Imagine a modern crusade: Death to the clam eaters!!!! Don't forget that Mark Bulger and the rest of the Rams will have to be disposed of as well, since they have touched pigskin.

Assuming that we won't act on those last items, and that a good percentage of even the people who are at the most fundamentalist churches today are wearing a 50-50 or 60-40 blend in their clothes, the notion of finding absolute answers for all time, even in the Bible, is problematic. Picking and choosing the Bible verses we follow, and then calling our choices God's will, leaves a lot of room for mischief if we're not careful.

Similarly, reliance on absolute and unchanging church tradition has its limits, though it did give me the title for this sermon. So, it has some benefit, though Galileo might disagree. Last year, the Trenton, New Jersey archdiocese was embroiled in a controversy over whether an 8-year old girl with celiac disease, a digestive condition that prevents her from eating wheat, could receive her first holy communion with a rice-based wafer - essentially, Jesus on rice. For people with this condition, receiving a wheat-based communion wafer could be fatal. Bishop John M. Smith in an act of stunning moral courage passed the buck, observing that "[T]he issue has already been decided … by Vatican authority." A bit of Googling led me to discover that this has been an issue for more than 20 years, and the preferred solution is to have a lower amount of wheat (akin to placing only 1 bullet in the chamber?). Asking a parent to play Russian roulette with their child's life seems a bit overzealous in support of tradition and misguided in terms of modern medicine.

Fortunately, according to the executive director of the Celiac Disease Foundation, many churches are moving past official pronouncements and reinterpreting the scope of what is acceptable for use in communion. Maybe Jesus can come on rice. In these cases and others, deeply committed people are staking out new terrain, integrating scripture, tradition, and modern knowledge. Given the limits of relying solely on Biblical or church tradition as a source of eternal, literal truth, this open-ness to building on tradition is a positive development. As Jesus said, new wines belong in new wineskins.

This is a seismic shift in the religious landscape, however. Once we start interpreting the past and applying its wisdom to modern issues, and discarding instances of bigotry, violence, and ignorance perpetrated in the name of God, we begin to slide away from religion providing the eternal answers and toward seeing religion as a means of deepening the questions we all have to face. Seeking religious truth becomes a process not of smugly citing a verse or a rule, but a process of searching for a way for how we can deal with today's issues in light of eternal values.

On the other hand, as critical as I am about unquestioning reliance on the Bible and tradition, the simplistic framing of liberal religions such as Unitarian Universalism as "believing whatever you want" is just as dangerous. To base our religious identities on questions more than answers, we have to be sure that our questions aren't blinded by our ignorance or false assumptions. Remember that Thoreau and Clouseau both thought that they had done due diligence before setting out on a course that proved not to be so great.

The quest is to understand, but not be rigidly bound by, how others have engaged with eternal issues in the past. I'd like to suggest two rules for the road that we keep in mind as we wrestle with a religious response to modern dilemmas;

1. It's probably not that simple, and
2. You may just possibly be wrong.

Notice that I said YOU may be wrong. I, of course, am right. Seriously, harkening back to today's readings, the prefatory remarks to the play Doubt remind us that we all too often get caught up in debate, having to prove or defend our position, never taking the time to acknowledge that our view may be only partially correct, and that maybe the "other side" (those people!!) may have something to contribute to our collective understanding. The wisdom of the fictional 10 year old in Prince Edward is also worth remembering, reminding us that our positions so deeply held often serve to divide us and keep us apart as much as they define us.

This danger of getting stuck in our own world view is particularly acute today, as we can easily read, listen to, and watch things that only serve to confirm our biases and keep us wrapped up in ourselves. This was proven empirically in a study conducted at the University of Maryland, showing that although we are awash in media, only 30% of Americans rely on more than one source for their news about the world. This is dangerous, since where we get our news informs our thoughts, beliefs, and actions...for better or worse. In that same study, 77% of the people who use Fox News as their primary source of information held one or more clear misconceptions about US-Iraq relations. (These were defined as proven Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration on 9/11, US discovery of weapons of mass destruction, and a belief that there is large world-wide support for the US invasion of Iraq.) The figure for the NPR and PBS audience was 20% holding one of these misconceptions, with the traditional "big 3" networks and CNN running from 55 to 71%.

Where we get our information from influences our thoughts, which inevitably influences the actions that come from them. What difference does it make that I wrote this listening to a Unitarian radio station instead of a fundamentalist station. How is my world view different in making the station choice, and how does my choice of stations reinforce that world view? With a gazillion cable channels, web sites, blogs, and chat channels, we never have to leave our own biases, unless we choose to. If I ever became the subject of a Law & Order episode, police searching for clues in my house or car would likely find any of a half-dozen niche market St. Louis papers besides the Post-Dispatch and Riverfront Times, some of them with diametrically opposite world views. Similarly, I have to work to be sure that I encounter other points of view in my TV and web surfing. In most cases these views don't represent "my group," and some I find revolting, but they help me to better understand other points of view in the community a bit better. Just living helps, too. I grew up in a 99% white, overwhelmingly middle class New England city. My various professional jobs in Atlanta, Memphis, Boston, and now St. Louis exposed me to a much greater diversity of people: rich and poor; Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist; gay, lesbian, and "straight"; Black, White, Asian, Latino. The list goes on.

So, my perspectives have expanded. I may still be wrong, but at least I'm gaining a bit more appreciation that it's not that simple, and as friends and co-workers are all too ready to point out, in fact I may be wrong.

As we become better and more broadly informed, filled with as much love and wisdom as we can muster, we can follow the Buddhist teaching as framed by Diane Eshin Rizetto when she challenges us by noting that:

We may grasp for clear do's and don'ts and what we get instead is the directive to question, investigate, be true. This is the key that opens the door to finding the wholeness of living and supporting all life.
(Waking Up to What You Do, p. 177).

Hmmm.… Tough stuff. The challenge is always before us. It's not that simple, and we may well be wrong. Scripture, tradition, and wisdom combine to form our religion, or in Latin, re-ligio … that which we bind ourselves back to … has much to offer, if we use it wisely to guide us in acting as best we can

For the Earth Forever Turning, hymn # 163.