by Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister

A sermon given January 19, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

My first mature transcendent experience occurred about seven years ago. I was in a steeply bordered valley in the Los Padres National Forest north of L.A. My boots were off, and I was soaking my feet in a pristine stream. I was resting during a difficult hike that was not even half way through. I looked around, and I realized, "This is my life." I was not coming from somewhere, I was not going anywhere; I was there, in that moment. My life was happening and in that moment I saw that I had not been involved. I was only a passenger. And, as I sat in the wonder of that moment, bare feet in that stream, the changes started.

I wasn’t in those hills on vacation. It certainly wasn’t a retreat to learn that this moment is the perfect teacher. I was First Lieutenant Was, then, commander of a reconnaissance platoon in the Marine Corps. We were in those hills under the guise of "training." We augmented federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in their quest to rid this nation of marijuana cultivation. Working for a shadowy Department of Defense unit called Joint Task Force Six, federal troops are employed to enforce domestic laws and reinforce the nation’s borders. Because we were "training," we weren’t primarily enforcing domestic laws; that was just an added bonus to our mission. Pretty sketchy.

So there I was, in this perfect moment provided to me by a real world mission, with real guns and real bullets that I executed with gusto. Being in that moment, I saw what my life was, and more importantly, I got a faint glimpse about the big question, WHY, and something shifted in me. That moment showed me the now and awoke the helmsman in me.

Well, by government standards, our mission was successful; we bagged 12,000 pot plants (not literally) and assisted in the arrest of a dozen growers. It was successful in another, more personal way, because a month later I told my commander that I was resigning my commission. Now I did not know why exactly at the time. I did not connect that discomfort, that dislocation I sensed between what I was doing, why I was doing it and what I was supposed to do then. It has taken years for me to process my Marine Corps experience, and I am far from done. I have a lot of Karmic debt to pay down for spending nine years of my life doing things that I know now were wrong, like teaching 19-year-olds how to kill better. And I am saddened by the struggle I took so long to begin, for so many of us go through similar struggles or have some inner knowledge that we should. Struggles like: Does my livelihood align with my beliefs? Do my patterns of consumption parallel what I know to be right? Am I raising my children the way I know I should, or even could?

Well, I’ve got some good news. Some good news that has helped me in ways that I don’t fully understand yet. I’ve got some good news for all of us who struggle with wanting to know what is right, wanting to know what it all means, wanting to make what we believe coincide with how we behave. It is the good news of church. The good news of this church. The good news of Unitarian Universalism, and I know in my own life, this has been some of the best news I have found.

Church is a blessing in our lives. It gives us something to do on Sunday mornings. It gives us a community that we can nurture and be nurtured by, a community that we can join and support and work to shape its destiny. Churches, for many of us, become a family, a family that we can choose to be part of. We come together in trying times and in joyous ones. That’s what people do. We celebrate together, we grieve together, we cry and laugh well together. Church gives us a place, gives us permission to ask the biggest question we can ask, Why? Why are we here? Why do we die? Why do we suffer so in the world? Church allows us to come together and witness our search for a sense of ultimate reality. If I had a church community supporting my search for truth and meaning earlier in my life, if I had a church that helped me act on my beliefs, I doubt that I would have volunteered so willingly to serve our government as a military officer. Church is powerful.

The purpose of religion is two-fold. First, it gives us tools, vocabulary to seek meaning from our existence. We are finite beings who encounter a cosmos that is infinite, beyond our comprehension. Religion helps us transcend our finity and encounter the Other. And religion goes one step further, it gives us parameters, rules, it gives us a guidebook as to how to live in harmony with our perception of ultimate reality. Religion helps us describe the nature of the world, then act according to our deepest beliefs.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have some unique challenges for our communal search for the big answers, but we are also uniquely equipped to address the largest of issues. As the leading, radical edge of the Protestant reformation, we have taken Martin Luther’s revolution of the Priesthood of all believers to the level of the Prophethood of all believers. Each of us has access to the deepest understanding, to the purest truth. It is within each of us, and each of us has, no matter how undeveloped, the means to experience the Godly in our midst. But the ability to ask the right questions and interpret the sensations that we experience is something that no human being can do alone. It takes community. It takes church.

Our church is unique because we believe that each of us has the ability to search for deeper truth and meaning in the world. We each have a responsibility to begin that search, discern the nature of ourselves, our world, and how we are supposed to be in that world. While we do not proclaim to have the answers, we provide the space, the community, the family that allows each of us to begin this search for our selves. We offer resources, support, thoughtful worship and opportunities to use different tools, vocabularies and means of expression to assist us on our search. We, as a religion, excel at not only being tolerant of other systems of religious belief, we excel at trying to be tolerant of other forms of religious expression.

