Standing on Holy Ground
“Standing on Holy Ground” – the Rev. Suzelle Lynch, Unitarian Universalist Church West, Brookfield, WI 11-07-10
Readings
First reading -- from Reinhold Niebuhr’s book , “The Irony of American History,” some familiar phrases:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime? therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
Our second reading is from Jal’l ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.
“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
And finally, our third reading – a quote from author E.B. White:
“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy; if the world were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I wake up every morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.”
Sermon – “Standing on Holy Ground”
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope,” wrote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
Theology is the work of building a house to hold our hope – the work of constructing the frames of meaning that give shape to our lives and our dreams, or, perhaps, the work of making clear to us the frames we have inherited from our parents and ancestors, our teachers and communities of faith.
The metaphor of a theological house – a house for hope -- is offered to us by the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, president of our Unitarian Universalist theological school Starr King School for the ministry, and the Rev. John Buehrens, former president of our Unitarian Universalist Association. Each part of the house -- foundation, walls, roof, rooms, the threshold – corresponds to a different aspect of theology. Their recent book, titled, “A House for Hope: the Promise of Progressive Religion for the 21st Century,” gently and persuasively reacquaints us with our Unitarian Universalist theological history and grounding, and reminds us of our kinship with other progressive faiths.
And we need this reacquainting and reminding. Because our faith is non-creedal – because we don’t have doctrine or dogma or set scriptures to turn to as a way to remember who we are, we often believe that the only important religious material for us is our personal beliefs – our freedom to engage the lifelong process of finding and refining the religious answers that fit our individual lives.
But if this is all we do as Unitarian Universalists, we’re forgetting something important. Our very freedom to believe is grounded in theological ideas that we hold in common, which have persisted in our midst for several hundred years.
You’ve heard me speak often of our Universalist and Unitarian Christian forebears, and their radical embrace of god as all-loving, instead of the harsh and judging god of their religious neighbors. You’ve heard me speak often of their radical rejection of the idea that humans were depraved and sinful, and their embrace of the human potential for good. Instead of religion being used to keep people in line and prepare them for heaven, these forebears believed that the purpose of religion was to draw out the good in us so that we could serve as god’s hands in nurturing a corresponding goodness in the world.
During my childhood, many Unitarian Universalists embraced humanism, feeling that the advances of science and technology made belief in any kind of god no longer useful. But even so, we held more strongly than ever the conviction that human goodness and agency were needed to shape a world more peaceful, fair and free. Today, we UUs are more diverse than ever in the nuances of our individual theologies, but in common we know ourselves to be part of a human family where worth inheres in each member, and we know ourselves connected to something far beyond ourselves as well -- an intricately interwoven, interdependent web of being.
This history, and these persistent theological ideas, are touchstones of our faith.
They are where our eschatology is based as well.
Eschatology is the branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind (Merriam-Webster online dictionary). It has to do with “ultimate hopes,” and “the horizon to which our lives are oriented…” (Parker and Buehrens, p. 4) Rebecca Parker and John Buehrens invite us to think of eschatology as the environment, the landscape -- the garden -- in which our theological “house for hope” is situated. It’s an apt metaphor, for as many of us know from experience, the land on which we build can be a tremendous factor in the architecture or livability of a house. Imagine Fallingwater – the stunning Frank Lloyd Wright home built in Pennsylvania – sited partially over a waterfall. Visualize the prairie sod houses or forest log cabins of the early European settlers in Wisconsin. These environments shape the houses, and thus the lives lived within their walls. In the same way, our eschatology shapes our values, and the way we live our values shapes our lives.
I will confess that when I think of eschatology, my mind always turns to the “Left Behind” novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins – or at least to what I’ve heard about them (since I haven’t read them -- yet). These books tell the story of the “end times” based on a particular evangelical Christian interpretation of the Bible’s books of Revelation, Isaiah and Ezekiel. In the Left Behind stories, the believers have been taken up to meet Jesus in the “rapture,” and Armageddon, a great battle between good and evil is taking place as those who are “left behind” struggle for their lives. This eschatology is based in the idea that human beings were created as perfect by God, but became “fallen” when Adam and Eve disobeyed and were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Only those who believe in a certain way will be saved and returned to paradise – only these will inherit the “new heaven and new earth” that emerge with the second coming of Christ. We may think that such apocalyptic beliefs are silly, but they have pretty profound social and political implications. Because the “signals” that herald the new heaven and earth include war and environmental devastation, those to whom this eschatology belongs have little incentive to work for the kinds of things that are precious to us: human rights, peace or working against global warming. Their house for hope is not located in this world, it is based in the world after this one. Torn between the desire to save the world or savor it, they choose a kind of salvation that begins in destruction.
