Sermon

INTRODUCTION: As the end of the 20^th Century approached, the National Endowment for the Arts picked the "100 Most Popular Songs of the 20^th Century." Woody Guthrie’s “This land is your land” was number three. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was number two. But the single most popular song of the 20^th century came from a 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, which was based upon a 1903 Broadway production by the same name. The most popular song of the movie was, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

So what was it about this particular song that qualified it as the number one song of the 20^th century? And why did it evoke such a compelling response, even again this morning as Kacie Phillips sang it for us?

Of course, part of it has to do with the wonder and beauty of rainbows. One of my earliest recollections as a child growing up in Sunday School was the biblical story of Noah, as recorded in the first few chapters of Genesis.[2] The story is really quite gruesome and does nothing for God’s PR; nonetheless, as the story goes, God is so upset with how people are living that he decides to drown them all – women, children, the aged, everyone – except for one man and his rather unspectacular family. Once in the boat, according to the biblical record, “the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And it rained 40 days and forty nights.”[3]

After it’s over, in what we would call a spin worthy of Karl Rove, God says, “I’ll never drown everyone ever again. And to remind you of my promise, I’m putting a rainbow in the sky as proof positive.”

With or without the biblical narrative, rainbows have a majestic place of beauty in every land and culture. They symbolize starting over after a storm, of second chances, and of doing better next time. In a word, they are symbols of intentional living.

Freeman Dyson, at one time a leading British physicist and author, married a woman with a five-year-old daughter. The daughter had never lived with anyone else but her mother. Soon after Dr. Dyson moved in with them, the five-year old unwittingly opened the bedroom door as Dr. Dyson was in the process of dressing. She saw him naked for the first time.

He covered up, but later that night, as five-year olds are wont to do, she brought up the matter at the dinner table. She said, “Did God really make you like that?” Dr. Dyson realized that a scientific answer was not being asked for, physicist though he was. So he replied in the worldview of a five-year old and said, “Yes.” The little girl responded, “Well, couldn’t he have made you better?”

That is a question we should all be confronted with at sometime in our lives. Couldn’t we be better? The only honest answer of course is, “Yes.” But to give that answer is only a word. More substantively, what does it mean to be better…to live intentionally? Mary Ann Radmacher writes that for her, to live intentionally means, “Begin each day as if it were on purpose.”

Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest California, has written a best-selling book on The Purpose Driven Life. In it, he makes an important distinction between success and purpose. He writes, “…being successful and fulfilling your life’s purpose are not at all the same issue.” Rather, being purpose driven means focusing on what matters most. And that is not a Sunday decision, nor a 40-days-and-nights’ decision, but rather a lifetime orientation.

So how do we live looking over the rainbow? Or rather, how do we live intentionally?

I was looking over the upcoming calendar this past week and I noticed that Dec. 8^th is “Bodhi Day.” That’s when some Buddhists recognize a very special time 2,500 years or more ago. According to Buddhist tradition, after an intense and difficult search to understand the meaning and purpose of life, enlightenment came to Siddartha as he sat under the Bodhi Tree. Ever since, he has been known as the Buddha, or the enlightened one.

That kind of experience is not unique to the Buddha. Less than 2,000 years ago, Christian scriptures portray Jesus going up to the mountaintop for 40 days and forty nights to fast and pray. As he neared the end of his retreat, the scriptures portray him being tempted by satanic appeals to power, fame and wealth. He said, “No,” which could also be called his moment of Enlightenment – his Bodhi Tree experience. Jesus then entered with fervor into his brief and short-lived ministry of six months or less.

Some 600 or so years after Jesus, a married, 40 year old caravan trader named Muhammad, was on a spiritual retreat in one of the caves outside of what we now know as Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. While there, tradition says that the Angel Gabriel appeared and passed on to Muhammad the revelation of the Qur’an. It was not the story of Muhammad as the Christian scriptures are the story of Jesus. In fact, in all the Qur’an, there is no mention whatsoever of the prophet Muhammad. Islam holds rather that the prophet Muhammad – may peace be upon him – was the vehicle through which the revelation of the Holy Qur’an was received.

That same kind of unique experience is typical of most of the founders of the great wisdom religions. While engaged in a search, a spiritual journey, through a combination of events, they are confronted with an overpowering spiritual insight. They share it with family, with friends, and in their community – ultimately with the world.

Many times, as with Jesus, Muhammad, and Baha’u’llah of the Baha’i faith, their founders suffer great persecution. Nonetheless, their message lives on and we are its inheritants. Sometimes though, because of cultural distinctions or the limitations that lapsed time brings, we focus on the differences between us and them, between then and now.

This summer, while touring the British Museum of History, I purchased a guidebook on their display of the history of religions. Then with a recorded device, it’s possible to walk from section to section and hear about the various religious expressions of our ancestors. It makes you realize that the cemetery of the gods must be overflowing.

But the spiritual issue in any of those or the ones I’ve mentioned preceding is not whether there actually was an ark which Noah and his family floated in. Nor is the issue whether Buddha actually sat under a particular tree, or Jesus talked with the Devil, or that Muhammad really visited with the angel Gabriel.

That’s comparable to your bringing me a precious gift, and I focus on the wrapping and not the gift itself. I’m sure we’ve all given presents to toddlers only to see them have more fun with the box, and the ribbon, than with what we had bought them.

When studying faiths that we didn’t grow up with, we’re sometimes like that as well: We focus on the baggage carrying the message, instead of the message itself.

The issue in faith is never facticity or historicity: it’s the gut-gripping, gizzard grabbing insight which we had never before realized until we confronted it in Moses or Muhammad, Jesus or the Buddha. Every ancient message is conveyed within the cultural limitations of its time, including our own. Like we, they used whatever baggage or suitcase was available to carry their message. It may have included devils and demons, angels and spirits, dreams and stories. That’s the baggage. The challenge is: What did they say about life and living in their and our world?

