Keeping First Things First

A Worship Service by The Reverends Jonalu Johnstone and Mark Christian

First Unitarian Church, Oklahoma City

March 19, 2006

Readings

From Dynamics of Faith, by Paul Tillich

In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly ultimate; while in idolatrous faith preliminary, finite realities are elevated to the rank of ultimacy.  The inescapable consequence of idolatrous faith is “existential disappointment,” a disappointment which penetrates into the very existence of [the human being]!  This is the dynamics of idolatrous faith:  that it is faith, and as such, the centered act of a personality; that the centering point is something which is more or less on the periphery; and that, therefore the act of faith leads to a loss of center and to a disruption of the personality.  The ecstatic character of even an idolatrous faith can hide this consequence for a certain time.  But finally it breaks into the open.

John Squadra in The Compass of the Rose –

When [we] die to what

[we] thought was true

everything in [our lives] catches fire.

[We] are the instrument

not the music.

If we think [we] are the music

[we] will stop at the final bar.

If [we] become an instrument

for the music,

 [we] will go on playing

no matter where [we] are

or who’s conducting.

The gig is never over.

[Our hearts are] always singing

Yes.

The mind is always shouting

No.

Between the two

we come and go

safe on the solid shore of maybe.

Meditation & Prayer

“Reflections on the Schema”

The Reverend Mark W. Christian

Schema Israel Adonai Elihenu Adonai Echad

Hear O’Israel your God is One with all things

Hear O People

The things that things that are most important

Are ultimately one

Part of one reality

Manifestations to the One True Spirit

Hear O People

You may feel the pull of many gods and many goods

But the things you apart from the Infinite One are not Ultimate

The things that make us feel separate and specially privelged

Are Illusions—they are not that which is Ultimate

Hear O People

Listen for that one pulse that connects all things

Feel the ultimate bonds that bring all things together in creation

Touch the One Force that was present at the Genesis of Genesis

Taste Life and discover it is the dominion without limit

Speak and Think and Know the Oneness of all things

Hear O People the things that are most important are One

Hear O Israel your God is One with all things

Schema Israel Adonai Elihenu Adonai Echad

AMEN

Keeping First Things First

A Sermon by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone of First Unitarian Church

Sunday March 19, 2006

The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes is best known for the poem that Pete Seeger turned into “Turn, Turn, Turn,” -- “to everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”  Yet, the book contains much more.  It is the story of a searching soul.  Popularly believed to be written by Solomon, Ecclesiastes identifies its author obliquely as Qoheleth, the teacher, never giving a name, but claiming to be son of King David.  In those days, that was a bit like getting an endorsement from Oprah, something to make the book sell.

Qoheleth the teacher writes in first person and describes his experiences that lead over and over to his conclusion that all is vanity, pointless, made of nothing but empty air.  He pursues and achieves wisdom, then pleasure, then achievement, then wealth.  And finds it all vain, because it all ends with death anyway.  And none of his efforts brought him what he really longed for – whatever that was. 

Ecclesiastes survived not because of its orthodoxy – its views of life and death hardly fit with other Biblical books, and Jewish rabbis and Christian theologians alike have had to create contortions to explain some of its conclusions.  No, it survived because we human beings living human lives can relate to Qoheleth’s quandary.  What is worthwhile in life?  What makes our three or four or five score years meaningful despite the suffering, the inequalities, the mess of it all?

Tough questions.  Still.  And in a way, questions that this series of sermons on the core revelations of Unitarian Universalism lays the groundwork for.   We’re giving the UU background thinking for shaping theological thought.  Mark started us off with a contention that defies the negativity of Qoheleth, the assertion that life is a gift, worthwhile in and of itself.  In the second sermon of the series, he went on to expound that we human beings have a direct relationship with what is Ultimate.  We need nothing beyond ourselves to explain or interact with the Ultimate.

My exploration today might begin with the downside of that assertion.  If we can know the Ultimate ourselves personally, we can also get it wrong.  We can think that we’ve encountered God when we really got a bad mushroom.  What’s more – evil – because it is real, as Mark asserted in the third sermon – evil can entice us to displace the Ultimate with something lesser.  And we can’t go to some authority to test our experience, because we recognize that revelation is not sealed.  If we’ve encountered the Ultimate and found something new, how the heck do we know that the revelation is authentic?  How can we keep clear on what’s big enough to worship?

