Blink and Miss

A sermon preached for the congregation at Eliot Unitarian Chapel

by the Rev. Dr. Daniel ÓConnell in St Louis, MO on January 27, 2008

There is a reading in our hymnal– a chalice lighting reading– that I struggle with a little bit. Here it is:

Life is a gift for which we are grateful. We gather in community to celebrate the glories and mysteries of this great gift.

It seems simple enough, really. What is there to argue with?

Somewhere in town this morning a baby is about to be born. The baby is not totally comfortable. Squirming around. Getting a little crowded, but very safe and warm. And then, wham! Birth!

Now we have a red faced squealing infant who moments ago was deep in warm liquid.

Out into the world they come, and there are tears of joy and crying and the infant is having none of this. It cries for the past, it cries for having come through a one way door, never to go back. As far as we know, this infant never asked for the ‘gift’ of life. But it was given anyway, like it or not. But who can refuse the gift of life? And who can refuse the gift of death?

Is life a true gift? In the end, it will be taken from us. Like it or not. If something is a true gift, do you have to give it back?

It seems that with rare exceptions all holiday and birthday gifts will– one day– wear out, get lost, become broken, get used up or recycled, or even end up in a landfill. And so too, we wear out, get lost, become broken, get used up and eventually– end up recycled into earth or sea, or simply buried in the ground.

And for many of us, life didn’t turn out the way we thought. Maybe it got bad at one point, maybe it’s better now. Maybe it was better before and these days we are suffering some dark nights of the soul.

Whether or not life is a gift, Life is truly a blessing. Because we can use our lives to bless others. And we can cook up something new.

That’s why I was so struck with this morning’s meditation about leftovers: That this is how we make our lives into a symphony when we get older. We revisit various pieces– maybe some unfinished pieces. And we rethink things from the vantage point of who we are now.

We create our adult lives out of the hopes & fears, joys & sorrows, all of the milestones of our lives. We season with experience, we dream of new confections. We begin again in love.

And it’s not just our personal lives is like cooking with leftovers. Most religion is cooking with leftovers, too. Several tribes in Judaism, they became one people, one nation.

The new Christians cooked up what they saw as leftovers from Judaism. The religious and philosophical idea of syncretism is a “combination of different systems of religious belief or practice.”

The six sources of Unitarian Universalism describe a kind of modern American syncretism:

•          Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;

•          Words and deeds of prophetic women and men...;

•          Wisdom from the world's religions...;

•          Jewish and Christian teachings [in particular] which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;

•          Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science...;

•          Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

The very idea that there could be more than one source for your religion doesn’t make sense to the orthodox. The orthodox, by definition have this idea of “right belief.” There are two and only two choices: in or out, heaven or hell, black or white, take it or leave it.

We had our New U class on Saturday. Many people come to us in this class from being religiously homeless after leaving their childhood religion. We had eleven people in the class, which ran from 9 am to 2:30 in the afternoon.

Eight of them have Roman Catholic backgrounds. That’s unusual. Usually, we get more ex-Catholics than that.

And it occurred to me that I don’t know if it’s a great strategy to depend on the Catholics to keep sending us their former parishioners. We won’t have the current arch bishop of St. Louis forever.

The eleven folks at New U on Saturday came from a variety of religious paths. Often deciding their childhood religion no longer fit them as a teenager, they moved away from their roots, and began exploring. For most, it took many years. They wandered into Wicca, they encountered Buddhism. They sampled evangelicalism.

But in almost every case, a friend told them about Unitarian Universalism or about Eliot Chapel. And then they took a deep breath, and came to check us out.

Reverend Peter Morales of our Golden, Colorado church says that our overall UU membership has remained the same for the last 50 years, even as the population of the US has increased 68%. Our influence has been waning.

Is that important? It depends on your perspective. Are you satisfied with American Theology being Bad Theology? As we heard in our reading? That God curses some folks with hurricanes and blesses others by leaving their church relatively unscathed?

Are you okay with religious conservatives promoting homophobia, opposing birth control, and opposing evolution– and what? Where is the liberal religious response?

Maybe the public concludes there is no liberal religious response because there aren’t any religious liberals.

Are you comfortable with the idea that many Americans have no idea we exist, don’t believe a religion like ours could exist? They blink and they miss us.

Your spiritual homework this week is to bring a friend to church. Next week I will be talking about what our common beliefs are. So it will be a good week to bring a friend.

The week after that will be a huge celebration. A single service at 10 am at the Kirkwood Community Center, with brunch immediately following, and a great kids only program here. And the week after that, our Senior High leads the service.

So, there’s plenty of opportunities to invite a friend to church.

New members sometimes tell me about how long it took to find a church like ours. A church which affirms authenticity rather than authority. A church that draws on world religions, a church with deeds not creeds, which values individual liberty, religious freedom, and social justice.

Why are we so hard to discover, and once discovered, stay found?

Allan Gurganus has a short story entitled: It Had Wings which tells of an old woman in her kitchen. She sees an angel fall into her back yard, and when she presses her arthritic hand against his face to see if he was alive, her hand is healed.

