Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Many years ago I scripted a 13-week's television series aired on PBS entitled, "The Other School System." It featured Art Link letter as the host, a former Miss America as co-host, plus I was provided educational consultants I could call on to critique my typescript and to insure I understood the educational theory involved.

In that process, one thing the educators shared with me, that they said was a key to the intelligence of small children: the vividness of their imagination. When I asked why so, their answer was related in this way:

Imagine that the knowledge of a mature adult fills up a jar almost to the top. Then for someone like a three-year-old, her or his knowledge would only fill up a small portion near the bottom of the jar. The difference between the two represents the knowledge deficit of a three-year-old.

The child developmental specialist I was consulting with explained that the way children make up their knowledge deficit – the way they fill the bottle up so to speak – is through the use of their imagination. Through their imagination, they temporarily at least, answer their unanswered questions. The more imaginative they are in filling up the jar of knowledge, even with make-believe, the more their sense of inadequacy is reduced.

I think the same thing happens to us as adults, but not necessarily a knowledge deficit. Rather, I would like to suggest that we have a deficit of spiritual knowledge.

It’s like we used to describe Christopher Columbus and his search from Spain for a Western ocean route to India: When he started, he didn’t know where he was going; when he got here, he didn’t know where he was; when he got back, he didn’t know where he had been; and he did it all on borrowed money.

In understanding our Universe, historically, we’re much the same way. Columbus’s contemporary, Copernicus, discovered in his search of the heavens, that Planet Earth was not the center of the Universe; rather, the Sun is the center. Later, we discovered that our solar system is only a minor part of an enormous spiral galaxy of more than 100 million stars; and that the sun is orbiting the center of the galaxy at one-half-million miles per hour, while Earth is not only spinning on its axis at 1,000 mph, but it’s also orbiting the sun at a speed of 66,600 mph, and all the while our solar system of the sun and eight planets is racing outward into space at 43,000 mph.

Last century, we learned that there is another galaxy next door to our Milky Way Galaxy. And eventually we have come to realize that in fact there are at least a billion other galaxies in the Universe, plus enormous regions of dark matter. And there may even be other Universes – Multiverses.

But that all feels so relative. Here we are on little Earth, which to us is not only huge, but also home. And in a Universe whose age is measured in billions of years, and its distances by how many years it takes light to travel, it seems as we sit here this morning that we will live forever. But by time standards in our Universe, we are here for the briefest of moments, and “Poof,” we’re gone.

We walk alongside the waters of the ocean, we look down from the heights of mountain tops, we stare at the stars, at trees, the beauty surrounding us. We sit on a rock or a stump and the question arises from within, “Who are we? Where did life come from? Where are we going?"

Knowing that, there come those moments of solitude, when we are addressed and engaged by the heights and depths, the inner and outer dimensions of existence, and we ask the question, “What’s it all about?”

We want to raise our hand and ask a question of the Universe? Can we stop the world for a moment? Can we get off the merry-go-round at the next stop? Can we do something about our spiritual deficit…our inner hunger?

In answer, let me say, that’s what our species does every year. We do it by denoting holy days and sacred seasons. We give then special names and stories, which have cosmic color, with shining stars, gods, and angels. And when they’re all put together, they say the same message in many different ways. They proclaim: Stop. Look. Listen

I’ve just come back from time with my family. One of the fun parts of reading to my grandchildren at bedtime is remembering that I once read the same story to their mother or father.

Mine always liked the huffing and puffing of the big bad wolf against the three little pigs, and particularly that in the end the big bad wolf does not win. It’s the kind of story where good triumphs over evil. It’s another way the imagination of children helps them come to terms with the unknown, with things that go thump in the night, with the sometimes scary experiences of life.

There are some devout religious who oppose the reading of fairy tales, and stories of dragons and monsters – the Harry Potter series being one.

There are others on opposite ends of the religious spectrum who oppose the reading of sacred scriptures with their mythical components. They feel that anything which falls outside of the world of the concrete is to be avoided. As a result, they put up barriers to hearing stories of imagination, faith and hope. In contrast, they say, “This is the way the world is. This is the way the world is. Two and two equal four. Seeing is believing. Black is black and white is white.”

But the reality is that in the realm of the spirit, in the realm of faith, in the realm of hope, those images that bring moment and meaning to our lives, are the stories that address the living of life at its deepest and most existential level, that tap into our fears and doubts, that enable us to relive our times past and contemplate the future. Such stories help us to see beyond the gulf of space and time, the barriers of lost imagination, and the hurdles of a dualistic mindset.

What matters in the stories of this holy season are they help us to live with our mistakes.

Now some of you may be saying, "It will take more than a story to handle all of my mistakes."

Let me say this, and I’m very serious: It is precisely our weaknesses and imperfections that enable us to become better persons. That bears repeating: It is precisely our weaknesses and imperfections that enable us to become better persons.