For a very long time, I didn’t consider eschatology important. I mean, I had my ideas about what would happen at the end of my own life, but I didn’t pay much attention to ideas about the end of the earth or where humanity is ultimately going.
But I have been thinking about these things more lately. Only a few weeks ago – in my sermon on food and environmental justice – I quoted to you statistics from environmentalist James Gustave Speth about the ways in which we human beings are destroying the natural world we and all living creatures rely on for our very survival. Though it is hard to wrap our minds around the fact that there could be an end to our species or an end to all life on our planet, science is showing us that this is, in Speth’s words, “the world we appear to be making.”
What sort of eschatology might help us come to grips with the reality of global climate change, massive species extinctions and environmental devastation?
Where is the hope in this landscape?
Rebecca Parker tells us that over time, progressive people of faith have shaped three major eschatologies, “all of which move earthward,” meaning that they all locate paradise on earth, rather than in some faraway heaven or new paradise after this world ends. Parker writes, “For handy reference, these three alternatives can be identified as Social Gospel eschatology, universalist eschatology, and radically realized eschatology. Each can be captured in a sentence: ‘We are here to build the kingdom of God on earth,’ ‘God intends all souls to be saved,’ and ‘Paradise is here and now.’” (“A House for Hope,” p. 6)
Raised as a Social Gospel Christian, Parker says that the people in her church marched for civil rights, worked to end the Vietnam war, advocated for women’s reproductive freedom and the rights of lesbian and gay people, among other things. Inspired by the vision that God’s commonwealth could be realized on earth, rather than heaven being a place they’d be able to go when they died, they worked for peace, justice and freedom for all.
The actions of the UU community in which I was raised were strikingly similar to those of Rebecca Parker’s Methodist church, but the underlying theology was different. We were humanists, inspired by our faith in the goodness of humanity to create a world which would be continuously getting better and better. “Humanity upward and onward forever” was the slogan of the times. It was a non-theistic understanding of the universalist eschatological idea that all souls would be saved – but we knew we had to do the work to make it happen. Our hands were god’s hands, even though we didn’t believe in god. And, like our Social Gospel Christian neighbors, the horizon to which our lives were oriented was a far horizon -- out there in time the idealized future would be realized. And our choice between saving and savoring the world was always to save it – and to work, work, work at this.
The eschatology that I want most to lift up for you today is the third one Parker describes: radically realized eschatology, which she summarizes in the phrase, “paradise is here and now.”
A realized eschatology means that the horizon is not way out there but is here, now. It means our ultimate hopes are not to be achieved in the future, but are present now. For many liberal Christians, it’s in the words of Jesus when he said, “the kingdom of God is within you,” or “among you.” God is here, now, awaiting our kinship and partnership.
A radically realized eschatology, says Rebecca Parker, “begins with affirming that we are already standing on holy ground. This earth – and none other – is a garden of beauty, a place of life.” She reminds me of something else I said in my sermon As I said a few weeks ago: I said, “the earth is all we have, and all we need.” It is, here and now, our paradise – our garden – our beloved home.
Does this shift in perspective change how we live? Does it give us hope, for example, in the face of the ways in which human living is damaging the earth?
Yes. For when we call ourselves into this present moment, we cannot help but know beauty. There is beauty in this gathering of human beings, beauty in the sounds and scents of this room, beauty outside our windows in the natural world, beauty in the thump of our hearts and the rush of our breath… This life, this world, this earth is wounded, but beautiful and good. Instead of zooming past this moment in a rush to get somewhere else, we open our minds and hearts to the love and laughter that are here right now, and our prayer becomes one of gratitude for all that is. We untie our expectations and demands from the future, and take joy in what is.
