by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given May 6, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Holy and beautiful is the custom

which brings us together;

Three unseen guests attend;

faith, hope, and love—

Let all our hearts prepare them room.

Come now and let us worship together!

My subject matter this morning, finding faith in the midst of despair, reminds me of a story I once heard.  It seems that a non-believer was walking through the forest one day, admiring all of the creations of evolution.  “What majestic trees!  And look at that powerful river!  What beautiful animals scurry before me in my path!” he said to himself.  As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him.  Turning to look, he saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charging towards him.  He ran down the path as fast as he could, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw that the grizzly was closing in.  He ran even faster, and fear brought tears to his eyes.  His heart was pounding, and he tried to run even faster.  He tripped and fell to the ground.  When he rolled over, he saw that the bear was right over him, raising its paw to strike him.  “Oh, my God!” he said.

Time stopped.  The bear froze in place.  The forest was silent.  Even the river stopped moving.  A bright light shone upon the man, and a deep voice came out of the sky:  “YOU DENY MY EXISTENCE FOR ALL THESE YEARS, TEACH OTHERS THAT I DON’T EXIST AND EVEN CREDIT CREATION TO A COSMIC ACCIDENT.  DO YOU EXPECT ME TO HELP YOU OUT OF THIS PREDICAMENT?  AM I TO COUNT YOU AS A BELIEVER?”

The man looked directly into the light, and because he was an honest man, he answered honestly.  He said: “It would be hypocritical to ask me to be a believer after all these years, but perhaps you could make the bear a believer?

“VERY WELL,” said the voice.  The light went out.  The river ran once again.  The sounds of the forest were heard as before.  And the bear dropped down on his knees, brought both paws together, and bowed his head.  He began to pray:  “Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful.”

Finding faith?  Faith, as defined by Webster as “a firm belief in something for which there is no proof”?  That’s a tough one for Unitarian Universalists!  It’s a tough one for thinking people who trust science, who trust what their eyes can see and ears can hear and their hands can measure.  It’s tough for people whose religious trademark since the Reformation has been to question dogma.  Faith?  For us?

And yet we each in our own way come to the point in our lives when there are no more answers, when our intellect alone will simply not suffice to meet the huge existential questions that confront us.  Despair, in fact, seems easier to come by than faith. 

Let’s just start with the difficulty of living in the post-modern world, a world characterized by irony and absurdity, a world in which traditional assumptions about values and identity are radically questioned.  Everyone younger than, say, 35 or so grew up in such a world.  I wonder why my one son says to me, “I don’t know what I want to do with my life.  Nothing seems really interesting to me.”  The question underlying that is, “What is worth giving myself to?” And the other son says, “Money’s not important, Mom—that’s the least thing I’m interested in.  What good is money?”  And I’m thinking, “Well, one thing that it was good for was to pay for your very expensive education.”  Oh, well.  What my generation found meaningful—getting a decent job, actually working, raising a family—well, that has just lost meaning for many of our young people.  Life has to be more than that.  I would agree, actually.  In a time in which traditional values are so profoundly questioned—and should be—we can find ourselves adrift on that sea of despair.  What is my life all about, anyway?  And does it really matter?  Do I really matter?

And in terms of irony and absurdity, I regularly watch three television programs, all satire—Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Saturday Night Live.  It’s really difficult for Jon Stewart to satirize our government, because so much of what occurs is a kind of self-parody.  How do you satirize a President who mispronounces every third word?  How ironical is that a man who doesn’t read is President of the world’s only super-power?  And Vice-President Cheney—mistaking an elderly man for a bird and shooting him in the face with buckshot?  It doesn’t get more bizarre than that.  And on Saturday Night Live, it’s hard to tell the real advertisements from the fake ones.  Our post-modern world is kind of crazy-making.  Sometimes I think I’m living in some kind of bad absurdist drama.

Modernism promised us a kind of golden age of prosperity and leisure, fueled by technology; promised an end to prejudice; promised that there would be a war to end all wars—and instead we marched right into the bloodiest century in all of history; created a devastating division between the wealthy and the poor; and jumped into a non-stop consumerism that threatens the future of living things on this planet.  No wonder so many of our young people seem without anchor and their elders are saddened at the kind of world we’ve made for them.

