Sermon

Word for All Ages:[2] In Shel Silverstein's book, The Missing Piece, a circle sets out to find the pie-shaped wedge of itself that is missing. (Imagine a pie with one piece missing, rolling along, looking for its missing slice.) The circle, with the piece missing, searches everywhere. It finds a whole lot of different pieces that were lost, but none fits the circle. There’s one that’s too big…there’s one that’s too little…there’s one that over-advertises its availability…but none of them exactly fit the empty hole in the circle.

As the circle with the piece missing bumps along, it realizes it cannot travel as fast as it used to when it was a whole and did not have a missing piece. Because of this, it has to go slower.

After days of searching, the circle finally finds its missing piece and gets back together -- right back where it started from.

But then, guess what? After awhile, the circle lets go of the slice that once was missing. Why would it do a thing like that? The answer: It discovers that going slower enabled it to see and enjoy more along the way. It realizes that there was a lot it had been missing when it was going so fast as a whole circle. Although it had to go slower with a missing piece, the circle was better able to see the world around it.

Which was Shel Silverstein’s way of saying that losing something can be bad, sometimes very bad – but what we do after we’ve lost it can be good.

Several years ago, George Gerbner, then the dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project. As a result of his research, he reached some very insightful conclusions. One was that people who watch excessive amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place. Fear is pandemic. From these data, he coined the phrase, “mean world syndrome,” to describe that kind of belief.

“Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures…. They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve them of their insecurities.”

Which explains the phenomenon of people wanting a “strong leader,” even if, he breaks the law, or takes away their freedoms. At least they don’t feel insecure.

We live in a society today in which fear has become a major motivating tool of the government. The event we label as “9-11” has become a staple of governing by fear. It’s been used:

n to grossly misread intelligence so that a third world country whom we had severely bombed and sanctioned for ten years could be made out to be a potential nuclear threat,

n 9-11-fear of terrorists led us to justify invading a country that had no significant terrorist presence until after we occupied them;

n a combination of 9-11 war-related factors resulted in devouring our government’s surplus,

n 9-11-fear has resulted in the loss of more than 2,000 young American lives and countless tens of thousands of Iraqi lives,

n 9-11-fear wreaked property damage of untold billions of dollars on the people of Iraq,

n and, 9-11 spending has severely slashed government programs which once provided a safety net for the poor, the aged and the infirm; they are at risk in America as never before.

And when the public support for programs granted in times of 9-11-fear began to wane, what was the response of our government’s leaders: again to appeal to fear…the fear of the unknown…or in this case, the fear of 9-11-like terrorists, who might be hiding under a bridge, casing a big building, threatening our air space, or poisoning our water resources. While anyone of those scenarios could be in the offing, what seems to be increasingly true is, we are doing more to cultivate the fear of those things happening, than addressing how to stop them from happening.

So what should we do about fear? One of the most famous quotations of all time about fear came from President Franklin Roosevelt as he took office for his first term in March 1933. The economy had tanked, people were starving, and fear of the future was rampant. In that most famous of his speeches, President Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

I’ve always liked that quotation, but to be honest with you, I also couldn’t explain what he meant, had I been asked. What does it mean to say, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

To find out, I went back to read that Inaugural Address, and I must admit I was genuinely impressed. It almost read like a sermon for the national spirit. When I finished it, I realized that what that famous quotation means is this:

Which is another way of saying that fear-mongering is self-sustaining. It multiplies and regenerates so that it enervates one’s vision and energy and reduces us to puddles of helplessness. Or worse, according to George Gerbner: It creates a society in which leaders can rule by the use of fear, and the constant specter of uncertainty.

This is not a new phenomenon. How to live with uncertainty is probably one of the oldest social problems humankind has faced. Can you imagine what it was like ten thousand years ago, to face the uncertainties of life? Our species knew so much less about the physical and social world than we do today. Uncertainty was the routine of daily living. Our ancestors could not predict what would happen in their world – fires, drought, earthquake, hurricanes, or floods. They were unsure even whether they and their families could find the food or shelter necessary to survive in the present, much less the future. They were unsure how soon, and in what form, they would be facing deadly enemies – animal or human.

The world was a dangerous, mysterious, and potentially deadly place. One never knew when disaster would strike and a loved one taken…or a dwelling washed away…or food dry up on the vine…or disease eradicate a whole village. One never knew if danger lurked behind the next corner, if death lay under a rock, or if water was poison. Fear of the unknown ruled.

So how much different are we today from our ancestors? Of course, our population has exploded with huge implications for every facet of life. From 1750 to the present, the population has tripled. Technology has transformed our world as well. And our understanding of our world and universe has made a tremendous difference in how we approach life and living.

