by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together this day

To remember who we are,

To remember how we want to live, and

To become the persons we want to be.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Perhaps you have been following the current debate between those who believe in evolution—though we know it’s just a theory—and those who believe in creationism, or what it has now morphed into, “intelligent design.”  Our understanding of cosmology is important, not just because we wish to adhere to scientific truth, but also because cosmology makes a difference in theology—it makes a difference in how we think about human beings and how we think about the earth.

About fifteen billion years ago what we now call a “big bang” released the energy of the universe into billions of particles that eventually self-organized into atoms, that eventually self-organized into clouds, and then galaxies, and then stars, that grew, died, and became new stars and planets. About 4 billion years ago, there came into being a planet that we call Earth, which gave birth to tiny life forms that began to develop and cooperate to form more and more complex organisms.

If all of life evolved from this first big bang, if this divine energy flowed from the very beginning through all of existence, then everything shares that holy stuff and everything then has within it that spark of the divine: you, me, trees, flowers, animals, the fish in the sea, and the creepy-crawly things that are not so pleasant to look at and touch.  Everything is shot through with the divine.

Now I’m not saying that every creature is equal to every other creature.  I’m not saying that if you run over an earthworm with your car, that’s the same as running over a kitten—or certainly the same as running over a child. Within existence there are degrees of consciousness and degrees of responsibility. But humans must acknowledge their place within nature, rather than placing themselves above it and separate from it. We are one among many, and what matters is the good of the whole of creation.

But somewhere along the way we became alienated from the earth, and from one another.  The Biblical account in Genesis of Adam and Eve is a myth that gives us some insight into our brokenness and alienation. You know the story. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, save one, and of course that is the very one they just had to have. Isn’t that just like us? What we don’t have is precisely what we want. After they eat the fruit, their eyes are opened and they become self-conscious. They hear the voice of God in the garden, and they hide from God amongst the trees, and the Scripture says: “And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, where art thou?”  Where art thou, Adam?  And we have been set apart, ever after.

A deep separation haunts us. We have an ancient yearning to be at one with the cosmos, but so often we feel just the opposite. Psychologist Otto Rank calls this loss of cosmic union an “original wound.”  We feel separated from the whole, from our primal beginnings. We have glimpses of a reunion with our true identity through love, and art, and mystical experience. The ancient call keeps coming back to us: “Where art thou?”  And we hide ourselves away.

Our alienation from the earth—the stuff from which our flesh originally came, the substance which sustains us still—this awful woundedness is voiced most clearly by the indigenous people of the world. If we would but listen, we could learn. We do not know precisely what Chief Seattle said in his speech in 1854 to his tribal assembly in  the Pacific Northwest, but the following words we think are close to what he said, in part: “We know that the White Man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. . . . . He treats his mother, the Earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the Earth and leave behind only a desert.”  Prophetic words.

In our particular culture we suffer from the fact that economic values drive everything and we bow to a bottom line that is all about money, an economic system only very secondarily concerned with other values, such as care of the Earth, right relationships, ethical behavior. We come and go at the beck and call of the workplace, and the rules there are clear, and strict.

There is a question, though, as to whether or not we are happier as we pursue this way of life. The Science Times reported last Tuesday that in Bhutan, they are trying to measure their national happiness. Their monarch, it appears, insisted nearly a generation ago that gross national happiness is more important that gross national product. The cynic might say that a country with a gross national product  as small as Bhutan’s can afford to worry about its gross national happiness, and that the most dependable way to insure G.N.H. is by increasing G.N.P. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that’s not necessarily true. Our sense of happiness is created by much that cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It is created by a sense of community, believing that you have meaning in life, and such things as the ecological stability of our Earth upon which all of us depend. To talk about gross national happiness seems foolish, because we think about happiness as being a purely a personal pursuit. But if we think of happiness as coming from the kind of society we have created, the kind of environment in which we live, then we may begin to understand the growing disconnect  between Americans’ prosperity and their sense of well-being.

We all have those times when we are invited to see a different way of being.  Sometimes we break through to connection when tragedy strikes, when what we love most is taken away, and we feel absolutely naked, absolutely vulnerable, with no defenses left. There is no competing, there is no measuring ourselves against another, there is only the human being reduced to essence, to this well of hurt and longing. Such a thing happened to a man who is a dear friend of mine.

My friend’s son, Michael, was sitting in a car with two friends, stopped at a red light in the city of Chicago. They were hit from the rear by a young woman going eighty miles per hour there in the city limits. The three young men were killed instantly. The young woman—unharmed by the accident—is in jail, charged with murder.

