HOLYDAYS AND HOLIDAYS: How They Help.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: Ash Wednesday was last week, which means there were 40 days between then and Easter, April 24^th, which has posed the question for us this morning of holy days and holidays: How do they help?

I still remember as a child growing up, that on Saturdays, Mother would cook everything we were to eat on Sundays, so that Sundays were a day of rest for everyone, including her. Sundays were the Sabbath. In a sense, Sundays were a time out from the routines of daily living. Sundays were not just a day off from work, but they were a day of rest, a holy day.

The roots of the word “holiday” of course are found in two words: holy and day. Back in the 1500s when the word first emerged, a holy day was a day set aside for reverence and worship. But as we know today, holidays are seldom observed other than by banks and post offices closing, and the government’s paying millions for people not to work.

So how can we be helped by our holy days, or holidays? Or is it a bigger question? Is it a way of seeing and discovering the sacred in ordinary habits and practices?

TEXT.

As I’ve mentioned before, the authors from the text of our last workshop, All Things Shining, say that our technology has “flattened human existence.”  In a flattened existence, the world begins to lose its distinctiveness. A simpler way of saying that is, everything begins to look the same. For example, look at the phenomenon of how restaurants have been transformed by technology:

I.

Instead of mom and pop restaurants all up and down the highway with their unique dining areas and menus, now there are franchise restaurants at seemingly every major intersection of the Interstates, and they all look alike. Gone is the uniqueness of the food, the sounds and the look of one of a kind, neighborhood restaurants. In their places are franchisees of one kind or another. They have the same color and design in both interior and exterior.

n     We drive to an order lane, and look at an illuminated menu…

n     We drive further and give our order to a speaker system…

n     We drive a little more, and pick up our order and pay for it.

 The leading franchiser of all, McDonald’s, is so technologically advanced and so intent on cutting costs and making profits, that for a while they even experimented with uplinking your order to India, which would then be downlinked by the time you arrived at the pickup window.

Compare that experience to last Friday, when Joyce Schaffer and I met with Nancy and Chuck Syverson and Barb Durkee to discuss the memorial service and placing of bricks that we will have for the Syversons’ son and daughter-in-law at 12:30 in our Memorial Garden today, followed by the placing of a memorial brick for Doug Durkee. By choice, we met at the Oasis Restaurant on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the owners are two wonderful women partners. We placed our drink and food orders with a real person. Both owners came over and asked how we were doing. The wait staff person was new, and he had a little difficulty at first, but soon everything was brought out, and we even had a little pitcher of our own for the iced tea. We were given a check, left a tip, and we paid at the counter. It was so anti-technology, but so human.

More and more, life on this planet is less and less distinctive, and more and more sameness. In the faith development workshop concluded this past Thursday, the last chapter in the text drew conclusions about how the Western classics might bring a sense of the sacred back into secular American life. It started with Homer’s Odyssey and worked its way through Aeschylus, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Kant and Descartes. 

The authors contend that while our technological achievements have introduced some stunning advances to our society, it has not been without its losses. The text argues that one of those areas of loss has been a continued diminishment in our society of a sense of the sacred.

They set forth a trenchant analysis that contains a four step corrective:

First, determine what we really care about:

We can be reflective and intuitive to determine those things we genuinely enjoy. The task then becomes not to decide what to care for, but to discover what it is we already care about. The making of tea or coffee is a good example.

The second step is to address how we can elevate that which we care about from a daily routine, an ordinary habit, to something with intentional dimension to it. Whether it’s the making of a cup of coffee or tea, the eating of a meal, the breaking of bread, or the act of reading, they are no longer things we do without awareness. We discover where the coffee or tea is made; we savor the process of making it. We take time not only to smell the roses, but to smell the coffee. And when we break bread, we realize that we humans have been eating bread for thousands of years. It was first discovered in ancient Egypt, and travelled to Europe, across the ocean, up and across the Americas.

Today, farmers at this very moment have fields filled with beautiful green blades of wheat that will soon began to mature and turn golden brown. Harvesters will start deep in South Texas probably in May and work their way up through Texas and across Oklahoma and Kansas, then Nebraska and the Dakotas. That wheat will go into silos and eventually to be shipped by rail to giant flour mills and made into flour, and the flour will be shipped to bakeries and made into dough and the dough into bread.