The question, which we address to faith, is always, how can I make it when the love of my life is gone? What to do when I’ve lost my job, a friend, a much beloved pet, a child? How? Who? What? When? Where? Why?

When faith speaks, it speaks to life in the now, in this moment of reality. It is not about believing whether snakes once talked, or whales swallowed and spat up human beings. Those are the wondrously rich cultural anomalies, which we can engage for deeper understanding of the culture or time. But they have little if anything to do with the demands of destiny.

n The story of the serpent in Genesis 3 is not recorded to make us believe in talking walking snakes, but to put on the table, the issue of what do we do with temptation – big-time temptation.

n The story of Jonah and the whale is not about literally living in the belly of a whale for three days – that’s facticity; rather, it’s about how we respond to the spiritual tasks which life calls upon us to perform. Will we do what is needed, or will we run away from the tasks before us?

So before we can live intentionally, we have to believe that it makes a difference to do so. That’s a spiritual issue, a spiritual choice, about the living of these days. Not surprisingly, that’s what the great faiths of the world are also about as well. They say it matters how you live, it matters how you give of your time, your money, your love, it matters what you believe and don’t believe. That’s intentional living.

II. THE VEHICLE OF THE ANCIENTS FOR COMMUNICATING WAS NO LESS CHALLENGING FOR THEIR DAY THAN OURS.

I mentioned Dr. Dyson’s book earlier. I actually stumbled upon it as I was stocking a new bookcase that Mo helped me put up. As I thumbed through it, I saw a section that I had highlighted several years ago. Listen to it for a moment, please. Remember he’s a physicist. He said:

Matter is the way particles behave when a larger number of them are lumped together. When we examine matter in the finest detail in the experiments of particle physics, we see it behaving as an active agent rather than as an inert substance.

Say what? Is Dr. Dyson saying that this lectern – matter – from which I’m speaking is a bunch of particles lumped together? And if we were to examine it in a particle physics experiment, it would behave as an active agent rather than as an inert substance.

In fact, Dr. Susan Blanchard, here this morning, who is the dean-designate of the soon-to-be new school of engineering at FGCU, explained to me yesterday that what Dr. Dyson is also saying is that when you get to the particle level, there is more space than matter.

When I read those kinds of statements, they make me want to say, “Wow. That’s hard to believe.” Much like the ancients, it challenges our perceptive comfort zone. Dr. Dyson added another dimension. He writes:

Imagine, if you can, four things that have very different sizes. First, the entire visible universe. Second, the planet Earth. Third, the nucleus of an atom. Fourth a superstring.

Universe, Earth, atom nucleus, and a superstring. Now here’s the all important, interpreting sentence that should always follow any citation of data: The step in size from each of these to the next is roughly the same – from Universe, to Earth, to the nucleus of an atom, to superstring. The Earth is smaller than the visible Universe by about twenty powers of ten; the nucleus of an atom is smaller than the Earth also by about twenty powers of ten, and so on.

Now think back to when you looked into a starry sky and realized that what you see is only part of one enormous galaxy, called the Milky Way, which is only part of a Universe filled with billions of other galaxies and enormous super galaxies and unfathomable dark black holes. And that in this clump of matter – this lectern – there is more space than matter!

On the one hand, we are now exploring dimensions of the Universe never before even imagined – going all the way back to the Big Bang. But on the other, we have divided the atom, and utilized its power, militarily, as energy, and medicinally.

But the issue is not, knowing that, but how do we live knowing that? What difference does it make? How does it cause us to treat others differently? How do we respond to the world, its parts and our lives? That’s the struggle of faith in all ages and times.

Adam Gifford, in his will endowing the prestigious Gifford Lectures more than 100 years ago, gave these criteria for the selection of speakers. They could also be criteria for membership at All Faiths. They are not bad guides for intentional living, either. Listen if you would please:

The Lecturers appointed shall be subjected to no test of any kind, and may be of any denomination whatever or of no denomination, of any religion or way of thinking, or as is sometimes said, they may be of no religion, or they may be so-called skeptics or agnostics or free-thinkers, provided only that they be reverent, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth. (Last Will and Testament, 1887)

So scientific discoveries and the pushing of the boundaries of thinking can have the same parameters as the reading of the Tao De Ching or the Bhagavad- Gita, the Qur’an or the Holy Bible. How? with reverence, thoughtfully, sincerely, earnestly and lovingly inquiring after truth!

As Thomas Jefferson said almost 225 years ago, “My life is not threatened and it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Rather, faith says,

We are children of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. And in the increasingly noisy pace of life, let us keep peace with our soul.[4]

There’s a well-known Eastern saying which you’ve heard many times. It goes like this:

But that’s about beginnings. When it comes to endings, there’s an equally compelling saying in the Tao de Ching:

“For every mile you travel on a spiritual path, the destination is two miles further.”

Which is a recognition that the more we know, the more we want to know, the more we create, the more we want to create. That’s another way of saying that the spiritual journey never really ends. We have to keep searching for the pot of gold over the rainbow…where dreams and troubles…lemon drops and chimney tops…all come together. Amen and may it be so.

[1] Fifth and final in a series on “The Gospel of Broadway,” by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, Minister, All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL. Ph. 239.226.0900; E-mail: allfaithsuc@earthlink,net; Web page: allfaiths-uc.org.

[2] Chapters 05-10.

[3] Genesis 07:11-13 (The myth of Noah and the Flood starts in chapter 6 of Genesis and runs through chapter 10.)

[4] Edited and excerpted from the Desiderata.