Expectations Lost and Gained
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 3, 2006
Those of you who have heard my story of my journey to the UU ministry know that one of the crucial early stops along the way was at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin where, nearly 30 years ago now, their minister took me under his wing after I'd left the American Baptist ministry and pointed me in the direction of the UUs. That minister has long since retired and the current minister of that Madison UU congregation, the Rev. Michael Schuler, began his ministry there at the same time that I came here - which means that Michael and I are right up there near the top among our colleagues when it comes to longstanding, and still ongoing, ministries with a single congregation.
I'm borrowing some of Rev. Schuler's remarks from a sermon he gave as the Christmas/Holiday Season approached several years ago to get me launched today. He titled it From Atheism to Appreciation. Michael recounts how, in the strongly humanistic/atheistic household in which he was raised, Christmas - in a manner of speaking - was observed in this manner:
"There was a good deal of routine joking and logic chopping about God at the Schuler house, but the defining moment in our religious lives arrived each year on Christmas Eve, because that was the time when we all sat down in the living room, turned on the hi-fi system, and instead of cueing up a medley of Christmas Carols, we (instead) laughed at the antics of Vladimir and Estragon as they patiently waited for Godot - the paternal God figure who never appears in Samuel Beckett's famous play." Schuler continues: "This was not a convention that I, as a twelve year old child, resented. On the contrary, listening to Waiting for Godot at Christmas made me feel superior to those benighted youngsters who still believed in a cosmic Sugar Daddy."
That must have made for a rather strange scene - a family sitting around on Christmas Eve, with all of their neighbors houses decorated and with trees in their living rooms, listening to a recording of the dialogue to Waiting for Godot. But there's a part of me that connects with such a thing. This play, which is in the existentialist, theater-of-the-absurd genre, and which first began being staged in the early 1950s, actually anticipated John Lennon's well known line that "Life is what happens while you're making other plans."
The play features these two hobo-like characters, Vladimir and Estragon, sitting beside a road feeling like they cannot go anywhere or do anything until the arrival, or advent if you will, of the mysterious Godot who will show them the way, and give them a reason, for moving along. A few other characters do show up who claim to have some knowledge of, or relationship with, this Godot person but that's as far as it gets. Each of the play's two acts ends with the same bit of dialogue: "Well, shall we go? "Yes, let's go." But the final stage direction at the close of each act is also the same: They do not move. They keep waiting for Godot to come, to arrive, to show them the way; and the anticipated arrival, or advent, never happens. Whatever life there is to be had on the road of life that they are sitting beside, just goes on as the two of them wait.
That's a powerful image, really; and one I can resonate with. The humanist in me knows that it is futile to wait for what Schuler aptly calls an imaginary "Cosmic Sugar Daddy" who will take us by the hand and show us the way that will make the journey meaningful and fulfilling. For better or for worse it is we human beings who are responsible for where we go because there is no Godot who'd going to show up and do it for us.
As a side-bar here, and in the interest of fairness, I should point out that the playwright, Samuel Beckett, insisted that he did not intend his non-existent character of Godot to be a metaphor for God. In his cranky Irish way he noted, "If I wanted Godot to be God I'd have called my play 'Waiting for God.'" Beckett meant for his play to be a statement about the futility of living by hope and anticipation alone, of allowing life to pass you by while you're making other plans or while you're anticipating someone or something beyond yourself to appear and give you some kind of deliverance. But the playwright protestations still haven't stopped the Godot/God equation from being made, and I think it's a legitimate one whether the playwright intended it or not. When an artist or writer or poet puts his/her work out in the public domain then it is subject to all manner of interpretation, which can go well beyond what the original intent of the creator may have been. The God/Godot equation was, as we've seen, the interpretation given in the household Rev. Schuler describes.
This, in fact, gets us back to the rest of Michael's story and to his punch line. After recounting the anti-Christmas family observances of his youth he goes on to say: "Nevertheless it doesn't surprise me that as an adult my older brother gave his life to Christ and is now active in an Assembly of God congregation. Perhaps it isn't always wise to begin the process of demythologizing too early." Wise words, indeed. We do not live by negation and by pure rationality alone. We need a place for myth and mystery in our lives. I'm convinced that if we do not, in some way, nurture myth and mystery in the lives of our children we create a spiritual vacuum that they will, at some point and in some way, seek to fill. They may not all go to route that Michael's brother did, but most of them will seek to fulfill that vacuum in some manner.
Then, picking up on his own religious journey that eventually brought him into the Unitarian Universalist ministry, Rev. Schuler says, "I am grateful to be in a (religious) movement where belief in God is an option but not an expectation; in a movement where I can be a skeptic one day and a devotee the next. I fervently hope there will always be a place in our movement, not only for the atheist and the theist, but for those of us who cannot accept 'theist' and 'atheist' as mutually exclusive categories."
I do not know Michael real well. We've exchanged greetings at a few General Assemblies. But I feel a real kinship with him as I read these words of his. I, too find myself being a skeptic one day and a devotee the next. I, too, am among those who do not accept "atheist" and "theist" as mutually exclusive categories. If you ask me if I believe in God my answer most likely will have more to do with the kind of day I'm having, or the kinds of experiences that are being visited upon me, than it does with whatever kinds of theological constructs I may have erected for myself.