Being a practical woman, she put her other hand on him, and her sore hip, and so forth, and she becomes as spry as a 20 year old again.

Later the angel flies off, and she thinks about telling her neighbor about her encounter with the angel, but it occurs to her that her neighbor might think her crazy. Then this thought: Folks keep so much of the best stuff, quiet, don’t they?

We may have an authentic spiritual encounter– and it might be with an angel in our backyard, or letting the choir transport us to some ethereal place– and we come to appreciate our religious home. Our church is a place where you can bring the real you that you really are– and the you that you really want to become.

But so often we don’t tell people about it. Folks keep so much of the best stuff, quiet, don’t they? Why do we keep such experiences quiet? Fear, I think. The very real fear of being embarrassed, trivialized, overlooked or discounted.

But how to talk about the good stuff without giving an encyclopedic answer or a trivial answer?

It turns out that the UU national association has teamed up with Time magazine to run some advertisements about Unitarian Universalism.

There are two of them I have seen. One is titled: “Is God keeping you from going to church?” and it continues:

Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the idea of God– or at least someone else’s idea of God. Yet maybe you yearn for a loving, spiritual community where you can be inspired and encouraged as you search for your own truth and meaning. This is a church you ask? Welcome to Unitarian Universalism.

Another one is entitled: “Find Us and Ye Shall Seek.” Kind of puts the right spin on it, doesn’t it? It continues:

If you’re searching for a spiritual home where questions are as welcome as answers, find us. We are a loving, open-minded religious community that is guided not by a set creed or dogma but by a free and responsible quest for truth and meaning in our lives. There is a religion that welcomes your search. Discover Unitarian Universalism. (http://img.uua.org/marketing/time/Generic_FindSeek.pdf).

So maybe we can reproduce those ads in our order of service later on in the year, and you can clip them and take them home, and pass them out when you want to give someone an idea of what we’re about.

Why do we need ads or marketing? I am told the last time we had any kind of national print ads were back in the 1950s– they had an ad with the tag line: Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?

And the ad listed some of our qualities, such as non-creedalism, diversity of belief, and so on, and people ended up coming in droves. But then we haven’t really done much since then, and so only 40% of Americans have ever heard of Unitarian Universalism.

You and I and our children are bombarded with media messages. And our culture is bombarded with a sort of default understanding of what religion is and what church is.

If there is something other than Bad Theology masquerading as American Theology, then shouldn’t someone be pointing that out?

And if we have something truly different, something people would get out of bed on a weekend mornings for, something people would contribute their energy & resources to– something which people invested in emotionally, spiritually, and financially, then why oh why would we hide our light under a bushel?

Well, here’s the hard part. We come back to how almost all of those 11 members of the New U class found out about us– they found out about us because someone told them. Someone like you.

The clear implication is– we have to be able to talk about our UU faith with others in a clear, concise and short way.

There are two main considerations (1) what you say to people. And (2) what they ask you. And it’s important to keep those things distinct.

If you want to tell someone what we’re about, you can tell them our mission. It’s only 20 words long, so you can memorize it pretty easily, if you want to:

Eliot Chapel, a Unitarian Universalist community, gathers to foster free religious thought, nurture spiritual growth, and act for social justice.

In the advertising world, this might be called an adlet and two blinks.

Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio company in America, is offering time slots for commercials as short as one second. As of last report, no advertiser has bitten on a slot that minuscule yet, but they are buying the two-second and five-second slots. That is a big change, because traditionally, radio ads run for 60 seconds each.

The five-second ads are being called “adlets” and the two-second spots have been dubbed “blinks.”

But what can you possibly communicate in tiny time periods like that? More than you think. Here, for example, is a two-second ad you might have heard on the radio recently: “The Simpsons — ‘Doh!’ — tonight on Fox.”

And here is a five-second ad: “‘I’m hearing people’s thoughts.’ (whisper: Heroes on NBC).”

The regional president of sales for Clear Channel conceded that “With the one-second ad, there’s a lot you can’t communicate,” but he quickly went on to say, “You really need one and a half to two seconds to get [a] point across.” Well, doh!

One, one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand. Two of the most important messages in the Bible can also be stated in an adlet and a blink.

Consider this one from the gospel reading: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.” Five seconds flat. Adlet length.

And this one also from the same reading: “[You shall love] your neighbor as yourself.” Two seconds. A mere blink.

I time our mission statement at 9 seconds, so that’s an adlet and two blinks. And it’s only 20 words, so it is easy enough to commit to memory. So you have something to tell someone about who we are, what we are about.

Assuming you get that far, and if they’re interested, they will have lots of questions. I’ll give you some tools to handle those next week.

In the meantime, let us remember that we are called to be a haven for religious liberals, and we are called to be a beacon of liberal religion, in a sometimes bruised and hurting world, which doesn’t know we exist.

My wish for you this week is to find a stillness. Take a time of quiet. Just by yourself– some few meditative moments far from the madding crowd. Find a stillness, hold a stillness, let the stillness carry you to a place of peace.

Let us rise and sing it, shall we? “Find a Stillness,” #352.

            Benediction

            Postlude