Does this mean we give up our striving for justice and peace, our recognition of and outrage at the widening gap between rich and poor; do we give up our practices of caring and compassion for the earth and one another?
No. For “We come to know this world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth,” says Rebecca Parker (p. 16). A radically realized eschatology invites us to save the world and savor it. It invites us to stop striving as though the struggle for peace and justice and a healthy planet might someday end, and instead, to embrace the struggle as a part of life’s blessing. It is a letting go of the chronic exhaustion and sometimes-despair of the tireless social activist, trading these in for the divine refreshment and renewal of gratitude. It means that saving and savoring lean on eachother – they go hand in hand with one another.
Coming from our gratitude inspires us to live our values, even if they will not save the world – but because they save us! They save us from despair, from resignation, from the sin of forgetting that we matter… Because we do matter! We matter. It’s as Rumi wrote, “let the beauty we love be what we do… there must be hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
A radically realized eschatology invites us to remember Paradise is here, now, and we – with all our imperfection, our fears, our desires, our relatedness – we are part of it. We help create it.
I could give you an example from my life but you have so many of your own.
Think of a time when you treated another person as though they were worthy of love and respect – whether others thought they deserved it or not.
Think of a time when you changed your comfortable habits out of respect for the earth.
Think of a time when you allowed yourself to be vulnerable and seek help.
Think of a time when you helped someone who needed you, even though it was inconvenient.
When we live with our hearts open, when we have the courage to celebrate the diversity of humanity instead of fearing it, when we are generous and forgiving and keep our promises to one another, paradise is here and now. Tell me, what are the ways you kneel and kiss the ground? What is the beauty you love?
We are standing on holy ground. As Niebuhr wrote, because “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime… we are saved by hope.” We are not saved by hope for a future world or a future time, but by our hope in this world, now. We have hope not because we or our faith are perfect, but because enacting our hope is the way we give thanks for all our ancestors gave us, because enacting our hope is the way we show our children the seeds of paradise that are hidden all around us. The seeds of Paradise -- hidden in our struggle, in our joy, in our rest and play, in our relationships. Seeds hidden in our commitment to the earth, in our recognition of each other’s wisdom, and above all, in our love.
Let us seek these seeds, and sow them widely. Let us begin this day.
Amen.
Readings
First reading -- from Reinhold Niebuhr’s book , “The Irony of American History,” some familiar phrases:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime? therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
Our second reading is from Jal’l ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.
“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
And finally, our third reading – a quote from author E.B. White:
“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy; if the world were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I wake up every morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.”
Sermon – “Standing on Holy Ground”
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope,” wrote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
Theology is the work of building a house to hold our hope – the work of constructing the frames of meaning that give shape to our lives and our dreams, or, perhaps, the work of making clear to us the frames we have inherited from our parents and ancestors, our teachers and communities of faith.
The metaphor of a theological house – a house for hope -- is offered to us by the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, president of our Unitarian Universalist theological school Starr King School for the ministry, and the Rev. John Buehrens, former president of our Unitarian Universalist Association. Each part of the house -- foundation, walls, roof, rooms, the threshold – corresponds to a different aspect of theology. Their recent book, titled, “A House for Hope: the Promise of Progressive Religion for the 21st Century,” gently and persuasively reacquaints us with our Unitarian Universalist theological history and grounding, and reminds us of our kinship with other progressive faiths.
And we need this reacquainting and reminding. Because our faith is non-creedal – because we don’t have doctrine or dogma or set scriptures to turn to as a way to remember who we are, we often believe that the only important religious material for us is our personal beliefs – our freedom to engage the lifelong process of finding and refining the religious answers that fit our individual lives.
But if this is all we do as Unitarian Universalists, we’re forgetting something important. Our very freedom to believe is grounded in theological ideas that we hold in common, which have persisted in our midst for several hundred years.
You’ve heard me speak often of our Universalist and Unitarian Christian forebears, and their radical embrace of god as all-loving, instead of the harsh and judging god of their religious neighbors. You’ve heard me speak often of their radical rejection of the idea that humans were depraved and sinful, and their embrace of the human potential for good. Instead of religion being used to keep people in line and prepare them for heaven, these forebears believed that the purpose of religion was to draw out the good in us so that we could serve as god’s hands in nurturing a corresponding goodness in the world.
