by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 15, 2006

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come to this place today

To rediscover the gift of free religious community;

To renew our faith

In the holiness, goodness, and beauty of life;

To reclaim the vision

Of an earth made fair and all her people one.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Last Sunday I had the privilege and the challenge of leading worship in the Unitarian Universalist church in Devon, PA, a small community just fifty miles from the tragic school shootings in the Amish school at Nickel Mines, PA.  The preaching date had been set months ago, and when I saw the news accounts, I called the interim minister, who had barely arrived in the community himself, and asked if I should still come.  Yes, he said, yes, I want you to come.  And so I did.  When I got on that plane, I was despondent, really, sickened by the news reports, wondering how I could possibly walk into this group of strangers and minister to them.  Strangely enough, I found that I came back uplifted, spiritually strengthened. 

Part of the reason for this positive change is that I went, however reluctantly, where I was truly needed—but that redemptive shift also came from how the Amish themselves responded to this horrifying crime.  In their one-room schoolhouse, these people did not have security officers or metal detectors.  Their classmates are their neighbors, their friends, their siblings.  There were no phones in this school to call for help.  The room was kept warm by a wood-burning stove.  The children in this school have never watched television, never seen a movie, never seen a video game.  They don’t have in their consciousness any experience of violence such as that which visited their classroom two weeks ago.

So how did the community respond to this outrage?  With forgiveness.  With Christian forbearance.  The killings were shocking to the nation.  But we’ve had other school shootings—in fact, two previous ones that same week.  The truly shocking thing to our nation was the forgiveness.  The Amish residents started a charity fund, not only to help the victims’ families but also to help the gunman’s widow.  They invited her to the funeral for four of the slain girls.  This is actually something one would expect of the Amish.  It is common for the community to invite drivers who have accidentally killed one of their community members to come to the funeral.  They believe that they are responsible to counter violence by expressing compassion and comfort.  “Do not think evil of this man,” the Amish grandfather told his children at the mouth of one little girl’s grave.  Yes, it’s the forgiveness that has left us—this Christian nation—absolutely open-mouthed, stunned.

And what will sustain these families long months and years after the losses they have endured?  The Amish depend on the love and the care of the community.  When a barn burns, they do not call the insurance company—they have a barn raising.  There will be a tremendous and on-going outpouring of love and support from these people for the hurting families.  They will draw their strength from that, from their acceptance of what is, and from their deep and abiding faith.  “I don’t understand it,” said one Mennonite woman, speaking of the shooting, “but it’s not from God.  <God> wants us to love one another.”[1]

The values of the Amish are in stark contrast to the values of the larger culture.  In the popular culture, we seem to seek perfection on the surface of things—to seek it at all costs—whereas the Amish seek to perfect the soul.  We seek to enlarge and display the ego; the Amish seek to marginalize the ego.  We seek to deny the realities of aging and death, whereas the Amish believe that all that happens is contained in some larger picture, which they do not understand, but which they accept.  They call this “the will of God.”  This doesn’t mean they don’t care about justice—they seek to serve the good, as they know it to be, accepting that moral imperfection is a part of what is.

We have a society that is aging—all us baby boomers are now members of the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), and we get discounts at the movies, too.  And this predictable event of our actually getting older—in spite of oat bran muffins and jogging—has spawned a vast industry of denial.  Every department store has at least 20 cosmetic lines, and each one of these has five or ten bottles or tubes or jars of something that will not exactly guarantee to take wrinkles away or make sagging flesh perk up, but will, and I quote just one: “reduce the look of serious expression lines.”  I could certainly use that!  Another ad shows a picture of a woman who couldn’t be over 25 and who doesn’t have a wrinkle anywhere on her face—and the copy reads:  “Because 30ish skin can wait for surgery” and it suggests in the meantime for these 30-year-olds a collagen filler that will “visibly smooth wrinkle creases up to 20%.”  Up to twenty percent??  That’s the best they can do for $73?   What is going on here?  Are we all being turned into perfect little products?  Women are now coming in to get liposuction—or the siphoning off of fat by plastic surgery—not just around bulging stomachs or thighs, but from ankles, knees, chins, necks, and even genitalia.  This is “plastic surgery for skinny people,” as one doctor said.  All these areas have become “zones of perfectibility” for body-conscious women who want to improve physiques already honed by diet and exercise.[2]  There’s always room for improvement, ladies.

Let us leave this concern of the perfectibility of women behind now, and move to another, even greater concern:  the new-found genetic knowledge which may soon enable us to choose the sex, height, and genetic traits of our children—that is, to engineer our children into perfect products, to create “designer children.”[3]  We’re actually pretty close to being able to do this.

Researchers have produced a synthetic gene that prevents and even reverses natural deterioration in the muscle cells of mice.  H. Lee Sweeney, of the University of Pennsylvania, the leading researcher in the field, wants to prevent the immobility that afflicts the elderly.  But Sweeney’s “bulked-up mice” have already caught the eye of athletes hoping for a competitive edge.