Now, this is an important week. Wednesday was the birthday of the greatest of modern prophets of peace, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a scholar, a leader, an organizer, and a formidable speaker, but first and foremost he was a man of God. He said that we can never fully grasp complete knowledge of what was real and, quoting from an early paper he wrote at divinity school in Boston, "religious experience is not an intellectual formulation about God, it is a lasting acquaintance with God." Martin Luther King, Jr. was acquainted with God. He was acquainted with the power of love expressed by the ministry of Jesus. He experienced the suffering of human beings in unfathomable depths and was called on a mission of righteous non-violence to right that which was wrong. He and his wife Correta Scott King dabbled in Unitarianism while living in Boston. Both were inspired by the rational approach to truth and human nature, but both were called back to the church of their birth, the Christian church, the African-American Christian church, which holds an image of God as an ever-present, suffering companion aligned with all creatures that weep, too. Christianity informed King’s sense of Ultimate Reality. Centuries of theological writing and ethical debate, combined with his own experience as a man and a person of color in the United States molded his way of being in the world, most beautifully embodied in his pursuit of a non-violent correction of injustice.

Following the lineage of the concept of non-violence as a tool of social and spiritual change, we can trace King’s ideas, his language, to his hero, Gandhi. And from Gandhi back to the eloquent peace writings of Leo Tolstoy, back to a little know Universalist turned Unitarian minister writing in Massachusetts in the 1840s, Adin Ballou. Ballou wrote Christian Non-Resistance, a theology of social conduct based on one of the most potentially world-changing passages in the Christian Bible, Matthew 4:38-41. Jesus taught his followers a correction to Judaic law, as he often did, when he said, "You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I say on to you, resist not an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your cloak, give your coat as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile."

What, Jesus, King, Gandhi, Tolstoy, and even the humble Ballou, did was give voice to a vision of ultimate truth that was palpable, that was accessible, that was hearable in the time and place they inhabited. And the time and place we are in is so desperate for this voice. And the voice is still present. We are still in the age of Martin Luther King’s ministry. The passion he mustered to save his people, African American people, from the horror and indignity of racism and segregation is still desperately needed. But the passion he mustered for his people is broader than that, his passion spilled forth to include the oppressed everywhere; from organized labor struggling under powerful management, to poverty-stricken people in the ghettos and in rural villages, to our involvement in Vietnam. He saw poor white and black young men dying in an unjust war, spoiling their innocence killing and being killed by poor young Vietnamese men. His allegiance was not with Ho Chi Minh or Lyndon Johnson, but with the scared lost boys of the National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong) and the equally scared, lost boys of the Seventh Marine Regiment and all of their brothers.

Martin Luther King’s message is relevant to our age, and his language is still hearable. We here, in this church, in this building, have the opportunity to take this message, this faith, forward. As many of us did yesterday afternoon. Twenty-five thousand of our neighbors showed up. Three hundred of the people sitting in the pews with us this morning showed up. Being true to the legacy of Martin Luther King is doing the work to find out why we need to be the good people we are and going out and doing it. That is what Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us.

Earlier this week, a young man asked how to live in a time and place where you simply don’t agree with what is being done. He referenced the mounting war effort, the registration of aliens, the crumbling social service safety net. He asked what do we do when we just can’t stand passive and what does church have to do with any of it.

Questions like that usually fill me with despair and hopelessness. Sometimes the world just overwhelms me, everything seems so bad, problems can seem insurmountable. I know we don’t have much control, but sometimes the lack of control I have over the world and the goings on inside my own head and heart is far too apparent for me to bear. But his question inspired a moment of faith. I told him that church is a place for us to search for our own sense of ultimate right and wrong and then it equips us to go into the world and act upon that. Church gives us the support of a community, it gives us a framework of ethical and moral behavior, and it gives us a language to communicate that which we find of critical importance to our own survival and the survival of our planet.

I think that was a good answer, and since it was posed at a new member orientation, I hope it inspired an able young man to join us here! I have sat with that question this week, as I have sat with my own faith that is in a constant state of flux. My disbelief and doubt, recently, seem as frequent as my praise, adoration and thankfulness. Lately, I have been questioning my faith.

I question my faith when a 19-year-old boy is led to believe that it is a holy act, an act of national defense, a justifiable act, to strap a bomb to his chest or drive a tank through his neighbor’s home.

I question my faith when terror happens in our homes. Family violence, terror that occurs here, in our communities, in our families, in our Church right here. I question my faith when I know that not everyone knows that hitting is always wrong. Hitting is always wrong. Always.

I question my faith when I hear that some of our neighbors are subject to arrest, humiliation and deportation simply because they were born at a different latitude and longitude than most people in this country.

I question my faith when our schools and public health and safety programs are gutted because some people are too stingy to pay on average $114 more per year in taxes—that’s $0.31 per day.

