What Am I Doing Here?
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 3, 2011
Whenever I set out to plan a Sunday service - something I do on an almost weekly basis for about three-quarters of the year - I have a thought way in the back of my head, no matter what the topic is for any given Sunday. It's not always even in my conscious awareness, but it is tucked back there somewhere. The thought is a question: What kind of a statement is this service making about us here as a congregation and about a faith tradition called Unitarian Universalism for someone who is in here for the first time, and for whom this service is their first exposure to UUism. It's not a question that drives every sermon I prepare or every service I lead, but on a Sunday like this one it does work its way out of the recesses of my mind up to the forefront. This, as already noted, is our Spring Open House Sunday - the first one we've tried in the spring as a matter of fact. We've done one in the fall for many years now.
I try to put myself in the position of any one of you who may be here for the first time. Maybe you were invited by a friend, family, or co-worker who convinced you to check us out. Maybe you saw one of our ads that have been running in The Hippo for the past few weeks. Maybe - and this is getting to be the most common route here for those giving us a look - you saw our website and found it to be of enough interest to get you through our door. I'm going to guess, though, that whatever the route here was, once such you get in and settled into a pew the thought may enter your head: "Okay, what am I doing here?"
It's not an unreasonable question. It is also the requested title of the "Auction Sermon" for 2010 which was purchased by Bill and Judy Kennedy. The 2011 Auction, as you know, was held last night. But with this being the day ser for Open House, both Judi and Bill agreed we could hold off on their sermon until this Sunday.
If your life has been getting along well enough without your being a part of a religious community, you may well ask, "Why go looking at one now?" If you were raised in a particular religion or faith tradition and moved away from it - for any number of reasons - the question may be, why reconnect with another one now? Or maybe you have kids and are thinking well perhaps I should look into some kind of religious education for them - but does that really have anything to do with me personally beyond my role as a parent? Really now, what am I doing here?
This is the question I'd like to speak to for a time today: What am I doing here? I don't necessarily mean here in this room, although this room is a part of it. I mean, rather, "What am I doing here?" in this life I've been given for however long I have to live it. Like the question that lurks in the back on my mind from one Sunday to the next, somewhere in the backs of our minds the "what am I doing here?" question has a way of hanging around. It's not usually right at the surface. Given the day to day demands of living there's usually too much other stuff going on for that. But it's still back there somewhere: What am I really, finally, and ultimately doing here?
This is the question, in fact, that religion, in all its many forms and manifestations - some of them good and some of them terrible - has attempted to answer for as long as there's been human beings on this planet. And yet, even though I regard this gathering right here as that of a religious community, neither I nor anyone here can answer the question for you. You see, ours is not a religion with pre-packaged answers. So, all I can really do is say a bit about why we are here - why weare here, and then you have to decide whether or not our being here might have something to do with why you are here.
The very fact that I use the term "religious" community raises questions, however. As I said earlier many persons find us by way of our website; and I continue to be intrigued by the messages that occasionally come my way through our website. Most of the responses are positive. But we also get zinged from time to time, with most of the zingers starting our with "How can you call yourselves a religion when you don't even believe in.....? And that's usually following by a recounting of all the things the one doing the zinging does believe in.
The irony here is that we sometimes get praised for the same reason, as in: Hey this is great, a religion that's not really a religion!" From both ends of the spectrum there is an assumption about what religion is - followed by the assumption that we're not it. What both ends of this spectrum are not seeing is that we are not an alternative to religion, but we do offer an alternative understanding of what religion is. I'll pick up this point in just a minute, but will first point out that our behavior is similar to that of many religious communities in the liberal Protestant tradition out of which we have come.
We gather on Sunday mornings in a house of worship - a very New England traditional looking one in our case. We have a Sunday school for our children as you saw earlier. We're blessed with wonderful music - as you've already heard. We pray, meditate, reflect (different ones of us call it different things) with our silent meditation time in the service. As you've also seen, we celebrate the joys and mile stones of our lives, and we attend to one another's losses, pains, and sorrows. And - as you're finding out right now, a sermon is offered.
Beyond this setting right here we have social events, discussion groups, meditation and spirituality groups, fund raisers, all kinds of committees and a governing board - all that good "church stuff" in other words. We also seek to extend our values and principles into our wider community and world. We have an active Social Justice Committee that staffs a table every Sunday during of coffee hour; check it out to see the kinds of issues they are engaged in. This is part of what we are doing here. Maybe it all has something to do with what you are doing here - both here is this room and here with your life.
The thing is, and this is where the difference comes in, we do all this without requiring that you sign on to a pre-determined and prescribed set of beliefs in order to join in with us. This is what gives rise to some of those website comments, and questions that also get asked of me directly: Yes, you do all kinds of good things, but still is it really a religion? At the risk of sounding like a former United States President my reply is "That depends upon what your definition of 'religion' is."
Without, I hope, getting too academic about it let's try a little Latin on this one. Is Latin still taught in high school? I actually took a couple years of it in a West Virginia public school some fifty years ago where we would take an English word, break it out into its Latin origins and then put it back together and see what we had. When you do that with religion you get "re" and "ligare." Ligare means to bind together; we get our word ligament from it. "Re" means back again - as in "recall" or "return."
