FOUNDERS DAY: The Next Ten Years.[1]

INTRODUCTION: Tomorrow is “President’s Day,” and I must say that I’ve always found the religion of our first presidents and Founding Fathers, to be of particular interest. For example, George Washington, our first president, regularly attended Church – the Episcopal Church – with his wife Martha. But on the Sundays when the practice of their church was to take Holy Communion at the end of the service, President Washington would leave before it started, and return home, even though that meant sending a carriage back for Martha.

            Dr. Abercrombie, the pastor, was upset by this practice of the president, so one Sunday he preached a sermon in which he noted, “…the unhappy tendency, particularly of those in elevated stations, who, uniformly turned their backs upon the celebration of the Lord's Supper.”

            His remarks were intended for the president, and the president caught his intention. But he didn’t seem to take offence. From then on, he simply didn’t attend church on the Sundays they were having communion.

            So, religious? Yes, Washington was religious: He went to church religiously, that is, regularly. But was he spiritual?

            That’s not an easy distinction to make. However, on Thursday mornings, along with lunch, some 25 to 30 of us have been involved in a workshop on faith development, using as a text, the new book, ALL THINGS SHINING: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. And in this past Thursday’s session, the focus was made historically on the distinction between Judaism and its offspring, Christianity. In a sense, it was the distinction between religion and spirituality. So that you can remember them, there are two key P-words: practice and purity.

            To understand, let me quote some Hebrew and Christian scripture and also tell a story about Playboy Magazine and former president, Jimmy Carter. The scripture comes from the Gospel of Matthew (05:27f), which is Christian scripture, and in this Christian scripture, it itself quotes Hebrew scripture from Exodus (20:14). According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus said:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.”

So Jesus quotes Jewish scripture that commands, “Don’t commit adultery.” We know that it will break up your home, cause heartache, and besides that, it’s against the law of God. But Jesus says, that’s what they used to say in olden times. In fact, to his audience, who were very much practitioners of keeping the commandments, he dismissively refers to them as the “old days.”

            In the place of keeping the old commandments, Jesus says this, “But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.”

            Those are two distinctly different ways of understanding how to live the life worth living. According to the Jews, it was to practice living a good life daily…to keep the laws they had covenanted with God to abide by. By doing so, they would be counted as a righteous person.

            So from Judaism, we get the notion of the practice of faith. That’s the regular routine of doing things. Our solar system as we experience it here on Planet Earth functions on a 24 hour cycle and a 365 day orbit. In most parts of the United States, that means there are seasons when it’s appropriate to plant (Spring), to grow what we’ve planted (Summer), then to harvest it (Fall), and a time to let the ground rest and lie fallow (Winter).

I experienced those seasons, when I served as interim minister in East Lansing, Michigan, I had the habit of getting up each morning to run and walk at 5:45. At the end of my walk, about a quarter of a mile from my home, I would stop at the same place to do push-ups. In the crack in the sidewalk on which I did my push-ups, a few blades of grass were growing. As the Fall and Winter approached, they died and turned brown; but lo and behold, that Spring, they burst forth in beautiful bright green and told me, “You didn’t think we were coming back, did you?”

In this part of the Galaxy, there is a rhythm to life, and our lives are enhanced when we get in sync with its rhythms. Unrealized benefits accrue to this synchronization. For example: I went in for a checkup with my primary care physician last November. She’s very thorough, and because I’ve been seeing her for many years, we’ve developed an ability to interact easily. And after she had finished what she needed to do, she said, “Wayne, I want you to know that because of your genetic predisposition to small arteries and a propensity to produce plaque, you wouldn’t be sitting here in my office if you hadn’t exercised and kept your weight down.”

As I thought about what she said, I remembered that years ago when I began to exercise regularly, it was nearly always at the same time of day and week. That routine had become a ritual that, according to my physician, was life-saving. I also thought of going back to East Lansing and getting down on the ground where the blades of grass were shooting up, and saying to them, “You didn’t think I was coming back, did you?”

But the practice of faith is something that yields to routine; and routine when ritualized, becomes a sacred practice. By that I mean, that when we take an ordinary practice and elevate it in our consciousness to something of special value, we turn routine to ritual. For example, when my family was still together, one of our routines at meal time was for each one of us to say something for which we were thankful before we ate. Now though, they all have their own homes and families.

But in December, when Joyce Schaffer and I drove to Destin to be with my son and family, we of course had dinner with them. It brought back warm memories when they not only sang a song of thanksgiving, but also said what they were thankful for. So remember: the routines of life can be turned into ritual, which then become sacred practices. They are part of the metabolism of a spiritual practice and perspective. That’s an interpretation which we owe to our Jewish roots.

But, Jesus, who was also a Jew, said to his Jewish audience in a sermon one day, “…that practice stuff is not what living a good life is all about. It really is a matter of the heart…of the inner life.” He said that as God sees it, thinking a bad thought is as wrong as doing it.

            Wow! That means a lot of us are in deep jell-o, right? In fact, when Jimmy Carter took that thought to the bank, it got him in a lot of trouble in his campaign for president with Gerald Ford. He admitted to Playboy Magazine, that he had lusted after women in his heart…he hadn’t done anything, but he had surely thought about it.

