First U Has Been Good to Me

A Sermon by the Bob Hurst

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday May 28, 2006

Reading

Marcus Borg, From “Spirituality and Contemporary Culture”

Pre-critical naiveté is that early childhood stage in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true, is indeed true. I think, for example, of how I heard the Christmas stories as a child. I took it for granted they really happened that way, that there really was a magic star, that the holy family really did journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, that Jesus really was born in a stable and laid in a manger, that wise men came to visit, that angels sang to the shepherds in the night sky. And, very importantly, it took no effort on my part. It didn’t take faith. I had no reason to think otherwise. It never occurred to me to say, "Now are these historically factual reports? Or is this a metaphorical narrative?" It didn’t take faith! (I want to underline that.) Critical thinking begins in late childhood and continues through adolescence, of course, and into adulthood. And you don’t have to be an intellectual to get into critical thinking. You don’t have to go to college. Everybody enters this stage unless there is something seriously wrong with them, and there aren’t many people for whom that’s true. Critical thinking is simply that stage where we make decisions about how much of what we were taught as children we are going to carry with us. Is there a tooth fairy? Are babies really brought by storks? Does anybody say that anymore, by the way? In the modern period with its emphasis on factuality, critical thinking is deeply corrosive of religion in general, Christianity and the Bible in particular. When we first enter critical thinking, it can seem like a liberating stage, though it is often attended by epistemological anxiety. But when I say a liberating stage, I mean, realizing that all that stuff we learned as kids is up for grabs can be wonderfully liberating. But if you remain within the framework of critical thinking decade after decade after decade, and you can stay in it your whole life, it becomes a very arid place in which to live when it’s wedded to the framework of modernity, and it becomes a desolate place, T.S. Eliot’s wasteland.

First U Has Been Good to Me

A Sermon by the Bob Hurst

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday May 28, 2006

I suppose my real Journey began when I was 20 and took the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. One of the questions asked, “Do you believe in God?” Of course I was a good Christian boy, even though I hadn’t been to church except to get married recently, and so I started to black in the “yes” block. My hand, however, refused to cooperate. And so, I had my religious crisis. What was God? The old guy in the sky with the beard? After perhaps 15 minutes of crisis, slowly and apparently of its own volition, my hand blacked in the “No” block.

I’d been a good Christian boy, of course. My mother had been a seeker, but finally settled on being Episcopalian. I’d been baptized one. My father was a Southern Baptist, as had been all the Hursts. My grandfather was a deacon, a lay minister, and he read his bible every morning while waiting for the wood stove to warm up and make his coffee. When I visited, I sat on his lap, and he read it to me. My grandfather was all about God being love, and I could understand that. In fact, I thought God must look a lot like my grandfather. I’d attended a Lutheran school and sang “O Holy Night” as a boy soprano in the Christmas pageant. I still love that piece. I’d been a Methodist for awhile in Missouri and almost lost my virginity at church camp when I was 14. Her name was Leslie. As an older teen living in Germany on a small Army base, the local padre ran our Protestant Youth Group for awhile, and that was a fantastically interesting time. Then it was taken over by a hardcore fundamentalist Baptist type, and attendance plummeted as I and my friends left. This didn’t seem to have a lot to do with my grandfather’s God is Love.  I suppose that was the beginning of the end. I went to college where I studied biochemistry. For awhile, I tried to adapt science and religion, doing what Marcus Borg describes as “soft literalism.” Days in Genesis were equated with geologic eras, for example, but I never questioned the parting of the Red Sea. Still, these beliefs of my childhood began to be questioned one at a time. Then came the day of the MMPI.

Well, that was that. I was an atheist! I was, after all, studying to be a scientist, and we all know there was no room for faith in the world of science. Not only was I an Atheist, I was a Logical Positivist. I was what Huston Smith called a “fact fundamentalist.” Interestingly, I never noticed I defined my self by what I didn’t believe in, which is interesting, because there is an infinity of things I don’t believe in.

