Sermon

INTRODUCTION: The great radical activist Saul Alinsky's first wife, Helene, died while she was trying to rescue a child from drowning in the ocean. As you can imagine, Alinsky was devastated and subsequently fell into deep depression. He visited his deceased wife’s grave daily, and also began to drink heavily.

Then one day, he made an unexpected discovery: He had been visiting the wrong grave! When it dawned on him what had been happening for months, he roared, "What the hell am I doing?"

I think many of us have had similar experiences, but not necessarily in respect to the loss of someone near and dear. Rather, it’s been in the way we’re living our lives. Something happens and we suddenly realize that whatever we are doing is totally irrelevant to reality.

The fact that you are here in an interfaith, Unitarian service this morning, suggests that life may have sent you a message about your faith, as well. Or maybe it’s been a series of messages. Regardless, the end result has been the same. You’re now searching…you’re wondering…you’re hoping for an interpretation…a translation of faith that will make sense with the living of these days.

Or maybe it’s no longer an issue at this moment. But nearly all of us have at one time or another faced those life-daunting experiences, when the bottom falls out and the roof caves in on our faith and understanding, those gut-gripping, gizzard-grabbing, heart-wrenching realities of life, and we wonder: What is going on?

It happened to me as a slightly older graduate student, while at Southern Methodist University. I had come to the study of liberal theology, with the hope that my doubts would be relieved and that I would rediscover the faith that I could no longer profess in good conscience. But in the middle of that three-year study, I realized with out any caveats or doubts whatsoever: I did not believe what I had been taught to believe all my life. And no theologian or books or insight would change that. It was happening after seven years of college study and two degrees, one of which was in Pentecostal theology and ministry. And now I was in graduate school, pursuing a third degree, and it was in theology, as well.

I felt myself deep down asking the same question as Saul Alinsky, only mine went like this: What the heck am I doing studying for the ministry in a United Methodist University’s graduate school of theology, when I do not believe in a supernatural God, that Jesus was the Son of God, that the bible was any more sacred than any other scripture, and that I was destined for an angel-filled heaven or a burning-hot hell?

And as in most instances of crisis, there were other factors as well. (It’s the principle that, “When it rains, it pours.”) My wonderfully supportive wife was teaching high school so that I could go to graduate school full-time. That previous Sunday she had found a special in the newspaper for a rocking chair that was only $12, which would fit perfectly into our one-room-with-a-hide-a-bed-graduate-dorm-for-married-students. But at the department store that afternoon, before purchasing the rocking chair, she had stopped to look at carpet remnants for possible purchase at a later time. She saw one that was perfect: the right size and color for only $30. As she was looking at it, a clerk with another customer came up and started to pull it out. On impulse, Sharon said to the clerk, “Oh, I’m buying that one!”

When she brought both the rocking chair and carpet remnant home, we realized we were in deep jell-o for money until her next check came. As we talked about it, I recalled hearing from one of the students down the hall about his selling blood at Parkland Hospital for $15.

So the next morning, I went to Parkland, gave blood, and picked up $15. And when I went to my Greek class that afternoon, a fellow student and I were visiting. I told him that if he ever needed some quick cash, he could sell his blood at Parkland for $15. He said, “Wayne, you should have gone to Baylor. They pay $25!”

As I lay awake struggling with faith and vocation, I also was struggling with the stupidity of having to sell blood to survive, so that I could study about a god who didn’t exist, a bible I didn’t believe in, a Jesus whose bloody death was macabre, and a hell and heaven that were pure figments of medieval imagination. When I should have been working like my wife and making a decent living. What was I doing, and where was I going?

So when the sermon topic states: “If we don’t know where we are going, we will probably end up somewhere else,” it couldn’t have been a better description of my not having a clue. I knew what I didn’t believe, but I didn’t have a clue as to what I did believe. It was no longer a matter of going in a different direction, I simply didn’t know who, where, what, when or why.

What I didn’t know at the time was that one of the first principles of faith is this: It’s okay not to know what you believe!

When Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was first issued back in 1859, it created a huge backlash among the churches, especially among those who felt that the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 3 were the way the world actually came into being – not through evolution. That backlash was probably not a surprise.

But there was another group also concerned. They were open to science and discovery. Yet, despite their openness, they felt a significant void with the new discovery about our origins, because it had also shaken their faith in God. They accepted Darwin’s science, but did it mean also rejecting God?

They must have felt something like Alinksy felt: What is going on? What the heck am I doing?

For those people, the seekers, the intellectually honest, the doubters and believers all mixed into one, Sir Thomas Huxley, the leading proponent of Darwin, came up with an alternative. He did something very creative with the Greek word gnosis – which means “to know.” In the same way that putting the article alpha or an “a” before theos reverses its definition from “god” to “no god,” or from theist to atheist, so he suggested that putting an alpha or an “a” before gnosis – which as I said means “to know” – that would reverse the meaning from one who knows what she or he believes, to one who is an agnosis or “agnostic,” who doesn’t know what she or he believes.

So one of the hallmarks of life’s spiritual journey is to recognize, we don’t know where we are going to come out. And since we don’t know that, we probably will end up somewhere else. And that’s okay.