This stance then, of being both a skeptic and a devotee, is the one I find I bring to the Christmas and Winter Holiday Season in all its many manifestations, including the coming of the Christian Advent. In the Christian faith tradition Advent means awaiting or anticipating the birth of a Savior, of a Deliverer, of a Christ. In a more generalized sense advent - with a small 'a' - means awaiting any significant or momentous event that you hope will in some way transform your life. I come into this season finding myself between two contrasting stories or mythologies or metaphors, and finding truth in each of them, as well as in the interplay between the two of them.
The first story is the one I've already been dwelling on - the story of the God, or Meaning, or Purpose, or Reason for Living, call it what you will, who never shows up. The other is the story of a God who really does arrive. Both stories are myths, in the best - a la Joseph Campbell - sense of that term; stories that tell us truths about who we are and about the world in which we live even if they didn't "really happen." The second story is of a God, or a Divine Presence, that becomes humanized in the person of a human being called Jesus; and who came heralding the arrival of a time of hope, peace, love, and justice. For me, each story is equally captivating. In coming to terms with them I feel something like an unfaithful lover, embracing one story while casting a roving eye of the other story, which I also, in turn, embrace.
Well, uh...I've never actually been an unfaithful lover, you understand. I'm just using that as an analogy. I just happen to think there's truth to be found in two-timing a couple of metaphors. It's all symbolic here.
So, I can embrace Beckett's story while also needing to look beyond it. While the accounts, which as noted are largely mythological, of the birth of Jesus are no longer central to my journey, they still do offer me some traveling companionship. In the story of the God who actually does arrive I do not see the advent of that Cosmic Sugar Daddy who will fix everything for us, but instead some very crucial reminders as to what it means to be human. The theology that later came to be attached to this birth story held that this baby, who was born in the midst of rather dangerous and precarious circumstances, is also "God."
I do not know what that statement means in any literal sense since I do not have a literal concept of a Being or Entity called God. But, as we are reminded by the aforementioned mythologist, the late Joseph Campbell, to not get caught in the literal-ness of the metaphor or caught in the terminology, let me offer a couple of way in which I find the myth of the God-Child to be helpful and instructive.
The first is that the story or myth of an obscure baby who is also heralded as the arrival of God is a human reminder that what is often overlooked, ignored, or unseen can also be of greatest importance. It is a reminder that even those, or perhaps it's especially those, who are born and live under the most precarious of circumstances, are equally deserving of their chance to realize the inherent worth and dignity that they do possess. To be sure, at some point, when the child is no longer a child, what he or she does with such an opportunity becomes a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility. But if that divine spark, to use Emerson's well known term, is not affirmed and validated at an early age, it becomes harder and harder to realize it as time goes by.
The second piece of insight I gain from the myth of an anticipated child through whom God arrives, is an affirmation of the power and potentiality of human life itself. I find it very instructive that at the heart of Christian theology is the affirmation of a God who arrives not as a Supernatural Force or Power, but instead, quite simply, as a humble human being who devotes his life - and loses his life - teaching other human beings how to be more human. Some Christians have caught this point very well while others have not. One of the reasons I find myself attracted to the works of such liberal Christian theologians as Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong is because they really do "get it."
Be that as it may, what the God/Child metaphor suggests to me, as a religious humanist, is that all I need when it comes to finding meaning and depth and power and relatedness in my life has already been given to me. I may not - in fact I know I haven't - opened up the whole package of possibility for myself yet, and may never fully do so during my time on earth, but it has been given to me.
The metaphor of a Child who embodies God is a way of saying that Godot actually does arrive; not, in Schuler's words again, as a Cosmic Sugar Daddy, but as a fellow traveler who reminds us and encourages us with the understanding that we already have what we need for the journey if we dare use it; and that we can indeed be up and on our way. In addition, the story or myth or metaphor of a newborn child who also embodies the Divine recalls yet another of Joseph Campbell's words to Bill Moyers in their Public Broadcasting System sponsored dialogues on The Power of Myth, where Campbell says, "All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within you."
So I am grateful to Samuel Beckett for reminding me, in his best known play, of the futility of passively and powerlessly waiting for someone or something to come and deliver me. And I am grateful for the mythology in the Gospels - which I'll revisit in a couple of weeks - because the freedom with which I read them allows me to see that I don't have to wait for what I need, don't have to wait for Godot as it were, since the fullness of life and living in already available here - here on what the poet Edwin Markham called "the common human way."
Finally, I come into this season with a sense of - as the sermon title indicates - expectations lost and gained. It is easy to be cynical, if not despairing, about the promise of the arrival of a reign of peace, love, hope, and joy - as the four themes of the Christian Advent proclaim. It is easy to despair of ever seeing the arrival of the full manifestation of justice, equity and compassion in human relations; and of our reaching the level of respect for the interdependent web of life that will actually give us a safe and protected planet to live on. I know it is easy to lose any sense of expectation that such things as these will ever come to be.
I also know that sitting beside a road, so to speak, awaiting the arrival of all these great and wonderful things will not bring them into being - not even in any small or measured way. Whatever there is to be gained, when it comes to all of these hopes and expectations, is that their arrival - to whatever extent that arrival is ever to happen - remains in our hands and in our hearts. The story or myth of a God who shows up as a simple human being, under quite desperate circumstances, is a reminder to me of that truth.
Let us take these two stories to heart, then, as we enter this Holiday Season of Holy Days. Let us be up and on our way, believing in all that we can still bring to pass.
Stephen D. Edington
December 3, 2006