My first contact with Unitarian Universalism came several years later, when I lived in Birmingham. Some friends, he was a colleague of mine at the UAB, were both lifetime UUs. They told me I was a UU but didn’t know it. I told them UUs were chicken atheists, and I had gone the whole way. Hey, what do you expect? I was in my 30s and knew everything.

In 1983 the Hurst family moved to Oklahoma. Our two children, Tanya and Eric, needed something in religious education as a counter to the strong fundamentalist tone of religion in Oklahoma. The people here seemed pushier than those in Alabama, or maybe they were just less polite. I remembered my UU friends and figured that the UU church was as close to innocuous as I could find, and, near the end of the church year in 1986 we attended for the first time.

My experience was very different from what I expected. I can’t remember what Dick Allen preached that morning, but I do know I had the feeling I was Home. In the words of the Virgil Thompson “My Shepherd Will Provide My Need” that the choir sings, “No more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.” I could not tell you why I felt that way, but I was born again. It took awhile to grow up, though, and What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.

I’m a far different person than I was then. I have grown spiritually in many ways, and, in the words of Garrett Morris of the original Saturday Night Live, “First U has been good to me.” I’d like to share with you my spiritual journey and some of the discoveries I have made along the way with the help of you, my fellow Pilgrims.

I’ve stood in this pulpit several times and given reports from the Front Lines. The first was with my friend and fellow traveler Jim Gordon. We did a clever left brain, right brain thing entitled “Quantum and Cosmological Theology.” Over the years I’ve examined marriage, Jimmy Buffett and the Caribbean in music, poetry, The American Civil War, how I was beginning to find new meaning to Christian concepts of Hell, faith, but not heaven, among other topics. My sermons made interesting reading as I prepared for today. They were the tangible milestones of my Journey.

For awhile, I was content to putter along, but some of my very dear friends, Jim Gordon, Tanya Russell, Susan Biles and I had a lot of wonderful discussions, and I was called upon to describe, if not defend, my beliefs. In the process of these exciting discussions, often held in the hot tub, I began to see the inconsistencies in my beliefs. Well, that is something that drives me nuts. Perhaps it is my profession of scientist, but I like consistency and for everything to fit together. First to go was my Logical Positivist belief structure.

Logical Positivism is a form of positivism, which holds that the only true meaning is that which can be verified by experience or experiment. In other words, science was the only real form of knowledge. Everything else was devoid of cognitive meaning and thus nothing but expression of feelings or desires. Only statements about mathematics, logic and natural sciences have a definite meaning. This was the foundation of my atheism. After all, religious statements and beliefs were not and could not be logical. They were just opinions or feelings and therefore without any real meaning. I was really hardcore in those days!

The first real cracks in this world view were delivered by Michael Polanyi, the great biophysicist, who challenged the notion of absolute objectivity even in science. Jim Gordon had given me his book, “Personal Knowledge” in which the entire foundation of Logical Positivism was demolished, not by a philosopher, but by one of the foremost practitioners of science. Then, I learned what Post-Modernism really was from Susan Biles. As a scientist, I had scoffed at this philosophy which held that nothing was inherently true. No narrative was inherently privileged over any other. I resisted awhile the notion that science and religion and even belief in the powers of pyramids were all equally inherently valid. However, the deconstructionism, or taking apart of knowledge, and laying it bare on the table is followed by synthesis. The difference is that post-modernism forced me to acknowledge that I had choices in how I assembled my universe. There was no absolute truth. There was no one correct way of seeing the world. Context made the difference. I began to understand that if a technological civilization required a scientific approach over one based on pyramid power. Still, if one lived in the jungles, then a shamanistic approach might give people the illusion of control that made life endurable in a capricious world. I went to SWUUSI a couple of times and around playing music at the Point, midnight swims in Lake Texoma and Terry Sweetser’s workshop, my theological horizons broadened.

Jean Paul Sartre and his version of Existentialism played a large role as well. I’d been profoundly affected by his play “No Exit.”   However, how to reconcile this with my scientific world view was not possible at the time. Once I was able to begin to explore these concepts, I found them profoundly liberating. Unlike many who mourned the loss of the illusion of meaning to their lives, I reacted with joy. That Life has no inherent meaning meant there was no one meaning out there to discover. There was no chance whatsoever that the True Meaning of Life could ever be discovered because there was none. Whatever meaning my life had, I had to create it.