One of the things that happens to me as a clergy person is that sometimes people share with me in confidence their deepest and darkest secrets. Sometimes that means their struggle to deal with something they did in the past that they wish so very much they hadn't done. That event in the past may still be a very destructive part of their present, as well as its limiting their future.

I would never suggest we should be shielded from the consequences of our actions. However, I genuinely believe that understanding our mistakes has the potential to help us rise to another level of living.

Biologist Lewis Thomas wrote several years ago in The Medusa and the Snail, that without the capacity to blunder, instead of the millions of different species we have on earth, we would all still be anaerobic bacteria! There would be no great music, no great art, none of the depths of experiences and the heights of achievements that we as a species know –

In fact, he says our DNA was ordained from the beginning to make small mistakes.

"If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong....We are built to make mistakes. We are genetically coded for error."

He says that other animals "do not have this splendid freedom....” For example, he asks, “Have you ever seen a clumsy cat? Dogs are sometimes fallible, but they got that way by trying to mimic their human masters."

Admitting to and addressing our mistakes enable us to believe in our inner capacity…to live a life of confidence and courage...a life devoted to discovering the inner resources we possess to be the fully human person we were meant to be.

We can read great books...listen to great music...think great thoughts...discover the joy of wonder...recapture our ability to imagine...and experience the blessing of giving. The message of this holy season is we can do things we never dreamed of doing.

Next week, the new rabbi from Temple Beth-El will be here to share Hanukah with us. The following week we will have our annual Christmas service with special music.

To highlight Judaism and Christianity in our services is not to throw them into a pot and come out with an average Judeo-Christian religion. It’s not to believe that one of them is more important than the other. Rather, it is to suggest that we are all encountered by the Sacred no matter who we are, where we live, or what religious labels we identify ourselves by.

The encounter with the sacred doesn’t have to happen in a building dedicated to specific religious practices and beliefs. Nor is it restricted to the facilities of Christians, Jews, Hindus, or Muslims. For the sacred is everywhere.

That is not to deny the horrific mistakes made in the name of religion. But as Washington, D.C. has shown us, it doesn’t take religion to really mess up the nation and the world.

But what the eclectic practices we share in our services suggest are that it is precisely the great families of world religions who have been the trustees of the sacred through the many generations of human history. Not just one religious family. Not just one religion. But they all have been and are those who guarded that which is sacred.

Precisely because of their guardianship of the sacred, we as liberal religious can practice Hindu yoga, meditate with Zen masters in Kyoto, follow Buddhist meditation, engage Taoist Tai Chi, observe Jewish Yom Kippur, partake of Christian Mass, spend all night in a Native American sweat lodge, or listen to a Muslim imam like Abdul ’haq Muhammad last Sunday.

And when we have done one or more of those, they each have the capacity to be religious experiences, and sacred encounters. We can come away with an enlarged sense of what it means to live in our world with other humans and to be joint tenants in this fragile ecosystem we call life on earth.

If we choose, later, we can put on a name tag and say, “I got mine at the synagogue,” or “I found mine at the mosque,” or “I experienced awesome at the cathedral.” That’s fine. We all came from somewhere. And part of spiritual maturity is knowing where we came from, and where we are, and where we hope to go.

But I submit the important thing is not the name tag. Rather, it is how well that particular encounter with the sacred enables us to discern the phenomenal experience of what it means to be a human being today in Ft. Myers, Florida USA, planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe.

Over Thanksgiving week, I visited my kids, grandkids, and extended family in Texas and Oklahoma. That included visiting Dallas, where my son, daughter-in-law, and my miracle granddaughter live. I’ve told the story of my daughter-in-law Tamara having had 8 major surgeries below her navel. The result was that her physicians were totally pessimistic about her ever getting pregnant and having children.

They did hold out one other possibility: another surgery, two years of diarrhea, and then a 50-50 chance of being regular and getting pregnant.

A friend, out of care and concern, suggested, “Why don’t you try acupuncture?” With nothing to lose, Tamara went to Dr. Chen. He said he thought he could help her if she came twice a week for a year. She agreed.

In only three weeks, she was regular for the first time since high school, and she missed her next period. She went to full term in her pregnancy and 2½ years ago had my wonderful little granddaughter, Ella Rose.

This time when I was there, they gave me a picture: It was a sonogram. Tamara is pregnant again, with birth predicted for June 20^th. Her physician says this one is even more miraculous.

I promise, little UNI – unnamed infant – looked to me it looked like a tiny acorn attached to the wall of Tamara’s uterus. For just a moment, I stopped, looked, and listed to a gift of this season.

And that’s what this holiday season invites all of us to do with its story, music and ritual: to take time out for a sense of the sacred…and to raise a small voice of gratitude to the Universe, or as faith says, to God.

[1] A sermon on December 02, 2007, first in a “Holiday Season” series of sermons at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.