Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Anthony David[2] wrote recently that dogs seem to have an innate capacity to fetch a stick or chase a thrown ball. My son has two labs and some kind of ball-throwing device. He takes them out in the front yard of their home and they jump and wag their tails and even bark to hurry him up. Then he throws the ball as far as he can, and they always race after it as fast as possible. Then they bring it back, drop it and are all excited about doing the same thing…over and over again. It just seems natural: Dogs like to chase things.

But try carrying your cat outside sometime – I say, “carry,” because she or he will not obediently follow you outside. Whether male or female, it will not jump up and down and wag its tail and meow in anticipation. So sit the cat near you and then throw a stick. The cat may roll over on its back a time or two, lick itself, and maybe scan a distant tree for birds. And when you say, “Fetch, kitty,” if she or he even chooses to look at you, it will be to say something in cat-talk, like, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Fetching sticks and returning them are not natural to cats. Dogs yes; cats no. So when it comes to religion, are human beings more like dogs or cats? Is it innate or an add on?

To address that question, I suggest that we spend a few moments exploring some of the highlights of the life of a woman designated as the greatest feminist of the 20^th Century – anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who was born on December 16, 1901, and died, November 15, 1978.

In 1969 Time named her “Mother of the Year.” She was a past president of the American Anthropological Association and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was also awarded 28 honorary doctorates. And for most of her professional life, she was the curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Two years after her death in 1978, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Starting when she was 23, Margaret Mead conducted 11 missions in primitive cultures, including returning to them after World War II, to examine the impact the war had had upon them.

One of the insights from her career came in her mature years, when she contended that primitive societies barely experienced change. Things were the same for one generation as for the preceding ones. A child repeated almost exactly the same lives of her or his parents. The external community did little to impact the structure of home, work, and society. That was in primitive societies: Things stayed the same.

But Mead wrote that in more advanced societies, the impact of external factors caused significant change. Children often abandoned their parents' ways and modeled their behavior on others, like teachers or sports heroes.

But that also has changed. Our technological society has erased all the previous models. Youth today, she argued, are like children of wilderness pioneers – the first natives in a new world. "For the first time in human history," she said, "there are no elders anywhere who know what the young people know." If you’ve tried to set up some of your own gadgets, you know what I mean. In today’s world, we parents, especially those of us with adult children, have to reverse what once was the traditional pattern and let our children teach us what the real issues and questions are.

Mead had a lifelong interest in children. She was friends with Dr. Benjamin Spock, a little known pediatrician, when her only child, a daughter, was born in 1939. She agreed with Dr. Spock to rear her daughter by the practices described in what would be his book published seven years later (1946), entitled The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. In it, he argued that babies should be fed on demand and picked up when they cried, rather than the practices of that time which specified rigid, predetermined practices of feeding, sleeping, and tending.

She also influenced the sexual mores of America through her very first book, Coming of Age in Samoa. Mead went to the South Pacific Territory of American Samoa. She reported that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex; but they eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. All without social strictures or punishment. The book was a best seller, as well as initiating a widespread reevaluation of sexual mores. Many feel that transformation was visibly expressed in the 60s and 70s, and was greatly enabled by the availability of the new contraceptive for women – birth control pills.

Mead was married and divorced three times, and according to her daughter, most probably had a committed, same-sex relationship in her later years. Dr. Mead said of her three marriages, "I don't consider any of my marriages as failures. It’s idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it’s failed."

She was an early proponent of birth control, an advocate of the repeal of anti-abortion laws, and a supporter of the right to die. Here are a few of her more intriguing statements:

n “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

n “One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.”

n “Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.”

n “America has developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.”

n “Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.”

Let me use that last one to segue into the topic first broached this morning, namely, the issue of our innate religious inclination or the lack thereof.

Margaret Mead's parents were agnostic; however, due to a friendship she had with a clergyman's daughter, Margaret determined a few days before her eleventh birthday that she wanted to be baptized a Christian. As you can imagine, the decision was not popular with her parents. They were particularly dumbfounded when she insisted on “fasting during Lent."

She went further: Her first marriage was to an Episcopal priest. She later described it as her “student marriage.” And late in life she was on the committee charged with the 1979 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which provides the guide to Episcopal/Anglican worship. She also was an official delegate of the denomination to the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches.

She regularly attended Sunday services. She originally opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood, however, she later changed her mind, because she believed that "men have so damaged the priesthood that women are needed to repair it." She was not overly fond of preaching, largely because of the congregation's inability to respond.

For her, the church and the sacraments were a glimpse into the transcendent. She explained that she needed worship and ritual to counterbalance the cognitive faith of her mother. "What I wanted was a form of religion that gave expression to an already existing faith."