During my childhood, many Unitarian Universalists embraced humanism, feeling that the advances of science and technology made belief in any kind of god no longer useful. But even so, we held more strongly than ever the conviction that human goodness and agency were needed to shape a world more peaceful, fair and free. Today, we UUs are more diverse than ever in the nuances of our individual theologies, but in common we know ourselves to be part of a human family where worth inheres in each member, and we know ourselves connected to something far beyond ourselves as well -- an intricately interwoven, interdependent web of being.
This history, and these persistent theological ideas, are touchstones of our faith.
They are where our eschatology is based as well.
Eschatology is the branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind (Merriam-Webster online dictionary). It has to do with “ultimate hopes,” and “the horizon to which our lives are oriented…” (Parker and Buehrens, p. 4) Rebecca Parker and John Buehrens invite us to think of eschatology as the environment, the landscape -- the garden -- in which our theological “house for hope” is situated. It’s an apt metaphor, for as many of us know from experience, the land on which we build can be a tremendous factor in the architecture or livability of a house. Imagine Fallingwater – the stunning Frank Lloyd Wright home built in Pennsylvania – sited partially over a waterfall. Visualize the prairie sod houses or forest log cabins of the early European settlers in Wisconsin. These environments shape the houses, and thus the lives lived within their walls. In the same way, our eschatology shapes our values, and the way we live our values shapes our lives.
I will confess that when I think of eschatology, my mind always turns to the “Left Behind” novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins – or at least to what I’ve heard about them (since I haven’t read them -- yet). These books tell the story of the “end times” based on a particular evangelical Christian interpretation of the Bible’s books of Revelation, Isaiah and Ezekiel. In the Left Behind stories, the believers have been taken up to meet Jesus in the “rapture,” and Armageddon, a great battle between good and evil is taking place as those who are “left behind” struggle for their lives. This eschatology is based in the idea that human beings were created as perfect by God, but became “fallen” when Adam and Eve disobeyed and were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Only those who believe in a certain way will be saved and returned to paradise – only these will inherit the “new heaven and new earth” that emerge with the second coming of Christ. We may think that such apocalyptic beliefs are silly, but they have pretty profound social and political implications. Because the “signals” that herald the new heaven and earth include war and environmental devastation, those to whom this eschatology belongs have little incentive to work for the kinds of things that are precious to us: human rights, peace or working against global warming. Their house for hope is not located in this world, it is based in the world after this one. Torn between the desire to save the world or savor it, they choose a kind of salvation that begins in destruction.
For a very long time, I didn’t consider eschatology important. I mean, I had my ideas about what would happen at the end of my own life, but I didn’t pay much attention to ideas about the end of the earth or where humanity is ultimately going.
But I have been thinking about these things more lately. Only a few weeks ago – in my sermon on food and environmental justice – I quoted to you statistics from environmentalist James Gustave Speth about the ways in which we human beings are destroying the natural world we and all living creatures rely on for our very survival. Though it is hard to wrap our minds around the fact that there could be an end to our species or an end to all life on our planet, science is showing us that this is, in Speth’s words, “the world we appear to be making.”
What sort of eschatology might help us come to grips with the reality of global climate change, massive species extinctions and environmental devastation?
Where is the hope in this landscape?
Rebecca Parker tells us that over time, progressive people of faith have shaped three major eschatologies, “all of which move earthward,” meaning that they all locate paradise on earth, rather than in some faraway heaven or new paradise after this world ends. Parker writes, “For handy reference, these three alternatives can be identified as Social Gospel eschatology, universalist eschatology, and radically realized eschatology. Each can be captured in a sentence: ‘We are here to build the kingdom of God on earth,’ ‘God intends all souls to be saved,’ and ‘Paradise is here and now.’” (“A House for Hope,” p. 6)
Raised as a Social Gospel Christian, Parker says that the people in her church marched for civil rights, worked to end the Vietnam war, advocated for women’s reproductive freedom and the rights of lesbian and gay people, among other things. Inspired by the vision that God’s commonwealth could be realized on earth, rather than heaven being a place they’d be able to go when they died, they worked for peace, justice and freedom for all.