Religion, in its most literal sense, then, means to bind together again. It's about bringing oneself together again, or restoring our personal wholeness from the oftentimes fragmented nature of our lives. In a more cosmic sense its about re-storing our relationship with an often broken world and about how we find a relationship with the universe, with Ultimate Reality, or with God - however understood or conceived. Religion: to bind together again.
That's what we are doing here - binding our lives and binding ourselves back together. Maybe that's what you could be doing here. For instead of offering a prescribed set of beliefs, what we offer is a setting, a safe and welcoming place where you can re-store personal wholeness, where you can pursue a re-lationship with that which is greater than yourself, and where you may attend to the things you care most deeply about in this time bound life we are given.
Have you ever been on an airplane where there's a layover at an airport and you're staying on the continuing flight to another destination? Sometimes the flight attendant will say, "For those of you who will be continuing on with us, our ground time here will be brief." Whether the flight attendant realizes it or not, I would submit to you that truer words have never been spoken. For those of us continuing along on our life journey our ground time here is indeed brief - given the span of time for the life of our planet. How we live our ground time, and the kind of world we build and leave for those whose ground time outlasts ours - that is what the religious and spiritual journey is about. What we are doing here is attending to our ground time as best and creatively as we can. It's what you could be doing here as well.
When I say then, that we have no prescribed set of beliefs, I hope you can see by now that I wasn't saying we have no beliefs or convictions at all. We do covenant with one another - as our language has it - to see that certain principles and purposes are accomplished. Those principles are in the insert to your Order of Service. We know that many paths, many journeys of the spirit can bring a person to these affirmations; your journey is up to you; these principles are where we all arrive.
Moving on, the two biggie questions that get asked of us, via our website and other sources, have to do with God and Jesus; and what it is with us when it comes to them. I'll try to touch on that for just a bit before finishing up.
You won't hear the name "God" invoked as often in a UU service as you will in more traditional worship settings. This is not because we've thrown the term out - although some of us do not relate to it - but rather because God means different things to different ones of us. Few of us understand God as a Supernatural Supreme Being who can directly intervene in the workings of human affairs and in the world of nature. But many of us do believe, or sense the reality of a force or power or presence that is both within us and beyond us. Some of us call it the Spirit of Life - and we sing about that most every Sunday; others call it the Life Force, the Presence of the Holy or the Sacred within the natural world; while others, as just noted, stay away from the term altogether. It is how we live and how we find a relationship with that which is greater than ourselves which is really more important that what we may call it.
Now, about Jesus: I said that our behavior is like that of churches in the Protestant Christian tradition. This is because that's where our historical roots lie. But the tree that has grown from those roots now has many branches that reach out well beyond our origins. We no longer regard ourselves as a definitively Christian body, although some of our fine congregations do maintain a liberal Christian identity. But the person of the human Jesus is still a part of our overall make-up.
It was one of our early American Unitarian ancestors, a fellow named Thomas Jefferson, who drew a distinction between what he called the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. The religion of Jesus has to do with the life and wisdom teachings of an itinerant Jewish prophet and teacher of some 2000 years ago who went by the name of "Jesus.". His ministry was centered around a loving God, and he who held forth the principles of love, justice, compassion for the poor, and healing. These same values find expression in those UU Principles and Purposes to which I've already referred. The religion about Jesus is the doctrine and dogmas that later became attached to his life - as though the only way to Jesus - and by extension, God - was through these doctrines.
In a way similar with that of the term "God" whether the name Jesus gets invoked or not varies from one UU congregation to another. I feel quite safe in saying that all UU congregations try to live out the values and the teachings he exemplified whether done in Jesus' name or not. We regard Jesus as one of many great teachers of humanity - Buddha, Moses, Muhammad are among the many others - who tried to show us the ways of love, justice, compassion for our fellow human beings; and who taught and teach us to care for this fragile planet upon which we live as well.
So, yes, we are a religious community - a community of seekers striving after what it is that ultimately binds us to one another, to ourselves, and to this vast and mysterious universe in which we all live and move and have our being. That's what we're doing here; and it could be what you are doing here as well.
This in closing: There's a line from the now defunct comic strip "Shoe" that speaks to the human dilemma we find ourselves addressing here. It has one of the characters saying to another: "I've been thinking about it, and I've decided that it's hard to be an individual all by yourself." That is a humorous and whimsical way of saying what we are doing here and why we do it. We honor and celebrate our individual journeys of the spirit, our individual searches after truth, the individual workings of our free thinking minds, as well as the individual workings of our heart and spirit.
But we are here because we also know it's hard to be an individual all by yourself. That's who we are: People who don't want to be individuals all by ourselves, because we know we need one another. So, while the question of "What am I doing here?" is one you have to answer for yourself, perhaps your answer can get you to that greater question of "What are We doing here together with the short ground time we have?"
Stephen Edington
April 3, 2011