            Jesus said, “It’s the thought that counts!” In other words, Jesus was saying something unique and quite different than his hearers had heard before: Religion and the practice of keeping the commandments, is not really what living a good life is all about. What you really need to do is purify your heart and live a saintly life. Confess your sins. And search within to see what more you can do. And since that is a Herculean task that none of us can do by ourselves, ask God to help you. Seek to be holy…to find ways to purify yourselves…eliminate impure thoughts.

            So one of the distinctions then between Judaism and Christianity was that Judaism was and is a practice of the faith; Christianity is more a matter of spiritual purity and purification so that one’s heart and mind and soul are constantly seeking to be better and think better. And any practices of faith are done primarily so as to help in the process of purification of one’s inner way.

            So it’s not either, or; but both, and. We practice…we seek to purify ourselves through meditation and prayer…we quote the poetry of faith as we seek to harmonize our lives with the rhythms of the Universe. Hopefully, that will be the thrust of our next ten years…and I close with this:

CONCLUSION.

Like all of us, there are certain incidents in our past that are exceptionally precious in memory. The story I tell about my mother at Christmas time is one of those; the story I tell of what we thought were my father’s last words is another. And this one is another.

At the time of my first UU ministerial settlement in Oklahoma in 1990, AIDS was devastating and scary, especially to gay men. There was much misunderstanding and a lot of bigotry and prejudice being expressed. One of the outreaches our congregation had was a group that provided services at homes to seriously ill AIDS victims. That included things like mowing the lawn, buying groceries, cleaning the house – and also a special, highly trained team that very quietly and secretly oversaw death with dignity.

And I also let the funeral homes in the area know that I was available to conduct funerals free-of-charge for AIDS victims and their families and friends. Fortunately, I was privileged to be called upon to do several.

One that I’ve never forgotten started with a phone call from a young man who was so emotionally distraught that for the longest he could hardly talk. When he could, he said that not only had he lost his partner to AIDS, but the church to which they belonged and which he had been reared in, had refused to let his partner’s funeral be conducted in the church. The reason: they were gay and that his partner had died of AIDS. The young man said that his pastor had told him his partner was burning in hell at that very moment and there was no way he could have a funeral in the church. To make awful even worse, he then tried to get the young man to repent of the “sin of homosexuality.” I listened incredulously.

He went on to say that due to his partner’s illness, he had spent all their money, and he could not afford a service in the funeral home. The funeral home had given him my name and he was calling to see if it were true that I would conduct a free graveside service for someone who had died of AIDS. I assured him that I would be honored to conduct the service at the gravesite without any charge.

After I hung up, I called my sister, Grace, told her the circumstances and asked her if she would come sing that afternoon. She was teaching 8th grade English then, but without hesitation she promised to get a substitute for the afternoon and to be present.

So the next day, I drove to a little country cemetery, near Spencer, Oklahoma. This was what White people used to refer to as the “colored cemetery.” Due to Oklahoma’s racist and segregationist past, even the cemeteries had been separate until the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Now that the walls of segregation had come down, most people chose a cemetery closer to town and better maintained. Only the very poor used this one. It had tall dead grass and red clay dirt roads.

There were only three people in the funeral party, plus Gracie and me, and two persons from the funeral home. It was hot and windy, and there was only one very modest little bouquet of flowers, the very cheapest of caskets and ugly, green, artificial, plastic grass covering God’s good earth.

Knowing that the deceased and his partner were both from a fundamentalist church, I determined to preach as appropriate to their understanding as possible. I remember especially that I quoted the beautiful poetry found in the words of the Apostle Paul in the Christian scriptures of the book of Romans where he writes:

"I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other such creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

And I added for emphasis, “That means nothing…not preachers…not churches…not even AIDS…can separate us from the pure unbounded love of God.”

When I had finished, and without any piano or guitar, no choir or support, Grace began to sing:

"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see."

And as she sang, I promise you, the young man bereaving his partner lifted up his face. He began to stand up a little taller.  Though he had suffered a great loss, I genuinely believe that he began to realize that his partner was not burning in hell like their pastor had said. He had been enveloped in the pure unbounded love of God.

Afterward, by their response, you would have thought I was Billy Graham and Gracie was Mahalia Jackson. The young man and his two friends were so effusive in their appreciation. As I prepared to leave, the bereaved young man came up to me, seemingly embarrassed. He tried to give me a $10 bill, which when he pulled it out of his billfold, I saw was the only bill there. As he did so, he apologized and said it was all he had. I said, "No, I don't need or want any money." When he insisted, I realized that he was searching for some tangible way to have a part in providing for the service of his late beloved. So I explained that Gracie was a middle school teacher and would have to pay for a substitute that afternoon and to give it to her, which he did.

            As I began walking over to my car, I heard a sound. I looked around searching to see where it came from. I looked back at the gravesite and I saw the young man who was now kneeling at the grave to say goodbye…but the sound didn’t come from him. I looked in the unkempt dead grass and tall weeds…but heard nothing there. I looked down the red clay dirt roads crisscrossing the cemetery…and there was no sound being made on any of them. And then I listened once more very closely, and I heard it again as clearly as a bell. It was the voice of the Universe and it was whispering, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.

 Amen. And blessed be.