First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
“Ultimacy and Intimacy”
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore,December 7, 2003

Readings

Rabbi Harold Kushner:

What religion offers me is not fellowship with God, but fellowship with other human beings who are looking for the same things I am. Loneliness is today's greatest spiritual problem. People who have no intention of shopping go to shopping centers because they need to be where other people are. People come home and turn on the television set, not to watch the program, but to hear another human voice because they're lonely.

Religion should offer us that sense of community, that sense of "Here are people who share something important with you." You don't come to church or temple to find God - you can find God on a mountaintop or in your bedroom. You come to church or temple to find a congregation, to find others who need the same things from life that you need. By coming together, you create the moment where God is present. This is the one indispensable thing that organized religion offers us, which our vague individual sense of spirituality cannot.

Fredrick Emerson Small:

How much of our time and attention in the world are devoted to ultimate things? And yet how we hunger for them! The mass media baptize us in a bath of brand name loyalty, sex appeal, and stylized violence until we come to believe that our most vital freedom is the freedom to consume, our most profound question which brand name to wear, our most compelling conversation about last night’s episode of "ER," our greatest personal challenge the firmness of our bellies and thighs. In the midst of unprecedented affluence shocking in its ostentation our souls are starving. In this empty feast of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs we hunger for soul food, for soups and stews and root vegetables. Coming to church on Sunday morning we dedicate an hour or so to the contemplation of ultimate things and to the nurture of our inmost and highest selves. 

Out of intimacy and ultimacy emerge identity and service. Identity because our connectedness with each other and our contemplation of matters worthy of our attention lead us to a clearer sense of who we are, what we affirm and what we care about, and where and to whom we belong. And service because church brings us out of ourselves and into compassionate relationship with the universe, where hoarding our gifts becomes unnecessary and giving them away a pleasure.

Sermon

Ultimacy and intimacy:

What shall I do with this precious gift of life and with whom will I share it?

The more one suffers, the more important these answers become.

I remember vividly, over thirty years ago, weakly looking out of my hospital room window at the graveyard next door, frightened and alone.I was thirteen years old, weighed 85 pounds and suffered from a wasting disease that the doctors couldn’t identify.Life was ebbing out of me at the very time most of my peers were bursting with youthful vitality.I tasted the agony of losing my grip on living as my friends were seizing the day.In that moment, looking at the tombstones outside my window, I was intensely aware of just how precious life was and how much I wanted more of it.

Thankfully, I recovered my health but my early initiation into suffering deeply changed me leaving a permanent mark.My innocence was stripped way as I experienced great pain and suffering.Always a sociable child, I experienced a level of isolation and aloneness I’d never felt before.The childish pastimes I formerly enjoyed now didn’t satisfy me.Big questions of meaning haunted me.Given the suffering I might continue to endure in my life, what was worth the effort?Would this experience of the unpleasantness of reality demand more of my juvenile relationships than they could endure … or open up new ones?The questions of ultimacy and intimacy have been central to my existence ever since then, eventually leading me into the ministry.

Questions of ultimacy and intimacy are central to the purpose of religion.Twentieth Century theologian James Luther Adams used these two words to describe why people joined our congregations.Born in 1901, Adams served for twenty years as a minister then taught at Meadville Lombard, Harvard and Andover Newton seminaries.He was a strong advocate in our movement connecting social justice and religion, deeply understanding the positive difference organized groups can make for individuals and society.

Adams recognized people come in our doors to wrestle with life’s ultimate questions and find at least provisional answers.They ask, we ask, “Who am I.” “What is worth the brief time I have on this earth?” “In what or whom can I trust?”“Where do I belong?”They ask, we ask, “Will this be a safe place where I will be accepted and loved as I seek answers for myself and my family?”

These questions are not idle speculation.Many of us have tasted the bitterness of life, confronted our mortality, and agonized over the innocent questions of our children.We need a place to seek an expansive meaning that will not slip through our fingers, as do the sand grains of time.

We want big answers.We want really big answers.We’d like, if possible, ultimate answers we won’t have to rethink in five or ten years as the state of science and technology changes.

I’m pleased to say we do have some answers here.For many here, these answers are both satisfying and sufficient for living a good life.And, these answers are fairly unusual for a religious tradition to offer.

Central to our answer is recognizing that no religious tradition has a divinely mandated exclusive franchise for Absolute Truth.At best, each religious tradition is a different telescope to ponder the vastness of what is beyond us.Many religions convey great truth that captures the section of the sky they see clearly.But no telescope can see all of the heavens, just as no religion can encompass all Truth.Each religion arose at one time and one place within a specific cultural context.Each religion was interpreted, told, retold and recorded by minds fixed in that time and place.Science has taught us what is true cannot be fixed in one time and place. Truth is much bigger than what our limited intellectual faculties can grasp and express in a limited historic revelation.

