An Unmediated Life

A Worship Service by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday January 11, 2003

Reading

"To Live Deliberately"

By Henry David Thoreau (SLT 660)

Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?  We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.  I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.  I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.  I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear, nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary.  I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.  If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.

Prayer and Meditation

To Be Of Use

from the writings of Marge Piercy (SLT 567)

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along,  who stand in the line and haul in their places,  who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.  The work of the world is common as mud.  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.  But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.  Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used.  The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

An Unmediated Life

(First of Six Sermons on the Sources of Our Living Tradition)

A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday January 11, 2003

Submitted for your consideration—the case of one Goldilocks: hopelessly lost little girl or spiritual archetype and religious exemplar?  Maybe there’s no difference when your residence is in the Twilight Zone.  Everyone, of course, remembers Goldilocks.  She’s the little girl who while wandering in the woods discovers a little cottage and upon discovering no one at home invites herself in, to partake of what she finds there.  She tastes the porridge—some too hot, some too cold, one just right.  She test-drives the chairs by the hearth—one too hard, one too soft, one just right.  Her need to sleep is also greeted with a bed too hard, a bed too soft and a bed just right.  Her slumber is interrupted by the returning denizens of the cottage—who scare her half to death and send her scampering off through the woods never to be heard from again.

Perhaps one shouldn’t speculate on why a little girl was wandering alone in the woods.  I offer no hypothesis on how bears developed the ability to cook, make furniture and keep house.  I am not even going to ask what Goldilocks did after she sprinted from the cottage.  Suffice it to observe that sometimes we all have to try things out to find out what is “just right.”  It is safe to assume that Goldilocks didn’t subscribe to Consumer Reports but she did follow the advice of Paul to the church in Thessalonia—“Prove all things, hold fast to the good.”  (1 Th 5:21).  Such is the way of things in the Twilight Zone—or in our case, the Unitarian Zone—Prove all things, hold fast to the good.

            Today’s sermon begins a six part, on again—off again, series on what makes Unitarian Universalism the kind of religion that it is.  This is a topic that I regularly wrestle with—with literally thousands of churches in this city, why do we need this one?  What do we do here that makes all the time and effort and energy and money a worthwhile investment?  Deep in my heart, I believe that there is something that is qualitatively different about how we do things, something that is unique enough that some (if not everyone) needs a place like this to be-and-become whole.  I believe that—well, most days I believe that.  The question is: What is unique about our formula?  What makes us stand apart?  What makes this place not only special but essential?

            Ours is a faith that is sometimes hard to articulate—but in true Goldilocks fashion—it is readily recognizable as “just right” to those of us with a particular make up of heart and head and spirit.  One historian maintains that Freedom, Reason and Tolerance have been the defining characeristics or our movement since its inception.  Freedom, Reason and Tolerance are all fine and noble things and they are very much present with us, but many religious traditions claim to embrace these things.

            The drive and desire to distinguish ourselves as unique, and needed, in the religious marketplace has occupied a significant amount of energy within our parent organization the Unitarian Universalist Association.  One effort to define our boundaries led to a document you may have seen around here called the Principles and Purposes.  We have a framed copy of it hanging in the Jefferson Room, it’s printed in our hymnal, sometimes we print it in our Order of Services and we keep a supply of little cards with it in the pew racks in front of you.  Some of you, know doubt, even carry that little card in your purse or wallet as a form of self-defense in case you are accosted by someone demanding to know what it is that this strange church you attend is all about. 

            The Principles and Purposes speak of noble ideals like Inherent Worth and Dignity, Justice, Equity and Compassion, Acceptance and Spiritual Growth, Conscience and Democratic Process, World Community and even a somewhat ineffable notion of “the Interdependent Web.”  Many of my colleagues believe that this is the glue that holds our association together.  Some maintain that these are the things that make Unitarian Universalists, UUs—as we sometimes call ourselves.

            I am somewhat leery of these promises as our core.  The Principles and Purposes are fine and noble—but sometimes they are used like a creed to determine what is, and is not, appropriately Unitarian.  More importantly, I don’t think they point us to anything that is distinctively Unitarian.  This week at Alliance, I was talking to Carl Beyer who had just returned from a trip to California.  He told me that he keeps a copy of our seven principles in his wallet and springs them on unsuspecting persons of the more orthodox persuasion.  He says he covers up the reference to Unitarian Universalism and asks the person to read and comment on the statements.  “You’d be surprised at the number of persons who say they agree with them,” Carl observed. 