In whatever period or place, of course, human beings have had to deal with certain universal existential issues.  We have to deal with the presence of evil, we have to deal with loss, and we have deal with the reality of death.  Each of these issues has a way of pushing us into that sea of despair. 

Let’s begin with evil.  When I really take in the horrendous acts that human beings are capable of, I pull back into disbelief, into confusion, and sometimes utter despair.  I found myself there during my visits with our Service Committee to Guatemala, where I talked with Mayan survivors of massacres.  I saw the exhumed skeletons of murdered children.  I saw drawings on monuments of innocents hanging from trees.  I learned that some Mayans were forced to kill their own people, or be killed themselves.  And I came to know our country’s co-operation with this evil.  These experiences brought bad dreams and tears that simply would not stop.  It’s one thing to read about genocide, it’s another to be there with the survivors and hear their stories.

When we have these experiences, we come to understand the human capacity to do harm to others, and to rationalize it away.  We have to look at ourselves and wonder how often we choose not to see how we hurt others and how easily we forgive ourselves.  We wonder at how a close friend can betray us, or how a spouse or partner we trusted can be cruel.  We have to give up our childish notion that the world is a benign place, and that people can be counted on to be good. 

And then loss.  We become identified with what we have; at worst we think we are what we have.  We have a prestigious position, perhaps. We have a lovely home.  We have a loving partner.  We have a healthy young body.  We may be a fine athlete, a talented singer.  All of these things can be lost.  All of these things will be lost, if we live long enough. 

Writer Joan Didion in her book The Year of Magical Thinking recounts how her husband, John Gregory Dunne, dropped dead one night at their dinner table.  They had been close partners in their writing and best friends for forty years, together 24 hours a day, and suddenly he was gone.  How could it be?  And what is the meaning of “gone,” anyway?

Didion was caught off guard, completely, by her husband’s death.  They were privileged people—famous, well-connected.  She said she thought somehow that if they had the right friends, the right doctors, the right telephone numbers that they could avoid all this.

But we all lose people we love.  And then we face the final loss, the loss of our own life.  I think that when we’re young, we don’t understand in that gut-sense, that existential sense, that we are actually going to die, that one day we will actually cease to exist.  It’s hard to take in.  I remember the first time that I really, truly realized that it was not just other people who were going to die—that I, too, was going to die.  I remember saying to myself, “Well, damn!”  So what does it all mean, then, if I’m going to die in the end, anyway?  That I’m going to put all this effort into making a life—and then I no longer exist? 

So we are confronted with these huge questions of evil and loss and death.   What are we to do?  Some people numb out, with various drugs of choice, or depression.  Some become bitter and blaming.  Some distract themselves and fend off anxiety by staying busy—with work or shopping or by endlessly connecting with electronic devices: televisions, computers, cell phones.  Others, in their desperation, go to some wise person, some guru, to seek an answer. 

There is the story about the young rabbinical student who is about to leave for Europe to study.  He goes to his rabbi, a great Talmud scholar, for advice, and the man offers this assurance to the student—he says: “Life is a fountain.”  Thirty years later hearing that his mentor is dying, the younger man returns for a final visit.  “Rabbi,” he says to his old teacher, “every time I have been sad or confused, I have thought of the phrase you passed on to me, and it has helped me through the most difficult of times.  But to be perfectly honest, I’ve never fully understood the meaning of this phrase—can you tell me now, before you die, why is life like a fountain?”  Wearily, the old scholar replies, “All right, so it’s not like a fountain.”

I’m here to tell you this morning that I don’t have the answer for you, and neither does anyone else.  I can only suggest a path.  In the face of these chilling questions, the only way that is truly redemptive, is to deepen and stretch and find a faith that can encompass all of our experience: that can encompass evil and loss and even death.  And I’m further suggesting that you will not find the answers reducible to the cognitive, to the ego’s ways of knowing—in other words, you can’t figure it out.  You will be given the answers, ironically enough, when you have no more answers—or when you allow yourself to feel the despair of not-knowing down to the tips of your toes, and when you long, more than anything else, to find your way.

Loss can be the path to faith, because it cracks us open.  Joan Didion wrote, “People who have recently lost someone have a certain look . . . .  The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”  Yes, such loss cleanses us of all expectations and projections.  We seem to be entering a great emptiness, a strangely peaceful nothingness.

