“The Gift That’s Greater Than Any Faith.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: Two[2] of the pioneering developers of computer hardware and software back in the early 1950s were able to solve their main problems when they recognized that everyone else was trying to design perfect software and perfect hardware systems: fault-proof, as it were. Avizienis and Svabody concluded that the opposite should be the case.

They realized that any system made by human beings would be flawed. So built into any computer system had to be a capacity for functioning even when faults occurred. The question was:

“How can a system be developed so as to tolerate mistakes?”

That meant the challenge for them in design was to build a “fault tolerant computer,” which they did in 1954. It could have hardware faults occur and still function. 

 When I first read about their work, I thought of it as having parallels to life and theology in many ways. None of our lives is perfect. There are some things that should work that don’t; some hopes and dreams we counted on that don’t happen; some people we depended on who failed us; some who depended upon us, and we failed them. But despite all of the problems, we still have to be able to work and to cope. It’s very difficult to call “time-out” in the midst of living. In effect, we have to have a “fault-tolerant” ability, no matter the problems.

            The same is true in matters of faith and practice. One of the difficulties we have is that for 2,500 years, Western theology has attempted to construct a “fault-proof” theology. We were taught and told that God was perfect. He knew everything, could do anything, and cared so much for the world that he gave his only son to die for us. God was perfect.

            Mark Twain was an agnostic much of his life, but in his latter years became a very bitter atheist. He lost his young daughter; he invested in a linotype machine and went bankrupt; he had to go back on the road just to pay the bills. And the litany of bad things happening to a good person was quite long.

            In that environment, he wrote The Mysterious Stranger. Its central thesis is that if God is so good, so all-knowing, so all-powerful, then why in the world are things in such terrible shape.

            It was so strong that Twain’s wife refused to let him publish it. And even after his death, it was kept out of print for 50 years.  

            I remember after I finished reading it, that it hit me hard. And when I then went to my literature class at the University of Oklahoma, there was nothing that the professor said that assuaged my concern.

            But I had been invited to speak that coming Sunday night at the Pentecostal Holiness Church of Bethany, Oklahoma. The minister was a friend of both my family and me. And I used the questions it posed as the three points of my sermon: Does God know what’s going on in this world in which we live? Does God care? Is God able to do anything about it?

            I’m not sure what I said, but I know that the questions were not answered for me.

            But I want to pose this question: Are we the victims of a failed system design? What if we went back to the drawing board, erased all the clutter, and came up with a new, fault-tolerant theology?

            How could we revisit our Jewish and Christian roots, so that we found ways fully to appreciate the richness of our heritage? How would we do that and where would we start?

For me, it would be with what I consider the heart of both Jewish and Christian scripture. Because of that, it always bears repeating:

            When Jesus was asked, of all the commandments in Jewish scripture – 613 of them – which is the greatest, he answered,

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all they strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.” (Luke 10:27)

As theologian Schubert Ogden has written, “How could it be possible to love God with ALL – one’s heart, soul, mind and strength – and then have any left over for one’s neighbor, unless the way we are to love God is by loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.” In other words, deity worship is a misplaced application of devotion. If we really want to love God, then love our neighbor. And how does that occur?

Frederick Buechner explained the different ways to do that:

"The love for equals is a human thing...of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.

“The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing...the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

“The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing...to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is bewildered by its saints.

“And then there is the love for the enemy...love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer.”[3]

That kind of love is world changing. In fact, Albert Einstein wrote the following:

n     “If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets of all subsequent additions…

n     “And if one purges Christianity of all its subsequent additions, leaving it as Jesus Christ taught it…

n     “Then one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity.”

Remember: We’re constructing a “fault-tolerant theology.” And for sure, some of us have plenty of faults. But as the late Jay Gould said, together, we offer 10,000 acts of kindness every morning on the way to work. We smile at someone we don’t know; we ask the grocery clerk how she’s doing; we tell out wait staff what a super job she’s done.

According to Jesus, we’re spreading God’s love. When we help Hope House, when we buy vegetables for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, when we donate clothing for the McGregor Clinic, we are loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

We’re not perfect, but we’re trying. And our system is fault-tolerant and allows us to keep on keeping on even when we make mistakes.

Secondly, a fault tolerant theology would understand that this is a friendly Universe.

Einstein said, “I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

He later went on to state, "I think the most important question facing humanity is, 'Is the universe a friendly place?' This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.”

Let me visualize that for you. We’ve all heard the statement that, “The Whole is more than the sum of its parts.” In advertising and marketing that would mean that that amount of customers a radio commercial draws is “x” number, and a “TV” commercial draws a certain number, and a billboard so many, and newspaper ads so many. But if you run those all different me at the same time, they each outperform what they would do solo. “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

And if you have a person lying on a gurney in an emergency room, it would be theoretically possible to identify all that person’s parts. But we know that a person is more than her or his parts. Because it’s possible to have a deceased person with the same parts, but not be living. In other words, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. To be alive is be more than just our body parts.

The same may well be so when we speak of God. The late Charles Hartshorne, the only world-class Unitarian Universalist ever, said if we think of all that is as the body of God, in the same way as a human is more than her or his parts, so the Universe, the body of God, is more than everything that is. Rather than that being a pantheist, he called it panentheist.

What that means is that by God we do not mean something outside the Universe with some innate sense of perfection attaching. No, it’s all that is and more than.

Third, if we were going to design a fault tolerant theology, I think it would be essential to shed the notion that we are all dirty, low-down, sneaking, thieving, son-of-gunning sinners. We’re not. We’re human beings

            Our culture supports thinking of ourselves as innately bad rather than good. We are taught to think of ourselves as sinful rather than saintly. We are not perceived as people who make mistakes or commit sins, but people who are Mistakes and who are Sinners. And it is very hard to love ourselves if we have constantly been taught to think of ourselves as bad, as sinners.

But you are a good person. Any given day is proof positive that we spend most of our time working, sharing responsibilities, and doing deeds that in no way can be called sinful and wrong. In fact, the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould has an article entitled, “Ten thousand acts of kindness,” which he submits as proof of our innate inclination towards acts of goodness each and every day. He says that society could not function if in fact we were innately bad.

I always like to put it this way:

If we were innately bad by nature, then when we did bad, we would feel good, for it is our nature…

And when we did good, we would feel bad, because it goes against our nature… But the fact is, we feel good, when we do good, and bad, when we do bad… That’s because we have the potential to be good simply by doing good, which for Jesus was the same as loving God.

So as the foundation for building our own theology, Love our self.

Marianne Williamson writes, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the Universe. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

There’s one other kind of love that Jesus didn’t mention. It’s what we think of as romantic love. Erich Fromm wrote a wonderful little book entitled, The Art of Loving. In it, he traces the evolution of romantic love and contends that it was as recent as the Victorian Era that love was not viewed as a spontaneous personal experience, which then might lead to marriage. (Queen Victoria lived until 1901.)

Rather, marriage was contracted by convention – either by the respective families, or by a marriage broker or without the help of such intermediaries; it was concluded on the basis of social considerations. Love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded. It is only in the last few generations that the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the Western world.

From says though that we err when we identify love with romantic feeling and infatuation. He contends that we have to move beyond that understanding to practices of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.

CONCLUSION.

The story’s told that as Oscar Hammerstein lay dying, he sent Broadway musical star, Mary Martin a note, just before she went on stage to perform South Pacific. It read:

“A bell’s not a bell till you ring it.

“A song’s not a song till you sing it.

“Love in your heart is not put there to stay.

“Love isn’t love till you give it away.”

On this Valentine’s Day 2010, how wonderful to be able to love.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.

Amen. Blessed Be.