The actions of the UU community in which I was raised were strikingly similar to those of Rebecca Parker’s Methodist church, but the underlying theology was different. We were humanists, inspired by our faith in the goodness of humanity to create a world which would be continuously getting better and better. “Humanity upward and onward forever” was the slogan of the times. It was a non-theistic understanding of the universalist eschatological idea that all souls would be saved – but we knew we had to do the work to make it happen. Our hands were god’s hands, even though we didn’t believe in god. And, like our Social Gospel Christian neighbors, the horizon to which our lives were oriented was a far horizon -- out there in time the idealized future would be realized. And our choice between saving and savoring the world was always to save it – and to work, work, work at this.
The eschatology that I want most to lift up for you today is the third one Parker describes: radically realized eschatology, which she summarizes in the phrase, “paradise is here and now.”
A realized eschatology means that the horizon is not way out there but is here, now. It means our ultimate hopes are not to be achieved in the future, but are present now. For many liberal Christians, it’s in the words of Jesus when he said, “the kingdom of God is within you,” or “among you.” God is here, now, awaiting our kinship and partnership.
A radically realized eschatology, says Rebecca Parker, “begins with affirming that we are already standing on holy ground. This earth – and none other – is a garden of beauty, a place of life.” She reminds me of something else I said in my sermon As I said a few weeks ago: I said, “the earth is all we have, and all we need.” It is, here and now, our paradise – our garden – our beloved home.
Does this shift in perspective change how we live? Does it give us hope, for example, in the face of the ways in which human living is damaging the earth?
Yes. For when we call ourselves into this present moment, we cannot help but know beauty. There is beauty in this gathering of human beings, beauty in the sounds and scents of this room, beauty outside our windows in the natural world, beauty in the thump of our hearts and the rush of our breath… This life, this world, this earth is wounded, but beautiful and good. Instead of zooming past this moment in a rush to get somewhere else, we open our minds and hearts to the love and laughter that are here right now, and our prayer becomes one of gratitude for all that is. We untie our expectations and demands from the future, and take joy in what is.
Does this mean we give up our striving for justice and peace, our recognition of and outrage at the widening gap between rich and poor; do we give up our practices of caring and compassion for the earth and one another?
No. For “We come to know this world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth,” says Rebecca Parker (p. 16). A radically realized eschatology invites us to save the world and savor it. It invites us to stop striving as though the struggle for peace and justice and a healthy planet might someday end, and instead, to embrace the struggle as a part of life’s blessing. It is a letting go of the chronic exhaustion and sometimes-despair of the tireless social activist, trading these in for the divine refreshment and renewal of gratitude. It means that saving and savoring lean on eachother – they go hand in hand with one another.
Coming from our gratitude inspires us to live our values, even if they will not save the world – but because they save us! They save us from despair, from resignation, from the sin of forgetting that we matter… Because we do matter! We matter. It’s as Rumi wrote, “let the beauty we love be what we do… there must be hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
A radically realized eschatology invites us to remember Paradise is here, now, and we – with all our imperfection, our fears, our desires, our relatedness – we are part of it. We help create it.
I could give you an example from my life but you have so many of your own.
Think of a time when you treated another person as though they were worthy of love and respect – whether others thought they deserved it or not.
Think of a time when you changed your comfortable habits out of respect for the earth.
Think of a time when you allowed yourself to be vulnerable and seek help.
Think of a time when you helped someone who needed you, even though it was inconvenient.
When we live with our hearts open, when we have the courage to celebrate the diversity of humanity instead of fearing it, when we are generous and forgiving and keep our promises to one another, paradise is here and now. Tell me, what are the ways you kneel and kiss the ground? What is the beauty you love?
We are standing on holy ground. As Niebuhr wrote, because “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime… we are saved by hope.” We are not saved by hope for a future world or a future time, but by our hope in this world, now. We have hope not because we or our faith are perfect, but because enacting our hope is the way we give thanks for all our ancestors gave us, because enacting our hope is the way we show our children the seeds of paradise that are hidden all around us. The seeds of Paradise -- hidden in our struggle, in our joy, in our rest and play, in our relationships. Seeds hidden in our commitment to the earth, in our recognition of each other’s wisdom, and above all, in our love.
Let us seek these seeds, and sow them widely. Let us begin this day.
Amen.