by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

A sermon given January 16, 2005

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Long ago and far away, there was a man who started a highly successful religious movement.  He caused such a stir that people flocked to him with an unusual question.  Rather than who he was or where he came from, they wanted to know what he was.  They queried “Are you a god?”  He said no.  “An angel”?  No.   “A saint?”  No.  “Then what are you?” they finally asked.  And he answered, “I am awake.”  And so they named him, “The Awakened One,” or, in Sanskrit, “Buddha.”

Being awake to the gift of being alive is the opposite of sin, as it was conceived of in the ancient world.  Long before the institutional church developed the notion of sin as a list of forbidden acts, ancient civilizations described sin quite differently, as the inherent tendency of humans to fall asleep spiritually, forgetting their connection to God.

Because the divine is present within all of us, disconnection from God also means disconnection from other people and from our own true selves.  An important cause of the disconnection is the universal human experience of being wounded.  Every human being receives and recovers from many small wounds.  But some wounds, physical or spiritual, are so intensely painful that the immediate coping response is simply to lose consciousness—a kind of self-administered anesthesia that makes living like sleepwalking.

The ancient understanding of sin rested on a belief that human nature is inherently good, but that we can become disconnected from this good nature when we are wounded.  In the Christian church, a very different view of human nature eventually prevailed, reflected in the harsh teachings of Calvinism:  that humans fundamentally are inclined toward evil and must be carefully controlled by promises of reward and threats of punishment in heaven and hell.

Christianity thus reconceived sin as a list of prohibited acts.  Calvin planted Geneva thick with laws against sin, publicly enforced.  He was a lawyer, by the way.  Never was there a better example of the old adage that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This orthodoxy has been inherited by fundamentalist Christian churches right down to the present day.  But Unitarians and Universalists moved away from these doctrines long ago, when they embraced the rational thinking and faith in human progress ushered in by the Age of Reason. They saw clearly the tyranny of this heavy-handed conception of sin.  Over time, though, our movement’s basic response was simply to drop the word from its spiritual vocabulary. So now we have a feel-good religion without sin—as if by banishing the word, we could eliminate the reality. But you can’t simply throw away wounding experiences.  They won’t leave.

A spiritual void is left in modern life by the absence of any conception of sin that helps us deal with disconnection.  And our highly individualistic, consumerist culture has responded to that void as a marketing opportunity—for every conceivable kind of anesthesia to dull the pain. Not just the obvious ones like drugs, alcohol, too much food, fancier possessions, or too much television; but also things like impressive job titles and other status symbols.  These anesthetics actually drive us deeper into the state of disconnectedness that used to be called sin.

The reality of sin as disconnection, as a kind of sleepwalking, has personal meaning for me, in relation to my own history of immersing myself in work.  In 1983, I spent what seemed like all my waking hours on legal proceedings that my lawyer buddies and I referred to as “The Great Telephone Wars.”  AT&T was undergoing a court-supervised dismantling that would transform the telephone industry.  My son Galen was in first grade that year, and he wrote a little essay entitled “My Dad.”

The first sentence read: “My dad likes to work.”  Next, some geography: “He works at One Market Plaza.”  And then, in the third sentence, a surprise:  “He has black hair and blue eyes.”  I have neither, of course.  I chuckled at the essay, but certainly didn’t think it suggested any problem.  My work was intellectually satisfying.  My wife and children had everything they could possibly need.

I was reminded of Galen’s essay some years later, when I was living in Japan with my family and working with another team of lawyers on another sprawling case—a “bet the company” dispute over copyright protection of software for mainframe computers.   The work was intense and involved frequent trips back and forth between California and Japan.

My daughter Marianne was attending a school for expatriate American kids in Tokyo, and her teacher told me about a funny moment in class just before the Thanksgiving break.  At circle time she had asked the students to take turns saying what they were most thankful for.  When it came to Marianne, she thought a minute and announced, “I’m thankful that my dad is home for all major holidays.”

We had a good laugh about this line—one of those “kids say the darnedest things” moments.  Galen’s little essay popped back into my mind briefly, but Marianne’s picture of her Dad as someone primarily associated with “all major holidays” certainly didn’t perturb me, or suggest any problem with the place of my work in my life.  My work was  intellectually satisfying.  My wife and children had everything they could possibly need.

Years later, looking back from the vantage point of my path toward ministry, I could see how I had been using my law practice to distance myself from others.  I had plenty of daily contact with other people.  But hardly ever the kind in which anything deep is revealed.  Not even with my family. I was working too hard to have time for that.