He’s right, many folks agree whole-heartedly with our Principles and Purposes—but that doesn’t make them a Unitarian.  I want to thank Carl because he is doing something very important—he is talking about his faith.  He is sharing his religion with the world.  In another church, he might even be said to be testifying or proselytizing—but, of course, we all know Unitarians don’t do such things!  I congratulate Carl; the ready agreement that these things get (particularly if presented somewhat surreptitiously) is useful in showing the world that we are more than a collection of fruits, nuts and flakes.  Convincing the world, though, that we’re more than a bowl of granola doesn’t really say much about what makes us a needed and necessary way of being religious.  Some bunks are too hard and some are too soft—we’re still looking for the bed that’s just right.

            Sometime last month I was leading the UU 101 course that I offer on Sunday mornings before church and Jonalu pointed something out to me that zeros us on something much more unique about us.  Part of what I do with this course is to run through the Order of Service to help those new to our community have a better understanding of what this time together is about.  Every week the order of service sets aside a time for “Readings.”  Jonalu pointed out that someone from a traditional Christian background would expect that this is where the Bible would be read—and sometimes it is.  One of the unique things about us, though, is that we don’t limit our canon to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  I am more likely to offer a poem, a piece of prose, an excerpt from a book, a quote from the newspaper or a blurb from a website as the morning reading.

            This, I believe, is the institutional manifestation of something that is unique about us.  One of the things that distinguishes us is where we look for Truth and Inspiration.  I think it harkens us back to Goldilocks who we earlier found wandering lost in the Twilight Zone.  It also urges us on to what comes after Principles and Purposes.  Following Paul’s lead we do indeed seek to “Prove all things and hold fast to the good.”  Another of our points of departure is who we allow to determine if the proof is sufficient. 

This church, while different from Christian churches in many ways, is born of the same stock.  Our roots are in Protestantism and as one Catholic friend observes (I take it as a compliment although I am not sure he means it that way), “Unitarians are the most protestant of the Protestants!”  So, if we are the most protestant of the Protestants what happened to the Bible?  How can we be both institutionally unique and quintessentially protestant at the same time?

            One of the prime distinctions between Catholicism and Protestantism is tied up in the notion of how human beings interact with the holy, how we connect to God.  Catholicism maintains that there is no salvation outside the church.  The church is the mediating structure through which the Will and Grace of God is made known in the world.  Within Catholicism, priests perform the rituals and sacraments of the church—and it is through those rituals and sacraments that the laity (that’s you folks out there) gain access to God.  That is not our way.

            Protestantism (and Unitarianism and Universalism emerge from what historians call the Radical Reformation) emerged taking a different direction.  Bear in mind that this is an oversimplification, but Protestantism maintains that God is made known directly to humanity, not through the church.  For the Protestant, God is accessible through faith and through scripture—sola fide and sola scriptura—through faith and scripture alone.  The earliest reformers saw the church as fallen, but being unwilling to give up on God, they reasoned that by faith and by reading scripture an individual could gain communion with the divine.  “The Priesthood of All Believers” is the full fruition of this belief—and that is a notion that we rely on (whether we recognize it or not).

Thus while the Catholic saw faith in the church as the prime religious task, the Protestant maintains that a direct relationship with God was both possible and preferable.  That’s why Martin Luther demanded that the church use the language of the people.  God’s word should come forth in German rather than Latin because the people understood German and the people needed to understand God.  When Luther entered the priesthood, it was relatively common for priests to be biblically illiterate.  Within Catholicism, the Bible was not as important as the doctrines, dogmas and creeds of the church since it was the church, and not the Bible, that made God manifest in the world.  This conflict still exists in the Catholic Church as many of the older members of that faith long for the days when the Mass was only offered in Latin.  The mass could not be legitimately offered in the common vernacular until about 35 years ago.

