Sermon

INTRODUCTION: The connection that most of us have sought the hardest to understand is this:

n Is there an Ultimate Connection…some Force…some conscious self-understanding, which would potentially give some kind of greater meaning to our brief stay on this planet of ours?

n Is there some hidden energy…some hint of greater good…a cosmic plan to which we should adhere?

n And in so doing, would knowing that bring a sense of purpose and fulfillment to our sojourn? Or to put that in religious language:

n Is there an Ultimate Connection…some Force…some conscious self-understanding, which would potentially give some kind of greater meaning to our brief stay on this planet of ours?

n Is there some hidden energy…some hint of greater good…a cosmic plan to which we should adhere?

n And in so doing, would knowing that bring a sense of purpose and fulfillment to our sojourn? Or to put it in religious language:

Without benefit of the science that we have, human being has always struggled to answer those questions just posed. In another form, they are:

That’s why we should never make fun or ridicule the answers that were given to those questions thousands of years ago: They were the cutting edge of that day in trying to address the Mystery of Existence before which we all stand.

One example is the first twelve chapters of Genesis, which are wonderfully rich myths, all of which are aimed at trying to understand why this world is the way it is.

Then in the second chapter another writer addresses the same questions, but has different answers and makes creation much more simple: Seemingly in one full day, God gets everything done, which allows the writer to get to more bothersome questions, that are much more difficult to explain:

n If God created everything, then why would he let devastation and destruction wipe it out?

And in the 11^th chapter, he answers the question of why do we speak so many different languages? Why isn’t there just one language? Then in the 12^th chapter, we learn that God has favorites: Abraham and his children.

The rest of the Hebrew scriptures is their story…the story of the children of Abraham, who become the children of Jacob, also known as Israel, and the Israelites become known as Jews or children of the tribe of Judah. That’s all after the first 12 chapters which are the prelude, and the rest the main movement. It’s one answer to why things are the way they are.

But there are other answers. All across the globe, and in all kinds of times, people and places where they attempted to answer those original questions but with different answers: Plato, Confucius, Lao Tze, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, to name only a few.

Despite the brilliance of their answers, they all suffered one handicap. They did not understand the way the world worked. Geology, astronomy, biology, psychology, sociology, and the host of other disciplines which we use to explain the world, were nonexistent. They were handicapped by magic and myth. The suitcase that carried their stuff, the train that carried their baggage, caused them to see the world from the limitations of a world view that simply wasn’t so. The question we continue to face is, was their message worthy but the packaging defective?

“In 1919 Edwin Hubble, working out of the University of Chicago, looked through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time. He identified a star that was far, far away and not the same sun that fed life on Earth. It was another sun. And it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns.”[2]

Now what would those religious figures I cited earlier have done with that knowledge…had they known that the earth was not the center of the Universe…that our sun was a really average kind of sun, as was our solar system, and that our galaxy was only one in a billion of other galaxies, some incredibly enormous?

But now come with me if you would to what we quaintly call the 21^st century…”quaint” in the context of four or five billion years as a planet and 14 or so as a Universe.

In the New York Times last Wednesday, an editorial reported on a recent scholarly paper by the British mathematician Roger Penrose, which claims that our Universe may simply be one link in a chain of universes, each beginning with a Big Bang and ending in a way that sends detectable gravitational waves into the next universe. It’s another way of proposing that our universe is only one in a multiverse of co-existing, but undetectable, universes.

Let me read that last sentence again: “It’s another way of proposing that our universe is only one in a multiverse of co-existing, but undetectable, universes.”

What Penrose and his colleague V.G. Gurzadyan are proposing is that 14 billion years ago, instead of the Big Bang having been preceded by nothing, it may in fact have been preceded by something: gravitational waves generated by collisions of superbig black holes…before the Big Bang.

So not only may our planet be unexceptional, but also our solar system, our galaxy, and! our Universe!

Now earlier on, I suggested that many of the great religions of the world are hampered by the baggage they bring, the myths they carry, the presumptions about the world in which they are framed. But they did not know better. They worked with the understanding that they had. And our task is not to criticize their science but to let their insights to human existence challenge us and our living.

But now in the full light of day, with scientific probing as recent as last Wednesday’s New York Times, listen to this the 7^th principle and practice of Unitarian Universalism. We covenant to affirm and promote:

Respect for the interdependent web of human existence of which we all are part.”

Which is another way of saying that, everything that is and was and ever shall be is connected. The question is, how can we connect to a seemingly unbroken stream of connectedness that goes back in one endless chain of Big Bangs? One of the answers is to realize that the religious quest, in whatever form, is a quest for connectedness.

I like the story of the patient who went to see an acupuncturist. His knee was killing him. The acupuncturist began to put needles in his back. The patient protested: Doc, it’s my knee that’s hurting, not my back. The acupuncturist replied, “It’s all connected.”

If you have time, I encourage you to read my column in this month’s newsletter in which I expound on this from another perspective. And I also mention that Joyce and I have decided that instead of going away for the holidays, or going on a cruise, or some such, we would instead use the CDs and DVDs that we have from our retreat in Sedona last summer. In effect, we’re going to be on retreat during Christmas to New Year’s…all while staying here in Lee County, Florida. Two days at Mother of God: House of Prayer, along with massages and practicing of special meditations. It’s all about connectedness.

Now, I want to shift gears. We are in the eight days of Hanukkah, a wonderfully mythic story that’s gained in importance because of its location on the calendar next to Christmas.

The original story is how a brave and rebellious family of Jews fought the much more powerful Graeco-Syrian Army and won. And when they went to clean up the temple which had been defiled by pork placed on the altar by the emperor Antiochus Epiphanies IV, they lit a candle like the one in our Chalice. It only had enough oil for one day, but the mythic miracle was that it burned for eight days. Hence, the meaning of our hymn earlier. That’s also the reason for the eight candles in the menorah, plus the one in the middle to be used to light the other eight. It’s a story about right overcoming might…of a minority winning over a majority…of wonderful things that happen to those who trust and believe.

I close with this wonderful story of Hanukkah that illustrates the best of us all:

In Billings, Montana, where there were no more than 100 Jewish families, several years ago, a 5-year old Jewish boy, with his mother’s help, put a Menorah in his bedroom window. That meant to anyone outside that he was Jewish and not celebrating Christmas. That meant he was different than most people in Billings, Montana.

While he was asleep, someone threw a rock through his window. The policeman told the mother that for her and her son’s safety, she should probably keep the menorah out of the window.

The newspaper ran a story about what had happened, and a United Methodist woman read it and thought how awful it was. She mentioned it to her minister and they put up a menorah in two of the church’s windows. The High School put up a Hanukkah greeting on their outdoor bulletin board. A sports store did the same. Eventually the local newspaper ran a full page picture of a menorah and encouraged subscribers to cut it out and put it in their window. Eventually, the whole town was submersed under menorahs.

It’s as if they were saying to the hate mongers who threw the rock through the window: If you are going to throw rocks at people with menorahs in their windows, then you will have to throw one through every house in Billings, because you know what? More than 5,000 people – homes and businesses – put a menorah in their windows.

That’s what the meaning of our holiday season should be about, that whatever our religious practice – whether we are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, Unitarian-Universalist, or none of the above – it’s doing those things that say, we know that we all share together in different ways the wonder of being human beings in America on planet earth in 2010.

[1] Presented Dec. 05, 2010 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister, 7^th and last in a series: “The Principles and Practices of Unitarian Universalism: (VII): Respect for the interdependent web of human existence of which we all are part.”

[2] Isabel Wilkerson, “The Warmth of Other Suns.”