Before we eat it, we can pause a moment to realize that it didn’t come from Publix, but from Kansas and it still has the DNA of its Egyptian roots.

Third, whereas before we simply followed a mindless routine in doing the things we care about, now we think about the steps and processes that are involved. We turn them into intentional acts with awareness of what they are and where they came from and how we appropriate them into our lives.

And fourth, in so doing, we turn them into rituals that mean something. We admire them and how we assimilate them. Our lives and the patterns we follow become a part of the sacred architecture of this marvelous construct we know as humankind…a meaningful celebration of ourselves and our environment.

II.

There’s also a faith development to combat the flattening of our existence. Starting on Thursday evenings, March 24, we will be having another Faith Development Workshop series, only this time, they will be in the early evening and start with a dinner salad supper at five. We will be focusing on one of the most significant issues facing liberal religion: nihilism, which in its simplest expression theologically is this: It doesn’t matter whether you believe one way or the other, because there is no reason to prefer one belief over another. “I believe my way and you believe your way and maybe or never the twain shall meet.” Faith is flattened. Some say that describes Unitarians, but does it really?

For some of us, when we become liberal religious, the things about faith that at one time mattered most, now don’t matter nearly so much, if at all. And yet, we also recognize that there is and was some kind of power…some kind of insight…some kind of truth being told in all of them. There’s something about those experiences and stories that resonate with the human experience.

For the next workshop, our text is Honest to God! In it, Bishop John A.T. Robinson, introduces the German theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bultmann articulates an approach to reading sacred scriptures based on a couple of presuppositions:

One is that some of the most significant truths about existence are not reducible to facts, in the way two plus two equal four are. That’s what Heidegger calls “facticity.” Facticity reduces everything down to black and white; it draws a circle around the truth and says it can’t be otherwise. It’s a closed Universe; only this can be the way the world is.

That kind of thinking roots in the West from the deeply influential Italian philosopher Rene Descartes, the reconfigurer, who revolutionized the way philosophy, medicine and science are done. He put forth a methodology that was rooted in doubt: We disbelieve things until evidence – logic and experience – prove them to be true. In other words, doubt is the constant criterion in matters of philosophy, medicine and science, as well as in faith. You doubt it until the evidence proves otherwise. He developed a scientific methodology that went from hypothesis to theory to fact. And all the time, doubt was the attendant.

We are the inheritors of a belief system in the West that puts doubt above belief. It has to be proved before we believe. Don’t believe until you know for certain.

            However, Bultmann taught there are dimensions of faith that transcend facticity and are too important to be reduced to black and white, 2 + 2= 4. What he meant by that is this:

Some of the greatest truths in human existence are transported to us on the wings of myth. As Bultmann uses the word, “myth,” it is not a fairy tale; rather, it’s a way to describe a reality that is so much more than black and white facts reveal.

In our many faith traditions, our task is to remove the baggage of a pre-scientific world, the suitcase as it were, in which the myths travel to us. We’re tasked to discover the truth that the myth is seeking to communicate –something so important that it transcends facts and facticity. (As is typical of technical German language, the 17-letter-word that is built to describe this process is called demythologization.) Rather than focus on the historicity of an event – did it happen or did it not – the task becomes one of trying to understand the message that the myth was attempting to communicate, even though it was being told in language and thought patterns from a primitive time period. The intent is to permit 21^st century liberal religious to join in sharing the meaning of the message that faith has brought.

CONCLUSION.

Many, if not most of us here, have had a significant theological journey. The pastoral theologian Rosemary Chinnici (a member of the faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry) says that most people have a time in their lives when their inherited faith comes up against their life experience in a way that creates a crisis. She calls this experience a "religious impasse." At moments of religious impasse people have three choices:

n                         They can comply with their belief system and deny their own hopes and needs;

n                         they can abandon their faith for its inadequacies and cut their life loose from the ties of religious community; or

n                         they can become a theologian. Becoming a theologian means engaging in the arduous and creative task of reworking your beliefs in light of your experience. It is in such engagement that faith traditions grow and change, and individuals become active shapers of religious heritage -- not passive recipients of received truth.

We are given that option today. We can seek to bring a new level of ritual and sacred practice to our lives. That can include holidays and holy days. We can also revisit the faith of our heritage to reclaim its insights and wisdom, as seen through the lens of a lifetime of experience.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And blessed be.