Our institutional roots, though, are in Protestantism—and in many ways we exhibit most clearly that Protestant notion that there is a direct relationship between God and Creation and that the Holy is accessible to us—if we have but ears to hear, eyes to see and hearts to perceive.  It is in this direct and unmediated relationship that we find the roots of our radical individualism.  This is where we find the core of our aversion to creed and doctrine.  Creeds and doctrines, after all, place limits upon the individual and precondition our direct experience of the transcending mystery and wonder that some call God (and other’s find too big for any words). 

That distinction, though, leaves us a far cry anything that really resembles Unitarianism today.  What happened to the Bible?  What happened to Sola Scriptura?  Again, acknowledging the reality of oversimplification—we evolved past believing that scripture was the lone route to God.  Our commitment to individual discernment combined with a broader acceptance of how God could be present in the world—and the canon of revelation was both broadened and deepened.

From the Protestant Reformation we took the notion that God, or the Holy, is known directly by the believer.  The Reformation, though, as most revolutions do—only went so far.  They shifted the relationship from the Church to the Bible and left it there.  Whereas the Catholic would say no salvation outside the church, the average Protestant believes there is no salvation outside the Bible.  Putting aside the fact that the Bible is a very human document, Protestantism has maintained that “Revelation is sealed.”  God said it and it’s in the Bible—King James preferred—and that settles it.  Take it or leave it.  Believe it or don’t.

That idea is beginning to seem anachronistic even in Christian circles these days.  It seems positively antiquated to me.  You see, by the 1830s the notion that everything to be known was captured in the Bible began to wear thin among our Unitarian ancestors.  What was important was not the Bible per se—but in good Protestant fashion—what was important was the relationship the individual could invite and instill with God.  Where, our ancestors asked, do human beings get the notion that they can decide that God has communicated everything there is to be said?  How can something so big as God be thoroughly and accurately catalogued and recorded in a book?  Why would people think so little of the Divine as to believe that God has nothing else to say or show to humankind?

These questions fermented in the hearts and minds of people like Emerson and Thoreau and the other transcendentalists.  Yes, one can find God in the pages of the Bible but, Emerson believed, one could find God on a walk in the woods or in the petals of a rose.  One might read about God, second hand, in the Bible but one can also experience the divine directly—if you so choose.  That was the proven faith to which the transcendentalists held fast.

That was radical stuff 175 years ago.  In many ways it still is today.  It is part and parcel of how we understand religion here, though.  That which is true and compelling can reach you and touch you—it may do so while reading the Bible but more often does so when you least expect it.  When it touches you it may leave you speechless but it leaves you in full awareness that something has happened.

I remember the first time I saw a truly starry sky—100 miles from city lights—on a moonless night.  I remember the moment that I first touched the hand of my newborn son.  I remember the moment that I knew I had found a soul mate.  I remember finding a place in the spot in woods that spoke peace to my heart when torment was on my mind.  I remember the first time I saw a raging sea and the first time I really saw the mountains.  I remember the first time I saw this city at night in the landing pattern after a long trip.  I remember the first time I stood by a hospital bed holding a hand as life slipped away.  Whatever God is, God is in all of these things—but there is still more of God that I will never know and more than I could ever find words to describe.

Don’t get me wrong—this unmediated life isn’t just about first times.  I think if we live our lives right it is about every time—it’s just that first times carry a special power and the holy tends to jump around and surprise you when you aren’t looking.  Revelation is not sealed we say and revelation is available to every single one of us in every moment of our lives.  There is nothing special you have to do; no special prayers to say; no special offering to make.  Just breathe—inhale, exhale, look, listen, feel, think, be—and you will have done enough.  If not, trust and you will soon discover what more you need to do.

Let me share with you the statement that has been at the core of everything I have said today.  “The living tradition which we share draws from many sources.”  The first is, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”  Find it in the hymnal or the pew rack, read it, write it down, reflect on it—pray if you will—it is that important.

We are who we are, in part, because we turn to first and last to an experience of life—our personal experience, though, is never all that matters.  There is more to living the religious life than our personal experience but without it little else will matter or speak to our heart.  Know it, cherish it, treasure it and use it to explore, explain, appreciate and marvel at the mystery and wonder that transcends our lives.  Part of our religious journey together is allowing this mystery and wonder to sustain us and open our hearts and minds, in community, to the deepest and truest essences of life.  That is why we’re here.  On this day I pray that we live into the fullest potential of the spirit of creation that blesses us with and sustains us through an Unmediated Life.  AMEN