I question my faith when I hear stories in the news about troop deployments, bombs already falling and the prospect of a war that may cost thousands of our young people’s lives, and will take tens of thousands of Iraqi lives; and for the life of me I can’t figure out what we have to gain from this.

I question my faith when I see this country I love so dearly being led with the desolating arrogance of the Roman Empire.

I question my faith each time I see hate and violence and poverty and oppression spilling into our streets. The Rape of the Earth, disregard for the sacredness of life itself seems to flood the airwaves, crowd the papers and saturate my very soul. I question my faith.

I have been questioning a lot recently. But when I really get into it, really start questioning my Unitarian Universalism, I see what I need to see. I see the hope. My faith is sometimes wobbly, but hope empowers me, hope keeps me getting up every morning, hope will allow me to help bring children into this world some day. Hope is something that is kindled in that chalice that burns here each Sunday. And that chalice is finding a bigger corner of my heart to light up all the time. That is what keeps bringing back me to my family. This keeps me choosing to be here. Because no matter our doubts, no matter our questions, no matter our struggles, in Unitarian Universalism, like a family, we are always welcome.

Religion helps us find our faith, realize our ideas about reality, and it also informs us how to act in the world with this vision in mind. Dr. King had a concrete worldview grounded in his Christian faith that informed his behavior in the world. His interpretation of his religion told him how to be. But what about us here? We have as many ideas about ultimate reality as we have members. Can we have a system of behavior, a practice, a religious practice that encompasses Christians and Jews and Muslims and pagans and humanists and Buddhists and all the other concepts of reality that we welcome here? Yes. That is the beauty of our religion, the why is not central, it is what we each do with our own discoveries that binds us. Deed not creed brings us together to learn and grow and to do what is often forgotten, what we do not give ourselves enough credit for, our practice.

The seven Principles are a path to practice, much like the Eight Fold Nobel path the Buddha taught, much like Christ’s teachings on living in community, much like rabbinical law. The seven Principles stretch beyond a vision of what the world is or how the world could work, or even an expression of how the world should be. The seven Principles are a framework for living. The seven Principles are a framework for Practice. For the practice of living religiously.

These Principles are a way for us to practice being the good people that we are. Alone. As a family. As a community. As a church. Just try to remember every moment that you are alive that every person has worth and deserves dignity by the very nature of their being human. Try that each time you are challenged by an evildoer, a thoughtless driver, a person caught doing unconscionable things on the evening news. Try to remember that and you are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

Remember to use justice, equity and compassion next time you are on the phone with the phone company, or are talking to an angry customer, or are at a committee meeting. You are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

Try to accept one another as you each are. Encourage someone who annoys you to grow spiritually. Encourage your son to grow. Encourage, allow, demand, that you grow along with your family members here. You are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

When you try to learn something mindfully. When you try to find truth and meaning in your life, when you stretch the boundaries of what you knew, what you believed, what you had faith in, you are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

When you vote. When you participate in civil society. When you choose to spend or not to spend your money on something intentionally. When you come to the annual meeting here, you are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

When you are disgusted, angered, dismayed, infuriated about the oppression of our brothers and sisters across town and across the world; when the idea of poverty makes you sick; when you reach out to someone in need; when you do something to change someone’s situation for the better, you are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

When you sit in awe before eating your dinner and are thankful for the bounty provided by the Earth; when you think about where that plastic bag you throw away is going; when you remember that we are not the only species that inhabits Oregon; when you try to feel that every action has a consequence in the Universe, you are practicing Unitarian Universalism.

When you give of yourself, love your neighbor, pray for those who persecute you . . . When you make a friend, help someone, try really hard to be good, you are practicing Unitarian Universalism. We can pray, meditate, walk, run, paint, sing, garden . . . We can read, learn, study, work, create or donate . . . We all have our ways to interact with the mysteries that surround us, but anytime you are alone in the world or gathered as a religious community, you have the opportunity to practice your faith. And in this world, we had better be thankful for the opportunity.

When we choose this family, choose this religious family that supports us in our search for ultimate reality and provides a way to be in the world, we will find hope, we will discover courage. We will discover enough courage to follow Rev. King to that mountaintop. We will follow and look all around, and we will see that Promised Land. As Unitarian Universalists, we will see that we are in the Promised Land, it is here, it is now, and we have a lot of work to do. Amen.

PRAYER

Dear God, we know you have not forsaken us. We know that love is mightier than hate. We know that hope will overcome the darkest night. Guide us in our quest for truth. Hold our hand in our fear, in our healing and in our happiness. Please, give us the courage to open our mind to the world, our spirit to our brothers and sisters and our body to the earth so that your will be done. In the name of all that is holy, amen.

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Copyright 2003, Brent Was.  All rights reserved.