And I saw what I was working so hard to do:  to construct a public self to place between myself and others, to disconnect them from my real self.  I wanted to present that public self and say to others, in effect, “this is who I am”—I’m the one who wrote this well-honed legal brief, or gave this persuasive closing argument, or gained the confidence of this important new client.  Or whatever.

And I wanted to present this public persona to myself and say, “I am not that clumsy kid who showed up for high school basketball tryouts wearing the wrong brand of sneakers, or that socially backward college freshman who couldn’t be suave with the girl he wanted to ask for a date, or the little boy whose father sometimes made him feel terribly ashamed of mistakes.”  Whatever represented, for me, an experience of being wounded—that’s what I wanted not to be.

I had wanted to give people something easy to love, a self that would not be rejected as inadequate.  I didn’t hide behind this public persona every single day with every single person; but in retrospect it was clear to me that I had operated this way much of the time.  This coping strategy was the best I could do in light of my own history of hurts and fears.  But it was costly, depriving me of the enlivening experience of letting others get close to me, and of letting myself get close to them.  And those “others” included my own children.

At this point, you may wonder what this story has to do with sin.  Being a garden variety workaholic sounds too ordinary, not culpable or dramatic enough to be called sin. But this just shows how deeply ingrained those Calvinist notions of sin as something culpable really are—even among UUs.  Sin as disconnection happens in daily doses, almost surreptitiously, nothing dramatic.  As C. S. Lewis observed, “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”  Just cruising along in our sleep, “dead to the world.”

Metaphorically, at least, disconnection and sleepwalking represent a kind of hell on earth, rather than in an afterlife.  In this hell, life consists of the collisions and wounds that are inevitable without right relationship with others, along with simply missing out on the joy of life.  Being fully awake to life, in contrast, represents a kind of paradise on earth in which the human capacity for relating on the basis of love is given full expression.

 How, then, do we reawaken and overcome our condition of disconnectedness?  We need to reach out to other people, even though this may lead to yet another wound.  This is the only way to get and give the love and acceptance we were always looking for.

Love is the willingness to see the truth in others and to be the truth seen by others.  Love happens when we reveal ourselves to one another, and tell the whole truth about ourselves to one another, including our wounds and all of the hurtful things we do in the pain of such wounds.  And then accept one another just the way we are—flawed, messy, misbehaving, the whole nine yards.

Love fosters aliveness, and yet, humans are deeply ambivalent about this kind of encounter.  It is our nature to love and be loved; but the fear of revealing one’s self fully and being rejected, of yet another wounding experience, is deep.  The religious word for what happens in this intense encounter is confession, a word that liberal religionists find almost as repugnant as sin.  The idea that real love requires confession is frightening.

This kind of encounter is an important way of reconnecting with God, but not in any direct sense.  Our direct relationship with God is an abstract idea that can be held in the human mind as fairly non-threatening.  But when we take into consideration that God is revealed to us through other people, along with nature and other elements of life in the here and now, the picture becomes more unsettling.  We’re talking about connecting intimately with the people right around you; with your neighbors.

Neighbors are real and immediate, not remote as God can sometimes seem.  You’ve met them.  You’ve had negative interactions with them.  And the very idea of the spiritual equivalent of taking off your clothes with these people is terrifying.  The fear is not an unrealistic one.  Revealing yourself to just anyone, confessing to just any listener, is not a safe move.

And so the dilemma:  if you reach out to others for those encounters that are the only way to experience loving and being loved, accepting others and being accepted by them, you may be wounded yet again.  But if you do not reach out, you will continue to sleepwalk your way through the hell on earth, having wounding collisions with other people—missing the paradise on earth that being truly awake and alive can bring.

How do we get out of this bind?  One way is to search out an Awakened One to model how to overcome fear and woundedness; how to reconnect with others and thus with God; how to wake up to the possibilities of paradise on earth.  A Buddha or a Jesus; or, a Martin Luther King.  Martin knew what it meant to be awake, and even more importantly, what it meant to be asleep.  For me, Martin Luther King was at his most inspiring not in the Montgomery bus boycott, or the march to Selma, or the letter from Birmingham jail, or the “I Have a Dream” speech.  For me it was when he confessed his  disconnection from his neighbors, his sin of not knowing his own brothers and sisters.