Upon hearing of the death, my friend, Michael’s father, went to Chicago to be with his son’s friends and to see the neighborhood in which his son had lived, a neighborhood that turned out to be very diverse. My friend experienced the beautiful space of his son’s loft, and the next morning, because this man is a photographer, he walked about photographing buildings and activities in the neighborhood. After a busy day with attorneys and preparing for a gathering that evening, he took another walk in the neighborhood, taking more pictures. As he turned off his son’s street, he ran into a group of six Hispanic fellows who were sitting around drinking beer, smoking, playing a ghetto blaster with loud Mexican music. One fellow was in his parked truck with a door open, and the same music blaring out. It was surround sound for these end-of-the-day buddies. A man in his fifties with sunglasses wearing a bright yellow silk shirt approached my friend. “Why you take photos?” he asked.

My friend answered, “My son loved this neighborhood. I’m getting some photos to take home.”

“Where is your son?’” he asked. My friend pointed straight up, and then held up three fingers, and then slammed his fist into that hand. The story had been in all the papers, and so this man knew immediately what my friend was expressing.  He wrapped his arms around him, hugging him close. They gradually released their hold on each another, and he said something in Spanish to his buddies.  Then the radios went full blast, loud, an anthem of sound filling the air. And as he released my friend’s hands, all of the men applauded loudly.  Strangers on an unknown street in a faraway city—different language, different background, and yet there on that street a broken heart was touched and comforted.

But what is the source of this kind of love? We are not born loving others. We are not born loving even ourselves. We develop the ability to love by internalizing the love of all those who have loved us. Because kindness has been shown to us, we become kind. Because we have been fed, we will feel the impulse to feed others. Love begets love. Love is a creative force that only grows more abundant as it is given away.

Who is it in your life who taught you how to love? The most profound lessons of loving are learned early on in the first few years of life, but throughout our lives there are those people who offer love in various manifestations, and we can continue to grow in love throughout our lives.

When we sing the Doxology, who do you think of when you sing the words, “roots hold me close”? For the good that you are, is grounded there in the roots of those who loved you and nurtured you long years ago. My family was not perfect, and I expect no family is, but I knew I was loved, and I had a sense of place in the world. So when I sing those words I think of the home in that little Southern town where I grew up. I think of the neighbors in the neighborhood where nobody moved in all the years that I grew up. I think of my grandmother rocking in her big rocking chair and reading the Bible out loud: “Bless the Lord O my soul, all that is within me, Bless His holy name.”  I have her Bible, and I’m not even sure how it came to me—I mean, there were seven children and loads of grandchildren, and no one knew then that I was to become a minister. And yet here I am, trying to Bless the Lord, in my own way, in my own time. Roots hold me close, wings set me free.

I hope that this church might be a place where strangers can come and feel taken in and cared for, where people can find meaning and purpose in their lives, where they can find ways of making love manifest in their lives.

In closing, I would like to share with you a story from naturalist Loren Eiseley. I will tell the story in Eiseley’s own words. He sees a human figure moving on the beach and wonders what is going on.  Eiseley describes the distant figure: “He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand. Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half mile of uncertain footing. He started to kneel again. In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.

“‘It’s still alive,’ I ventured.

“‘Yeah’, he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out in to the sea. It sank into a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.

“‘It may live, if the offshore pull is strong enough.’ He spoke gently, and across his face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.

“‘There are not many come this far,’ I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. ‘Do you collect?’

“‘Only like this’, he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore, ‘and only for the living.’ He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.

‘The stars,’ he said, ‘throw well. One can help them.’

Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Call me another thrower.’ Only then I allowed myself to think, he is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.

I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing—a sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star-thrower stood and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing.”

We are born in mystery, and we die in mystery. Yet there is something of the divine which has been within us from the beginning of time, and is still in us, loving us, and at the same time, holding us accountable for this precious Earth. Much is asked of us during our journeying here. Everyone I know has some story or other of desolation. There is no one who can walk from birth to death without suffering. But out of our pain and disillusionment emerges a terrible freedom, the freedom to choose. “Where art thou, Adam?”  Where do you stand?  We can turn to bitterness, or we can choose life, in all of its shadows and uncertainties. We are each of us, every one of us, star-throwers, again and again flinging life into the void. Again and again, saying yes, yes to the infinite Mystery. So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Great Mystery, through which we have life and being, we give thanks this day for the miracle of this earth, this living being that takes in all death and gives forth all life. May this church community be a place that blesses us on our way, a place where love abounds. May we know no stranger here, for connected as we are, we know we travel this road not alone but together.  Amen.