By “form of religion” she meant a community of people who have committed to center their lives around a powerful, sacred story, in her case, the story of Jesus Christ. In worship, they reenact that story through worship and ritual. They internalize it through spiritual practices. And it’s lived out through service to others.

She needed it, she said, to balance the cognitive faith, the intellectualism, the agnosticism, of her mother.

So as Unitarians, what is our sacred story? We do have one. As a liberal religious congregation, our sacred story roots in retelling the story of the Universe, its planets, solar systems, and galaxies. We talk about the Big Bang, about evolution, and gravity. That’s an intellectual construct that we constantly describe. Its origins are such a wondrous Mystery. For example, if the Big Bang were 15 or 20 billion years ago, what was there before the Big Bang and how long was whatever that was? Or was there a time when there was no time. Is time just a creation of our time on this planet or solar system or galaxy?

In worship, we follow traditional forms, but because we are reenacting a different sacred story, the words are different. The lyrics to Enter, Rejoice and Come In, are worshipful, but they are based upon the human story as told by today’s persons in these times and places – rather than 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. The same is true of Spirit of Life, which we will sing a little later.

We became Unitarians because we have clearly been intellectually transformed; but to survive, we must also seek to find a sense of mystery, awe and wonder within those new paramenters.

Our sacred story did not conclude with one person, it also includes Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Gandhi and King, as well as Jesus, Moses and Muhammad, and Socrates, Plato and the Apostle Paul. Our story is the whole of existence, not a short time frame within that whole. The story of one history making individual like Jesus or Paul is a part of our sacred story as well. Our uniqueness is not a singular story; rather, its uniqueness is that it includes every story as seen from the window of the world which our time period has raised. So we can celebrate Easter, the High Holy Days, Eid, and Christmas. Each is our story because they are the story of our species. It is humankind’s story, but it’s from the perspective of the whole rather than from the part.

Secondly, our story is of an open Universe, rather than a closed one. We used to think that this is the way the world is…this is the way the world is. Two plus two are four. Cause produces effect. Black is black and White is white.

Now we know that the only thing that never changes is that things will always change. None of us is the same person today that we were yesterday, much less a year ago…10 or 20 years ago. So despite how much we might occasionally wish to reverse the way things are…the way things change…our faith story has to tell it the way it is. We’re born...we become adults…we love…and we die. And in between, life is lived in so many different, changing ways.

Sometimes, we want to say, “Hey. Stop the world. I want to get off.” But regardless, things keep changing. What we try for is not to construct something outside of us to believe, but to discover that which is inside us…inside our bodies…inside our fellow species…inside our planet and world.

When we spend time thinking, praying, reading, reflecting…when we stop to access the depths…we are internalizing what we’ve learned about our world and our place in it. We then proceed to live out our lives in that awareness.

More than 15 years ago, my brother died at age 62 of a virulent form of leukemia, which he had courageously fought for five years. I was called down to Waco, Texas, to join his Assembly of God pastor in conducting the funeral service.

Wesley had the largest John Deere dealership in the Southwest, except for one in the Rio Grande Valley. He had 10,000 aces in cultivation, which meant at times those giant Deere tractors were running three abreast, 90 feet wide, 24/7. There was a dairy with almost a 1,000 cows; 2,000 head of cattle on grass; motels, oil and gas wells, and a truck line.

Which meant that a huge number of people filled to overflowing the sanctuary of the church in which we met. And when we left the church to go to the cemetery, his two children had decided to have one of their newest, red, Peterbilt trucks with a shiny new aluminum cattle trailer some 40 or more feet long, slowly lead the processional, with lights on and flashing. When we arrived at the gates, of course the truck was too huge to go into the cemetery. But unknown to any of us as to his intent, the driver stopped his truck, turned off the lights, and turned off the giant engine. The processional came to a halt. And we sat there for a moment: the truck driver who had worked for “Mr. Wesley” longer than any other. Then he started up the engine, put it in gear and yanked on the air horn three times before pulling away. Nothing said or done beforehand or after said it better.

Maybe there is a place where angels sing and harps are played; like the cat, I’ll pass. But a truck driver, who on his own turns off the engine and the lights of his truck and sits in a moment of silence, then starts up and gives three blasts on an air horn: that’s as natural as can be. It’s this world…our sounds…our salutes…in our sacred stories…our reenactment…our practices…and our service. It was a form of religion that gave expression to the faith within each of us: that our lives and passing matter.

[1] A sermon given March 22, 2009 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation of Ft. Myers, FL, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, Minister.

[2] Senior Minister, Atlanta UU Congregation.