On August 11, 1965, five days after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the neighborhood in Los Angeles called Watts exploded in riots.  Thirty-four people were killed, mostly African-Americans.  Fourteen thousand National Guardsmen were sent into the devastated area to restore order.  Martin went there to help restore peace. When he spoke in Los Angeles, he was laughed at by the people of Watts.  He was told to get out.  He was told that the Voting Rights Act meant nothing to these despairing people, trapped in an urban ghetto.

Martin was deeply affected by his trip to Watts.  He saw how he had unconsciously allowed his comfortable upbringing in a supportive middle class family in Atlanta to keep him cut off from the brutal experiences of his people in the Northern urban ghettos.  Martin was the son of an influential minister and civic leader.  He was highly educated, a lover of classical music.  He had no need even to work until he was called to his first church.  His father paid his way through college and all the way through his completion of his Ph.D.

Martin acknowledged that he had failed to know the suffering of his own people.  Imagine how these realizations must have felt to him.  Imagine how hard it was to confess this.  A few months later he moved into a slum apartment on the South Side of Chicago.  For the remaining two years of his life, his whole orientation shifted toward economic justice and the complex relationships between racism, militarism, and economic oppression.  Watts was a wake-up call.  He heard it, and he acted on it.

Like my own story, Martin’s may not hit your ear as a very sinful one.  But once again, this simply shows how hard it is for us to let go of the idea that sin is based on culpability, on a specific forbidden act, rather than a condition of disconnection.

A shining example like Martin Luther King is valuable.  But by itself an example can’t overcome our fears of showing our vulnerability, of making a confession to another person.  We need to do that for ourselves, and we need to start where it’s safe.

What if we carefully constructed a safe and accepting environment for showing vulnerability, with ground rules designed to quiet the fear?  What if we entered into covenants to hear one another’s confessions, to treat one another as fragile creatures who need love and acceptance?  What if we developed rituals to remind us that this safe environment is a special place for confession, a sanctuary from the disconnected world?  When we finished with this spiritual construction project, what would we have?  We would have a church, right? Is church that kind of place for you?  Does it enable you to connect deeply with people, or is your experience of it more like life as perpetual coffee hour?

Now, you may be thinking, “Yes, this sounds important, but we need to find a new word, because the fundamentalists have ruined words like confession and sin.”  Maybe a new word is needed, or maybe we should reclaim the old one, precisely because it does have a history.  Either way, we need to engage the world on this subject.  We need to see our church as a platform from which to say publicly what sin is really about. 

To treat the subject of sin as off limits because we see fundamentalist Christians as having hijacked it would be that same turning away that occurred when we jettisoned sin in the first place.  If we are serious about our values and our religion, we cannot set up our own private club with its own enlightened conception of sin under a different name, leaving the orthodox one to determine what sin means out in the world.

Sin as disconnection is an excellent expression of our UU value of the interdependence of all of life.  Far from being permissive, it actually sets the bar much higher than the lists of forbidden acts from the Calvinist tradition.  Like any law, these lists of sins implicitly permit everything they do not explicitly forbid.  This is a lazy spirituality.  Sin as disconnection, on the other hand, calls us to aim much higher by opposing anything that takes us away, anything at all that blocks the natural human gift for love, truth, and forgiveness. Even the careers that keep our families secure and free from want.

Martin Luther King heard that call to aim higher after the riots in Watts.  Even we UUs, sometimes jokingly referred to as considering ourselves too good for God to damn to hell, might be missing some of that paradise on earth that comes with being truly awake.  Who knows what we might discover if we looked inward to see whether a part of ourselves here or there has fallen asleep, become disconnected, while our attention was turned elsewhere.  We might even find something that calls for confession.

If we did these things, it would not mean an end of sin in our lives.  As the ancients recognized, it is our nature to doze off, disconnect, sleepwalk.  And then wake up again.  And so on, for as long as we are alive.  This is why we need each other so much—to support each other in not missing the paradise on earth called being truly alive and truly awake.

We are a small religious movement. To have the impact we are committed to having in the world, we need leverage.  The thin rhetoric of secular ethics will never give us that leverage.  There is a reason why the language of religion often makes people uncomfortable:  it has power.  Explaining the principle of leverage, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes waxed poetic, saying, “If you will but give me a place to stand, I will move the world.”  We find that place when we declare what is for us sacred ground.  An essential part of that sacred ground is sin, without which nothing is sacred, without which the differences between awake and asleep, between connected and disconnected, indeed between paradise on earth and hell on earth would lose their meaning.

In the name of God and in name of God’s extraordinary instrument, Martin Luther King, whose memory we celebrate on this holy day, AMEN.