Sermon

INTRODUCTION: One of the all-time 100 best movies came out in the 1970s. It starred Dustin Hoffman, and Chief Dan George, as well as Faye Dunaway. The movie, Little Big Man, opens with a young reporter at a nursing home interviewing 121-years-old Jack Crabb. He was the last survivor on the Indian side, of General George Custer’s last stand in 1876 at Little Bighorn in Montana. That battle is generally viewed as the last great stand of the Plains Indians against the White invaders. All the 276 soldiers of Custer were killed in that battle with the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho.

In the story, through the accidents of history, the survivor, Crabb, had lived his life in both White and Cheyenne cultures. When he was just a child, the Cheyenne had rescued Crabb and his sister during an attack by Pawnee Indians on a settlers’ wagon train. He was taken in by the Cheyenne and raised among them.

But due to his initial White parentage, and then his Cheyenne rearing, he had spent a lifetime of bouncing between the two cultures. Crabb now spins to the reporter tales of life in each. Native people call it, “Walking between two worlds.” A brief excerpt of their conversation and interaction will provide our scripture for this morning’s sermon:[2]

At one point, Crabb tells of a Cheyenne elder named Old Lodge Skins, who taught Crabb the difference between White people (which would be Western civilization) and human beings (or native peoples) – the Cheyenne.

Crabb first explained that the only word the Cheyenne had for themselves meant simply “human beings.” Then, he told of Old Lodge Skins telling him this:

Do you see this fine thing? <hold up painted rock> Do you admire the humanity of it? Because the human beings – the Cheyenne – my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only woman and man and animals, but also water, earth, stone, and also the things that come from them….That is the way things are, according to the Cheyenne.

But the White man, they believe EVERYTHING is dead. Stone, earth, trees, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, White man will rub them out. That is the difference.

Now the question that segment broaches is quite simple on the one hand, but quite complex as far as the depth of the question, on the other. Namely: Is everything alive?

Let’s make it more specific: Are we alive? It seems safe to answer in the affirmative, doesn’t it? But if we are alive, what does “we” refer to as being alive? Is every single part of us alive, or is it just our heart, or is it maybe just our brain? What about our little toe, or our ear drum. What about the liver or lungs? What does it mean to say we as people are “alive?”

Or does to be alive refer to something separate and apart from us, maybe our souls or our consciousness. I remember in the church of my original spiritual heritage, it was very important for one’s soul to be saved. And what does “consciousness” mean? What is it, and where is it? And in what way is “consciousness” what we mean by “to be alive.”

Several years ago, I went to hear Dr. Depak Chopra speak. As you know, he originates from India, came to America to do extended training in medicine, and was initially a practicing endocrinologist. But he concluded very soon that something basic is wrong with the American or Western model of medicine. One example he gave was that so many seem to think of only their brain cells being conscious. Dr. Chopra said every cell has a dimension of awareness to it.

That meant, he said, don’t say negative things about yourself or your body, because every cell “hears” it. If you say, “I’m so dumb,” your cells will think they are supposed to act dumb. Be positive and upbeat in everything you say about yourself.

So one question posed by Old Lodge Skins statement was, what is it that’s alive? It’s not so simple, is it?

Old Lodge Skins says “human beings,” what we know better as the Cheyenne Indians, believed that not only women, men and animals are alive, but everything is: rocks, water, trees, even the Earth.

So let’s take water: Is this water “alive” or “dead” before I drink it? After I drink it, and it’s ingested and processed by my body, is it now dead or alive? The food we will probably eat following service, is it alive before we eat it or only after we eat it, or is it only alive when it is metabolized to become energy for our body? If it were vegetables, are they dead since they’ve been picked, or are they alive enough to provide sustenance for your body? Ditto for other foodstuffs?

So when you stand before a stream of water that we human beings have polluted, so that its life-giving qualities are no long viable, should we be concerned about the life or death of the water? Or is that romanticizing something which is purely chemical?

When we are warned that the fish we love to eat have such high levels of mercury that we should avoid eating them, should we also be concerned that it is we human beings responsible for the mercury in the water that the fish ingest? The “we” of whom I speak is we Americans – the biggest polluters on the face of the Earth.

But I would like to suggest that the truth of that statement is not merely an environmental issue, it is a spiritual issue, which is the point of Old Lodge Skins. It roots in how we see ourselves. It discloses what we believe about our life in the world. So what do we believe?

When Old Lodge Skin speaks, he refers to White people with contempt because they believe everything is dead. He doesn’t necessarily mean White people per se, but our self-understandings, the way we see the world. And in Western civilization – namely in every nation West of Rome – we divide the world, rather than uniting it. The modern era began in one very real sense when in philosophy and science, we made the distinction between us and them – between ourselves and everything else – or the more classic phraseology, we moved to seeing ourselves as an “I” and everything else as an “It.” It’s what we mean by objectification – turning everything into an object to be acted upon, not to be engaged with.

I’ve told the story many times of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose mother and father divorced when he was a child. Since both parents had to work during the summertime, Buber would go to his grandparents’ farm to live with them. There he was given certain chores to perform. This was near the close of the 19^th century and before the mechanization of farming, which meant that horses had to be used in the fields to plow, plant and harvest.

One of Buber’s assigned summer chores at the farm was to care for the horses. After they had spent the day working in the fields, his task was to take a big brush and brush them down, or curry them, and then take a big comb to comb their manes and tails. In other words, he gave the horses what we might call a “massage.”