Fear can take us there.  Young Martin Luther King, Jr., only 28 years of age, led the Montgomery bus boycott, which as you know began the Civil Rights movement in this country.  But you may not know how he came to that point.  Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus on December 1, 1955, causing black leaders to organize the boycott.  By late January King was being harassed by police, and white city officials were saying that he was the main obstacle to any resolution of the crisis.  He was receiving threatening phone calls.  On the night of January 27, a particularly frightening call came through.  King fell into despair.  He feared for the lives of his family, and he was ready to quit the movement.  He was trying to think of a way out without appearing to be a coward.  Unable to sleep, he got up from his bed, made some coffee, and sat at his kitchen table.  He began praying out loud.  He said, “Oh, Lord, I am at the end of my powers.  I have nothing left.”  He was an empty vessel, now ready to be filled.  He reported later, “At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced <it> before.  It seemed as though I could hear a voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at our side forever.’”  At the time he had been seeking a gun permit, but this experience turned him toward a full commitment to non-violence.[1]

What answer can faith give to the persistence of evil?  If there is a God, how could God allow so much suffering of the innocent, of the good?  This question reaches back theologically all the way to the Book of Job.  If you remember, everything has been taken from Job, a good and righteous man: his houses, his lands, his animals, his children.  His friends have judged him a sinner, and his wife has told him to “curse God and die.”  He finds himself lying on an ash heap, covered in boils.  It is out of this place of absolute loss that Job cries out to God, and God answers, out of the whirlwind.  God says: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  <Where were you> when the morning stars sang together?  Has the rain a father?  Who has begotten the drops of dew?”  In other words, excuse me, Job—you cannot know this great mystery.  You’re trying to figure out the infinite with your finite mind.  You simply must accept what is.

Faith, then, becomes less a belief than a decision, a decision to trust in a mystery that is absolutely unknowable.  Our God must be big enough to encompass the indifference of nature, evil as a choice, and outcomes in which the bad guys seem to win. 

There is a Sufi tale that is instructive.  Some children find a bunch of grapes and cannot agree upon how to divide them.  They turn to Mullah Nasrudin for help.  He asks them whether he should divide the grapes according to divine or human justice.  Naturally the children choose divine justice, whereupon Nasrudin gives the whole bunch of grapes to a single child.  A lesson about our lack of control of the movement of grace in the universe.

It is not so much God’s absolute goodness, not God’s finagling for justice that we can count on, but what we can count on is God’s absolute presence—the presence of the Holy One in defeat as well as in success, in every loss as well as every triumph, and yes, even in death, a presence to lead us home.

You know, I think there is a secret wound inside each one of us.  It is the fear that we’re not enough—no matter how hard we try, no matter how successful we appear to be.  We alone know all of our imperfections—how could anyone love us if they knew what we were really like? 

And what does faith have to say to this wound, this sense that we are somehow inadequate and will be found out?  I like the answer that Reb Menashe, a Jerusalem mystic, gave.  He was in dialogue with a prominent philosopher, and he asked the man, “What does emunah— the Hebrew word for faith—mean to you?”  The scholar went down a list of various positions, from the Medieval to the contemporary period.  Reb Menashe listened patiently, and then responded.  “It’s so much simpler than that,” he said.  “Emunah is the feeling that the baby has that its <sic> mother will not drop him.”

We cannot fathom the Great Mystery, but we can know the Presence of the Ineffable.  We can know the One who accepts us just as we are and invites us—doesn’t threaten us or bully us—invites us to be more than we are.  We learn that whatever we are after is already within us.  We see that our real task is to give up—to give up succeeding, changing ourselves for the better, even achieving higher levels of consciousness.  For it is when we empty ourselves, it is in relinquishment, that we discover that we are not alone at all, but part of all that is, and all that is, is Holy.  And we discover that we are held, held so gently and so carefully, in the arms of what is, in the arms of love.

So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved Mystery, we are so easily frightened, so easily thrown off track.  We ask for reminders when we go astray—a lovely flower, a kind word, the miracle of spring.  Help us to know our own goodness and out of that knowing may we let go of our fear and become ever more gladly a conduit of your love.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.