The title of this sermon, “Keeping First Things First,” could be a lecture on organization and setting priorities for our lives.  Valid concerns.  What comes first – family or work?  Spouse or child?   My interest, though, is deeper than these things.  Keeping first things first, in this context, means more than working out the perfect balance among competing demands of family, work, church, citizenship, and leisure.  As challenging as that effort might be, none of those really work as an Ultimate Concern, the term used by theologian Paul Tillich, from whom I read earlier, to describe that which we can legitimately place faith in.  Not simply how do I prioritize my time and energy according to the structure and needs of my life, but what – when the chips are down and the demands high – can I count on?  What is worth my eternal trust and even, faith?  Whatever it is must be bigger, higher, deeper, more eternal, more encompassing, more holy, more divine – than the day-to-day details of living.  It must be the Ultimate.

Words fail us when defining this – we use or reject “God,” the Divine, Ultimate Concern, Ground of Being, Spirit of Life, Goddess, Nature, Creative Interchange – nothing quite sounds right.  As someone said when struggling with naming the Ultimate – “Couldn’t we talk about what comes second?”  What’s really first is simply too hard to define.  That may be why the ancient Hebrews refused to speak the name of God.  Not a good thing to try to pin down.

It may be better to simply leave the top spot on the list empty.  Especially when you consider what happens when you elevate lesser things to that top spot.

Can we do it?  Can we leave that space empty?  Emerson didn’t believe we could.  He wrote:  “A person will worship something--have no doubt about that.  We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts--but it will out.  That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.  Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

Combining Tillich and Emerson, I come up with this.  To live with hope, to live with some degree of mastery of the world, to live without despair, we must trust something.  And what we set up as trustworthy – as worthy of trust, even of faith – we will find ourselves sacrificing for.  What’s more, we will find ourselves so attracted that we will want to be like what it is that attracts us.  Our minds will wander to it when we try to quiet them.  We will see that object of faith, in art and poetry.  We will find its presence in our lives.  And we will be drawn towards it, remaking ourselves in its image. 

And that’s where today’s revelation comes in.  We must ever be vigilant to be sure that what we give that status to deserves it.  “It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”     

Remember Qoheleth, the teacher from Ecclesiastes?  He tried wisdom, pleasure, achievement and wealth and found all wanting.  Finally, he did actually draw some conclusions.  Two contradictory conclusions.  One was Epicurean in its approach – all is vanity, so eat, drink, and be merry – or words to that effect.  The second a near opposite – give it all up to God; follow God’s commandments and life is worth it.  Scholars have argued over these opposite judgments – some dismissing the faithfulness to God as a later addendum that a religious adherent inserted to make the book theologically acceptable.  Others rejecting the Playboyish “live it up” as a rhetorical device.   It remains unclear which path Qoheleth himself chose – perhaps it depended on his mood.  What lingers, though, the quotation everyone recognizes (besides the Pete Seeger song) – “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”  We know Qoheleth came to recognize that when lesser goods and goals replace the Ultimate, what Tillich called “existential disappointment” sets in.  The book of Ecclesiastes is full of existential disappointment.

In fact, that is our first clue to what is idolatrous, what is not worthy.  It doesn’t satisfy.  That verifies its unworthiness.  It disappoints.  The inescapable consequence of idolatrous faith is “existential disappointment,” the sense of being profoundly let down by life.  Tillich also told us that idolatrous faith takes us off-center, out of balance.  These are symptoms of giving too much respect to limited values.

Qoheleth seems particularly surprised that wisdom proved unworthy of Ultimate Concern.  He emphasizes that once he achieved so much, once he had money, he still kept his wisdom.  Yet, it never benefited him as it should have.  He stayed frustrated.  Wisdom did not merit Ultimate Concern.

Wealth is the compulsory anti-Ultimate Concern.  Not only did Qoheleth try it, I can’t count the number of sermons I heard growing up on the idolatry of mammon or money.  No more do we worship graven images, said the preachers, but we place money central in our lives.  And so it is.  We’re viewed as consumers more than as citizens or workers or family members.  In some of the worst twisting of the Christian gospel, we get prosperity preachers like Benny Hinn, who focus so profoundly on money that a God apart from economic prosperity disappears.  We can all recognize the vanity of placing faith in a newer car, a bigger house, a better personal stereo, a faster computer.  Not to say we shouldn’t have any of those things – we have to know, though, not to have faith in them.  Like Qoheleth’s fields and slaves and storehouses, such accumulations lead to disappointment, or unquenchable greed.

The Buddhist concept of non-attachment offers a useful antidote to concern for material goods.  The harm is not in possessing, but in being possessed by things.

What about people, though?  We might think of our spouse or partner or child as being the most important part of our life – but that leaves us vulnerable to severe existential disappointment – when that person leaves us, or fails us, or expresses that most final of human limitations by dying.   Again, the Buddhist would counsel non-attachment; Paul Tillich would remind us of the false idolatry of placing faith in a limited being – a mere human.