One day, as he was brushing one of the horses, and trying as best he could to do a good job, he had this unique thought: He wondered what it must be like to be a horse, and have a 12-year-old boy brushing you. In other words, he tried to put himself in the place of the horse. And then he began to brush the horses in terms of what he thought the horses would like, rather than its being a chore to be done, or a necessary farm function.

Years later, as Buber grew into an adult and turned to theology and philosophy, he took that particular concept and wrote a book about it, entitled, Ich und Du. Or as we know it in English, I and Thou.

In one sense, Buber is speaking as Old Lodge Skins, when he said that we in Western Civilization see everything as dead. Buber phrases it differently. He writes that we in Western Civilization view both objects and people by their functions. Let me repeat that: We view both objects and people by their functions, what work they do.

For example, how many times have we met someone for the first time, and in the process of conversation, they asked us where we worked, or if they knew where we worked, what we did, namely, our function. Or we did it to them by asking, “What do you do for a living?”

Buber says that we objectify people by identifying them with their function. We attach value to a person by the position they hold or the function they fulfill.

It’s endemic, Buber says, to our western civilization to view both people and objects by their function. That’s objectifying. For Buber, all such processes are I-It relationships.

We keep ourselves apart, and outside the possibility of relationship. We do it either to protect ourselves, or because we feel too vulnerable to open up, or we do it to get something from somebody. That’s an “I-It” relationship. We don’t engage eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart, person-to-person.

But it is possible, according to Buber, to place ourselves completely into a relationship, so as to truly understand and "be present" with another person. We remove the masks, and the pretenses. When we do, it’s what Buber calls an "I-Thou" relationship. The interactions or relationships have no preconditions. Each person responds by trying to enhance the other person, rather than ourselves. That’s living people treating other living persons equally. There’s more:

Interestingly, like Old Skin Lodges, Buber maintains that it is also possible to have an I-Thou relationship with the world and the objects in it.

To make this more timely, let me mention something that just happened. I’m sure that many of us had conflicted feelings when we heard Friday morning that Al Gore had been the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Conflicted because he had half-a-million more people vote for him to be president than did George W. Bush. Conflicted because Florida’s election procedures proved so vulnerable to abuse. Conflicted because the U.S. Supreme Court violated its professed support for state’s rights and stole an election from the people. But more conflicted, because one of this president’s first acts was to withdraw the United States from participation in the Kyoto protocols. That meant that America, the biggest polluter in the world, was unwilling to join in addressing our global environmental issues.

What might our world have looked like during the past six years if we had had someone who could one day qualify as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who would be recognized for his 30-years of work with the environment, instead of the disaster our nation now faces around the globe – all the while ignoring the calamity happening in our environment? I mean, the North Pole is melting for God’s sake!

According to Buber and Old Skin Lodges, it’s a matter of how we view the world: dead or alive. What we have learned from the New Physics and so much of the work of a generation of great thinkers, is that truly this world is alive…right down to its smallest molecule. As the dominant species on the planet, we are sadly failing in our responsibilities – none more than our own nation’s president.

But what does that say about religion and how we see the world? Let’s talk for a moment about God. For Buber, trying to prove God's existence or to define who or what God is, automatically makes the relationship I-It – We acting upon It. Instead, Buber contends that God is the Eternal Thou. We can only enter that relationship with respect and openness to life.

Let’s put that another way: When we diminish the value and purpose of living things, we are in an I-It relationship to existence. When we pollute the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, we are in an I-It relationship with the Eternal Thou.

But if God is in everything from big to small, then by our efforts to improve the condition of every part of the Earth, we have the capacity to enter into an I-Thou relationship with God – again, by our efforts to improve the condition of the Earth. Further, when people do the necessary soul-searching to right wrongs, not only does society tend to get well and get right, but it’s a way of engaging the divine. God is the need we see, that we meet and engage.

So what about the classic options in our society of supernaturalism or atheism? Like many of you, as a child I grew up believing in a supernatural world, and even for a while as a young adult. When I broke free of that limitation, I turned to atheism. But one of the things that I’ve learned at All Faiths is that neither supernaturalism nor atheism are fully appropriate. Buber would say that they objectify existence, and reduce God to an It…a thing. He suggests that we can understand existence as “Thou,” that we can even enter into a relationship with existence.

We stand before the life presented to us in the flower, the plant, and the pet and marvel that they too share life on this planet. We can see that this world and all its inhabitants are not only living and breathing, but they also offer the potential of engagement, as the Eternal Thou proclaimed by Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Whether Hindu or Buddhist, atheist or agnostic, we can relate to that which is more than any of us understands. And in so doing, recognize the gifts that have been given, the wonders before our eyes, and the miracle of existence – not only mine and yours, but as Old Skin Lodges said, earth, rocks and water.

Sophie Abercrombie has written that when we no long are in awe of creation, we will use creation’s offerings as “mere commodities for economic gain. When we don’t realize that we originated from particles of stardust, which are connected to every other particle of stardust, we are capable of the ruthless destruction of rain forests, the damming up of rivers, a worship of warfare and a blatant disregard for the poor.”

In contrast, the mysticism of Native peoples is a capacity for mystery. Its earth-based mysticism is an enduring resource that delivers liberating hope and creative possibilities.

To many Native Americans, the number four is important because it is the number the four winds: North, South, East and West. However, the number seven is also important because it encompasses all directions: north, south, east, west, above, below, and "here in the center."

This morning, we are here, in the center, near sacred fire. We are free to engage existence at whatever level of confidence we wish. And in so doing, we are addressed by the Thou before whom we all stand.

[1] A sermon on October 14, 2007, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.

[2] I have my colleague, the Rev. James Wheeler, of the United Methodist Church to thank for this segment.