For awhile, I was shell-shocked. After all, almost everything I had believed true had turned to rubble. So be it. Time to move on.  First, I decided I had to discover what I did believe. I had no illusions that these would be eternal truths and knew for certain they would be my truths alone. Still, I needed to clarify my set of values and beliefs, for there was no absolute truth, no rock on which to build. Yet, perforce, did that mean I had to build on sand? I let that lie for awhile.

I discovered there were beliefs on which my life was built. Whether these were true in an absolute sense or not didn’t matter. I had to believe in them in order to get through the day. So be it.  I found meaning in music, in friendship, in helping others, in my work, in seeing flowers I had planted bloom and add beauty. I just lived. I experienced life without worrying much about what it meant.

This also was a difficult time for me, a time characterized primarily by loss. My children grew up and left home. Some difficulties at work robbed me of much of the joy that used to be there. Most significantly, my marriage began its slow decline toward the end that had been inevitable even before the problems became explicit. Yet, during this time, First Unitarian was a refuge for me, a place where I was accepted, warts and all. I could sing in the choir, work with committees, attend Big Events, and just BE here. I wonder how I could have coped without this place and the people in it.

Yet, during this time, I began to look more deeply into my beliefs. What were these beliefs I had to have in order to live?  Were they <gasp!> some nascent Sense of the Sacred? Some acknowledgement there was something larger than myself? Was it God? Well, no, I didn’t think so. God was something concrete. Everybody knew God was the Old Guy in the Sky. Even the Rev. Cynthia Johnson offered prayers TO something. I needed to look deeper and beyond the concrete constructions of traditional religion. And, in First U, I had the place for this kind of examination.

I began a several year process examining my Christian roots. I had become what Bishop John Shelby Spong refers to as a member of the Christian Alumni Association. My experiences with Christianity had mostly been good. I had felt loved there, for the most part, and so I continued a process of looking beyond the surface concrete meanings into the deeper, more universal meanings of Christian thought. I even gave a service here a few years ago titled “I Can Understand It All But Heaven.”

About this time I quit calling myself an atheist. That, after all, was as much a belief statement as calling myself a theist of some sort. What people called “God” was really irrelevant to me. I did have positive beliefs. I am a Humanist. My values are man-made and not divine, unless one believes the Divine resides in us all and is responsible for those kinds of values if we but only listen. But many of those beliefs were turning out to be remarkably similar at a higher level to my earlier Christian ones. The details of faith that hang up so many were entirely irrelevant. Was Jesus really resurrected? Was Jesus really Divine? Did God send him to die for our sins? None of this really mattered. There were deeper truths, and I’m continuing to try to find them.

I remember one of my great epiphanies. It occurred when I and several other choir members were singing “Elijah” with the great baritone Sherrill Milnes and several other church choirs. As we sang the words of the old prophet, I smugly patted myself on the back for having left those beliefs behind. Their bloody-mindedness and the cruelty of God were so far from where I was today! And then it hit me. I was being too literal again! I had relegated the Old Testament to nothing more than folk tales by a middle eastern people. Yet, were they more than that? Clearly, they were stories about how the Israelites experienced and coped with a cruel world, famine, conquest, oppression.  Not history, but what were they? I began to see what many others have seen. These stories were factually False, but yet, they were True in a larger sense? Did they capture something important above and beyond their literalness?

What struck me about Elijah first was the statement about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons unto the seventh generation. Was that just a cruel Old Testament God, or was that the truth? And, that Old Testament God is rather different to Jews than to Christians. Would the sins of George Bush in rejecting the Kyoto Accord not be visited upon our children unto the seventh generation? The difference was that sin had a wider meaning, and perhaps some supernatural God-being was not the active agent, but clearly this captured some greater truth. I was onto something.