Genetic enhancement is possible for our brains as well as our bodies.  Researchers have in fact manipulated a memory-linked gene in fruit flies, creating flies with photographic memories.  These genetically-improved flies not only learn more quickly and remember things longer, but (get this!) they can also pass down this enhanced capability to their offspring.  The companies have in mind those who suffer from Alzheimer’s, of course—and who would deny that benefit?—but they also hope to appeal to a bigger market: the 81 million Americans over fifty, who are beginning to encounter the memory loss that comes naturally with age.  Think what a bonanza that would be for the pharmaceutical industry—a kind of “Viagra for the brain.”

There is one non-medical use of bioengineering that is already widespread in some countries, such as China and India, and that is sex selection of children.  Prenatal tests such as ultrasound were developed to detect serious genetic abnormalities, but they also reveal the sex of the fetus, thus allowing for the abortion of a fetus of an undesired sex.  Sex selection need not involve abortion, however, for couples using in vitro fertilization, in which it is possible to choose the sex of the child before the fertilized egg is implanted in the womb.  It may be possible quite soon for parents-to-be to enhance their children’s intelligence, musical ability, and athletic prowess.  This would fit right in with the hyper-parenting that insists on enrolling children in expensive schools, hiring private coaches, cluttering their lives with back-to-back lessons of all kinds.

James Watson, the biologist who, in partnership with Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA, sees nothing wrong with genetic engineering and enhancement, provided these are freely chosen.  A few years back Watson stirred up some controversy when he announced that if a gene for homosexuality were discovered, a woman should be free to abort a fetus that carried it.  When people proved to be shocked and appalled by this comment, he replied that he was not singling out gays:  he said women should be free to abort fetuses for any reason of genetic preference—for example, if the child would be dyslexic or lack musical ability or be too short to play basketball. 

Now what’s wrong with all this?  Michael Sandel, who teaches political philosophy at Harvard, answers this question not from a secular but from a religious perspective.  He writes:  “The problem with . . . genetic engineering is that <this> represents the one-sided triumph of willfulness over <gratitude>, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding.  . . . .  To believe that our talents and powers are wholly our own is to misunderstand our place in creation.”  He goes on to say, “In a social world that prizes mastery and control, parenthood is a school for humility.  . . . .  It invites us to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to rein in the impulse to control.”[4]  It tames the ego and leads to a modicum of acceptance and compassion.  It brings us into solidarity with others, of all races and classes, of all times and places. 

Why, oh why, are we so resistant to limitations?  It’s onward and upward, forever!  Perhaps it’s just part of our national myth—we’ve pushed limits from the beginning:  crossing the ocean, settling the West, going faster than the speed of sound, landing on the moon.  We think of limits as temporary inconveniences, at best.  American hubris. 

But there’s something else at work here as well.  There’s a subconscious fear—some might use the word terror—a fear of death, of the loss of everything that we know and love.  We keep this fear well below the surface most of the time, but it influences us more profoundly than we know.  Our frantic efforts at control—I might say, our frantic and useless efforts at any ultimate control—take us finally to a place where we face disillusionment, in the best sense of that word—that is to say, our illusions fall away, and we are left with reality—with what is, with the good earth, with family as they are, with friends true and occasionally untrue—and we find that the love that just keeps emerging through it all is our greatest joy. 

James Baldwin, in one of his books, describes the following scene:

“The joint . . . was jumping . . . .  And during the last set, the saxophone player took off on a terrific solo.  He was a kid from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse.  But somewhere along the line he had discovered he could say it with a saxophone.  He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrow chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn, ‘Do you love me?  Do you love me?  Do you love me?’  And again, ‘Do you love me?  Do you love me?  Do you love me?’  The same phrase unbearable, endlessly and variously repeated with all the force the kid had . . . .  The question was terrible and real.  The boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past . . . .  The men on the stand stayed with him cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning . . . .  But each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them.”

It is our imperfections, don’t you see?  Our losses, our disappointments, our moral and spiritual failures even—it’s all of this that blesses us, for it keeps us in a kind of holy tension—you know, like the tension in a rubber band—a kind of holy tension that pulls us back to one another when we behave less well than we want to, or when we’re so hurt that we have to have some place to go to, some place where we, imperfect and corruptible as we are, can cry out “Do you love me?” and yes, there will be some comfort coming out of that void.  It’s this same tension that humbles us before our God, that lets us know that we are not the center of the universe after all, but at the same time we are part of all that is, and therefore we are sacred and worthy of love, just as we are, in spite of our mistakes, in spite of our misdirections.  May we know each day that no matter what wrong ways we have chosen, no matter how many times we have blundered, we are forgiven before we even think to ask, and we are held in the arms of a Great Love, a Love that will never, never let us go.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, help us to accept ourselves as we are, imperfect and yet willing to be of service.  Let us see true value for what it is, and turn away from all that is false and unworthy of our energies and attentions.  Lead us, that we might bless the world with our gifts.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, though you break your vow a thousand times, come, yet again come.  Go in love and go in peace.

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Copyright 2006, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.