It’s to state the obvious to say that we’re so much more blessed in so many ways. Part of that blessing is because of our ability to predict, protect, or even change our natural environment. Can you imagine the difference in how we respond to a potential hurricane with several days warning, compared to our ancestor’s not having a clue until it hit.

We also understand that there’s not a deity in heaven managing the weather and humankind’s destinies -- saving this one, and zapping that one.

But I would like to suggest that there is another level of discourse about our place in the Cosmos. It’s found in response to what Winifred Gallagher means when she says, “I’m a neo-agnostic.” She defines that “as a well-educated skeptic who has inexplicable spiritual feelings.” She says, “Something important keeps eluding her most trusted tools of learning and intellect.”

Just for fun, let’s unpack that statement. First, she says, she is a neo-agnostic. As you know, the Greek language has characteristics that inform much of our language in philosophy and theology. For example, theos means God. A theist is one who believes in God. If you put the first letter of the Greek alphabet, alpha, or a before theos, it negates the meaning of the word so that you have the word atheist. So theist is one who believes in God, an a-theist is one who doesn’t.

Following that same principle, back in the latter part of the 19^th century, Sir Thomas Huxley, a major supporter of Charles Darwin, decided that those two theological options – atheist and theist – were inadequate. So he coined another theological response also using Greek. The Greek word gnosis means “to know.” But, with an alpha or letter a in front of it, it becomes agnosis, or as Huxley coined it, “agnostic.” One doesn’t know whether there is God. That’s agnosticism.

But a major shift has come since Huxley. When his time period talked about believing or not believing in God or theism, they referred to the primitive notion of God as supernatural deity, separate and apart from the rest of the Universe. Logically, with the rise of the modern era, that belief had already lost much of its currency. Darwin for one made a supernatural understanding of deity totally untenable. So when a lot of atheists are saying they don’t believe in God, the god to which they are referring is a pre-modern caricature of the term. Very few people can sustain a belief in a God who could have prevented the Holocaust, but didn’t, could have prevented Katrina, but didn’t, could have prevented the death of innocent little ones, but didn’t. The supernatural god is a monster God. So atheism is very appropriate in response to that belief.

But since Darwin, since Einstein, since the 19^th and 20^th centuries, since the awareness of the Big Bang, we’ve begun to discover that the world of which we are a part is a marvelous and awesome place. To address that world and that mystery is a totally different matter. Which is why Dr. Gallagher says she is a “neo-agnostic.” She’s not puzzled at all by the notion of some super god controlling the universe like some cosmic puppet-master manipulating our lives. That notion of God is as dead as the dodo bird.

But something else has changed the playing field: relativity, the new physics, and a whole host of advances in understanding our bodies, our planet and our Universe have taken place. We’ve realized that the world is not reducible to neat logical packaging. There is a relativity to it, a universal evolution, a constantly changing cosmic scenario, that is awesome beyond description.

And as Einstein declared, there is a wondrous mystery to it as well. So much so, that very few would presume to dismiss the Universe as a mere set of physical phenomena.

Personally, I believe we all are created with what Santayana called animal faith…which is an innate confidence in the created order. It’s intrinsic to who we are. It’s not a matter of believing or not believing. It’s a matter of awareness of what is already there, and acknowledging the depth of what is within every one of us.

What the religions of the world attempt to do for us is to articulate that inner faith and confidence…to provide the poetry of creeds, the beauty of scripture, and the power of myth and story. In the language of faith they say, “Hear O Israel! The lord our god is one God, and you shall worship the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” The language of faith says of Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.” The language of faith says, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” The language of faith says, “I’m a well-educated skeptic who has inexplicable spiritual feelings. Something important keeps eluding my most trusted tools of learning and intellect.”

But as the little story of The Missing Piece informs us, it’s okay to be missing a part. It’s okay not to have it all together. It’s okay not to know exactly what we believe. Or as Rabbi Harold Kushner puts it:

"Sometimes we are more whole when we are incomplete, when we are missing something. There is a wholeness about those persons who can give themselves away, who can give their time, their money, their strength, to others and not feel diminished. There is a wholeness about those who have come to terms with their limitations. There is a wholeness about the woman or man who has learned that she or he is strong enough to go through a tragedy and survive, the person who can lose someone through death, through divorce, through estrangement, and serious illness, and still feel like a complete person."

John Gardner wrote, “I know that there is in each of you a flame that will not go out.

[1] Given on January 29, 2006, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Alliance for the Arts, 10091 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.

[2] Presented to the children in the early service before they departed for their religious education classes.