As time has passed, I have seen that what I feel is what many people call God. However, I cannot use that word. Too much baggage. Has anyone ever noticed that Mark writes G-d? Anyone wonder why? Could it be that to name the sense of the Sacred is to constrain it, to make it Something real? To reify the infinite into some human construct? I see a larger truth in this. Could I capture the deeper truths in my rich religious past without becoming mired in the swamps of Belief?

Interestingly, a number of Christian theologians, most of them from the Jesus Seminar, are trying to develop a re-visioning of Christianity from just this viewpoint. Marcus Borg, from whom came the reading, is one of them. Yet, I do not feel that I could ever really be happy, even in a re-visioned church. I think my sense of the sacred is wider than that of Christianity. Also, there just is so much baggage attached to some of those words to ever escape. Our context is our past, and we cannot just make up new meanings

I truly have found my place here among the Unitarian Church. I am encouraged that ever since Bill Sinkford’s 2003 sermon in which he began the debate by relating an experience of his own, the denomination seems to be undergoing a similar process as I. As he kept vigil in the hospital with his gravely ill teenage son, he related that “I felt the hands of a loving universe reaching out to hold. The hands of God, the Spirit of Life. The name was unimportant. . . . I knew that I did not have to walk that path alone, that there is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will.” In a wonderful essay in the latest “UU World” the Rev. Kendyl Gibbons examines the language of reverence. She says, “The question is whether our faith community is collectively prepared to help him understand, process, and honor it.”

I, for one, am ready, not only for Bill Sinkford, but for myself. I can understand very well what I would mean were I to utter the words Sinkford did. I would know that there were people out there I could count on. My faith community would be there. Even some strangers would be there. The highest aspirations of humanity would express themselves by someone, if I were open. Would everyone? Of course not! How many climbers of Mt. Everest passed a dying man recently? The capacity for good and evil resides in us all. It’s not God or Satan, but our innate nature, perhaps even our original sin. The way to salvation is, indeed, narrow, and one can easily lose one’s way. Yet, it is that fundamental force for good that we share that keeps us going, hopefully in the right direction. It is that spark of the divine that is within us all.

Last September, when Patti and I visited Paris together, we naturally stopped in the Cathedral Notre Dame. I simply sat in a pew in the warm twilight lit by candles and the huge stained glass window and felt the experience. I felt tears leaking from my eyes as I felt the emotion of feeling the connection, not to some mythical “God,” but to those human beings who had made their covenant with God to build this place over the course of centuries.  I could certainly understand how some could feel the Hand of God, here. In fact, I had been touched by that which I hold sacred at my very core. Was this God? Was this my own sense of the Sacred? Did it even matter? Was there a larger truth there in that place?

Marcus Borg defines the spiritual journey as traveling from pre-critical naiveté through critical thinking to post-critical naiveté. Dick Allen once preached on this, which he called Innocent, Experienced and Wise. In the first stage one believes the exact truth of Bible stories, for example. They are literally true. The bush burned. The Red Sea parted. In the Critical Thinking stage, we question which of those stories of our childhood we will take into adulthood. Is there really a tooth fairy? Was Jesus really born in a stable under a magical star? Liberating at first, if one never goes beyond it, the landscape slowly dries into desolation, T.S. Eliot’s wasteland. Post-critical naiveté is perhaps the wisdom of age. It is the ability to hear stories as true even though you know they are not factually true. Ronald Reagan had the ability in spades     to tell such stories. It’s the ability to see the metaphoric truth underlying the story as more important than the facts. Unlike the pre-critical naiveté of childhood, it brings critical thinking with it. It’s the ability to hear the Christmas story not as history, but as a re-telling of the struggle between the lust for power, as exemplified by Herod, and our higher aspirations, as played by Jesus.

And so, I believe in the Redeeming Power of Love. I believe that if I do not do my part to change the world, it will be the worse for it, and that evil has won a victory. As Burke would say today, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

So, I would like to close and say that yes, “First Unitarian has been good to me.” As many of you know, I am considering a move to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Whether I make the move or not, and it is far from decided, this church will always be a part of me. It is the place where I grew.

Benediction

May Love light your way

May Goodness guide your feet.

And may Truth be your quest as you walk in beauty.

Go in Love, return in Peace.