That’s why the first principle of every honest religious search is a healthy dose of agnosticism. When life has knocked you off your feet…when the storms have washed away all your moorings…when your boat has crashed into the shore…and you haven’t a clue as to what you believe any more…take comfort in a healthy dose of not knowing. Call, “time out.” You don’t know.

But then, how do we get from “not knowing” what we believe, to a place of knowing. How do we get from sitting on the fence to getting off on one side or the other – especially if it’s a barbed wire fence?

Here’s the second principle of life’s faith journey: We move from not knowing or agnosticism, to knowing this: We can’t really know. That’s much different than either agnosticism, which says we don’t know, or atheism, which says we know what is not. Rather, we say that we know that we can’t know. It might be labeled as “neo-knowing.”

It’s like wanting someone to prove to us that they love us. That’s impossible, really. We have to trust them and they have to trust us. Life reveals it in the living.

To me, that is precisely the canvass upon which faith paints life. In this Universe, we live on a pint-sized-planet, in a mediocre solar system, on the outer rim of our Milky Way Galaxy, which is itself one of the lesser galaxies in the Universe.

We’re in no way close to being near to the center of the solar system, the galaxy or the Universe. Though Earth is incredibly important to us, the reality is we’re one of not just millions of other planets, but one of billions upon billions.

So when we speak of faith matters, it has to reflect that reality. But we also seek a vocabulary that enables us to take seriously the drive for self-understanding, the search for meaning and purpose, all of which are articulated in ritual and spiritual practice.

So let me repeat: When we face that most basic of existential questions – why, where, what, when, who and how – we are ready to begin the spiritual journey.

The second principle is even harder: In the search to know, we discover that Mystery can’t be known. We can know it’s a mystery, but we can’t know what the mystery is or it wouldn’t be a mystery.

We already possess what we might call “general” faith. Every species is born with it – it’s an innate sense of confidence in the created order. Deep within every species is that psychic sense of belonging. We are not alien to life on this planet.

The task is finding a faith language that enables us to outwardly declare our inner faith. I suggest these things:

First, we have to move it into conscious awareness. We realize that life in the Universe is based upon our acknowledgement that we have faith – we – everyone – were born with it.

Second, we make it personal. How do we do that? By building our own theology. It may be with the building blocks from ancient faiths, along with the insights of contemporary psychology and sociology, plus a little new age and new physics mixed in. But the essential key is that it’s ours – a unique and personal extrapolation of the faith that is already within.

Third, we apply it to our life and living. Faith that remains in the head and heart is incomplete. It must be applied to life, and that means to our neighbor, our friend, and to our community, both here and at large.

Fourth, we keep building. Faith always has an asterisk by it: *Subject to change. There are no brownie points for immobility.

Fifth, we celebrate it. That means coming to a congregation like ours where whatever your personal faith is like, it will be affirmed and challenged, informed and increased.

And for many of us, when religious faith addresses the Mystery, it declares it to be God. If life in this Universe is truly a mystery, then all the language and ritual of the church, the synagogue, the mosque, the temple, the hymns and the creeds, are the poetry of faith. To repeat those creeds, to sing those songs, are to say, I believe. I believe in the mystery. I believe in the wonder. I believe in the marvel of faith, hope, and love. I believe in Judaism’s God, in Christianity’s Jesus, in the message recorded by the prophet Muhammad. I believe in the insight to life of the Buddha. My life is enriched by the meditation of the Hindu. I am helped by the new physics, by psychology, the newspaper, the latest book, and just sitting and thinking.

So we leap and then grow wings. We trust the Universe into which we’ve been born. We claim it as ours. When we do, we give rise to the faith deep in the heart of every one of us who trusts in today and has confidence for tomorrow.

CONCLUSION

When I was serving as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ft. Myers, the church was renting out its facilities to Hindus periodically. So I took it upon myself one day to invite the president of their Society to lunch. As we were discussing their usage of our facilities, I asked, “Is there anything we could do to make our facilities work better for you?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Oh, yes. We would like to put an idol in the court yard.”

I’m quite sure my face gave me away. I could not imagine anyone in America, in the latter part of the 20^th century, wanting to put an “idol” in a church courtyard!

She immediately said, “Oh, it would be made by the finest craftsmen in India. It will be shipped directly from there to America, and installed in a beautiful part of the courtyard.”

As I recall, when I mentioned this to the board, it not only was not voted on, it was not even taken seriously. It was as though we were saying, we may not be practicing Jews or believing Christians, but there is no way in God’s heaven or hell that an idol is going to be installed in the courtyard of a humanist leaning, Unitarian Universalist church. Period, exclamation mark!

Now though, I wonder: Wouldn’t it be great to have a courtyard filled with all the symbols of faith. Wouldn’t it be special to watch others kneel before an idol, or to listen daily to the Muslim call of prayer, or see someone genuflect before a Christian cross, or sit in silence at the center of so many extrapolations of the faith with which we’re born? It gives new meaning to the statement that “If we don’t know where we are going, we will probably end up somewhere else.” Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And blessed be.

[1] Given March 25, 2007, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, Ft. Myers, Florida, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister, in the service preceding our Annual Meeting.