What about that most carefully valued human, ourselves?  It’s another faith that disappoints, yet we UU’s tend sometimes to roll out faith in self as ultimate.   Some people set this up rather obviously – the self-centered narcissist, convinced of her own intellectual loftiness; the preoccupied prince, whose me-time robs family and friends of any genuine role in his life.  Most of us are more subtle in our idolatry of self, stoic even.  Shouldering any burden.  Moving any mountain.  Refusing to be bested.  That, too, disappoints.  We discover to our regret that we are not Wonder Woman – or Superman.  We fail.  We fall.  We cry.  None of us betters Qoheleth.  Self-aggrandizement doesn’t pan out as an Ultimate Concern.

When Tillich wrote about Ultimate Concern, his frequent example of the object of idolatrous faith was the nation.  We had recently come through World War II against an enemy – Germany – which had clearly confused its goals with God’s.  Purity of the race and the good of the nation trumped every other concern, so unrealistic demands were made of the people, along with promises of fulfillment that could never be delivered by a mere state.  We often forget that Hitler’s goal was not to create Hell, but Utopia.  Too much credence given to demands to build Utopia can indeed, descend to Hell. 

Tons of other things we elevate to too high a priority – time, work, status, recreation, making a difference in the world.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not echoing Qoheleth and calling them vanity.  I am saying that they cannot bear the strain of being viewed as Ultimate.  Worship them, devote yourself to them, and they will fail you. 

A few words against one more common idol – and I glanced against it when I referred to Hitler -- the fight against evil.  That war against evil may have done more ill than any other form of idolatry.  The burning of witches and heretics; the determination to preserve the purity of the German race; the Crusades – all showed a certainty of God on our side which justified outrageous and demented actions.  To really study the phenomenon, read Malleus Mallificarum, the detailed (277-small print pages in 2 columns in my paperback version) manual for prosecution of witches, first published in the fifteenth century.  It “documents” flights of imagination and impossible events as true and certain, and brilliantly and chillingly rationalizes the worst of human behavior.  Such splitting characterizes war on evil.  Indeed, when one is so focused on evil, I believe we could truly say that one has come to worship evil itself, to accord it more power than it has, to remake the self in the very image of evil.  If one gives evil that much power, one may actually be worshipping it, and as Emerson warned us, “what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

What is our protection, our defense, against esteeming human concerns more than they should be esteemed?  How can we avoid worshipping what does not deserve it?  We’ve already learned we cannot turn to an authority to tell us to mend our ways.  We must trust ourselves, yet own up to our own fallibility.  The vision may be real; it may be a dream.  Where can we find guidance in this?

First, we turn within.  The need to continually examine our notions of the Ultimate or God explains the centrality for Unitarian Universalism of doubt.  I was scanning channels the other day and came across Ed Young, one of my favorite evangelical preachers.    His topic was the need to commit oneself to faith in God, whether you could believe it all lock, stock and barrel or not.  He depicted people refusing to make a choice to have faith as like an airplane that circles the airport endlessly, never landing. 

I actually sometimes get something out of Ed Young’s sermons.  But this one I could only shake my head at.  I’d say the person who lands at the wrong spot is in more trouble than the one circling in the air.  Doubt is core in our tradition.  As contemporary UU theologian Paul Rasor put it, “Doubt is always an inherent part of faith, and theology should never be free from doubt.  Religious liberalism has always to some extent involved faith without certainty.”  Or as Dorothee Solle pointed out, it’s not that faith without doubt is stronger, just more ideological.

Where we aim our doubt matters.  Our first target is not the ideas and ideals of others, but of ourselves.  That is how we keep from elevating lesser good to the place of the ultimate.  I’ve named a number of lesser goods today that we sometimes allow to grow into gods.  I can really only know the ones I nurture in my own soul. 

So the names of God that I really need to be pushing up against to be sure I’m keeping first things first are probably Love, Power, and Nature.  You may be waging entirely different battles. 

What is worthy will withstand any doubt cast at it.  Perhaps you name God as Humanity or Creativity or Truth.  Be sure to question that name from time to time.  Test those manifestations with your own most powerful doubts.  It will only strengthen your faith ultimately.  Then there’s one more step.

To come closest to truth, we cannot do it alone, we need our gathering together in community… but that’s next week’s revelation.  So between now and then, know that this life is a gift, that you have the power to be in touch with the deepest and most profound elements of reality, that you have the ability to recognize and respond to both good and evil, that your faith can be chosen only by you, that we will never know all there is to know, but will constantly learn more of what is true.  Consider what you most esteem and cast it through the fires of doubt to test its worthiness.  Finally, know that you can gather once more in the embrace of this community coming together to see what we cannot see alone and to do what we cannot do alone.

So may it be.  AMEN