We Unitarian Universalists express this recognition in the language of an ongoing search for truth and meaning.This puts us in conflict with revealed religious traditions that fix truth in a revealed document such as the Torah, the Koran or the Gospels.While we do not dispute the great value and wisdom to be found in those documents, while many of us express appreciation of them, and while some of us even venerate each prophet’s example and words, we resist giving their words the status of Ultimate Truth.If the Laws of Moses have value, we will also be able to validate them in human experience.If the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, if his words be true, they must find validation in the natural world as well.

The errors describing the natural world and historical events found in revealed text has led us to give priority to what we can learn studying the natural world as we seek truth. Ancient descriptions of Jesus walking on water and calming a storm are not going to coax us out of our boats or cause us to abandon our umbrellas – unless we know where the rocks are.We put our faith in natural law as revealed by scientific inquiry knowing that scientific truth is limited and open to new discovery.

Our appreciation of the natural world and the beings inhabiting it makes the interdependent web of life of high value to us.We accept life’s existential value as an end in itself.We do not see the purpose of the planet as merely a backdrop for the drama of human salvation.Life on this planet (including us) is of ultimate value.

How do we know life is of ultimate value?As we do not put our trust in any one authority or revealed text, we must take personal responsibility for coming to this great truth.Rather than accepting truth second hand, we must test any truth claims in our own minds, hearts and souls before we accept them.

This is not an easy way to do religion.Taking personal responsibility for seeking truth is an awesome task most people shun.Most would rather have someone else tell them what to believe, abdicating any personal responsibility for their religious journey – except to be obedient.

Unitarian Universalists are not obedient.

We accept the personal challenge of a free faith.Many of us can do no other as we have felt or actually been betrayed in our obedience to a traditional faith.But this challenge of accepting personal responsibility is daunting and can feel pretty lonely.There are hundreds of truth claims to sort through.Thankfully, being part of a liberally religious community means we do not face our spiritual journey alone.As part of a group, we find our way together.

I’ll confess it now, I’m a groupie, I love being part of a group.I’ve had many positive experiences of belonging in my family, on teams, in work groups, on committees, and now in community organizing.I remember fondly a group of us in junior high that met at each other’s houses for games, refreshment, music and fun.I played on the chess team in my high school.My enjoyment of groups ranges widely from sitting silent and motionless in the middle of a group of meditators and chanting the praises of Krishna in a Hindu ashram with a thousand others to playing volleyball and swinging my partner at a square dance.I delight in forming a group to accomplish a task as much as relaxing lazily with a group at the pool on a hot summer afternoon.

Unfortunately, typical group life resists stimulating individuality and usually seeks to establish norms and control its members.The larger the group, the less significant is the individual.In a large corporation or a nation state, the individual is quickly reduced to an expendable means that subsumes the individual’s identity to the larger whole.Step out of line and get crushed.Times of war make this clear as I heard expressed in a story on NPR this past week.A reservist refused to go to Iraq and leave her children behind.If you are an active duty military couple with children, your wants and needs and your children’s wants and needs are subordinate to your commander-in-chief's.You are man instrument of state power.Express your individuality outside legal boundaries and go to jail – or die.

Historically, religion often has been an agent of the submission of the individual to social need.The caste system in India, the oppression of women in many religions, the historic Jewish temple purity laws all functioned to devalue some as opposed to others.This is what makes the record we have of Jesus’ living ministry so engaging.Jesus cast off all wealth and became homeless.He kept company with social outcasts.He healed the unclean and praised children.To Jesus, everyone had inherent worth and value, including the mentally ill.Jesus believed in the ultimate value of human beings.He didn’t use society’s measurement of their worth such as their social station, their suitability for parenting, generating tax revenue and consuming products.To Jesus, every person had ultimate value.

Jesus knew real intimacy happens when we confer on each other ultimate value.This is the purpose of a religious organization like ours.Inherent worth and dignity is not what society is interested in affirming for everyone.Society’s prime directive is survival and continuity.Religion at its best challenges social denial of individual value and helps each person move toward ultimacy and intimacy.

Let’s face it, the government of the United States of America isn’t interested in my personal search for truth and meaning – unless it can turn it into tax revenue.I love how Fred Small puts it so eloquently:

The mass media baptize us in a bath of brand name loyalty, sex appeal, and stylized violence until we come to believe that our most vital freedom is the freedom to consume, our most profound question which brand name to wear, our most compelling conversation about last night’s episode of "ER," our greatest personal challenge the firmness of our bellies and thighs. In the midst of unprecedented affluence shocking in its ostentation our souls are starving. In this empty feast of Twinkies and Ding-Dongs we hunger for soul food, for soups and stews and root vegetables. Coming to church on Sunday morning we dedicate an hour or so to the contemplation of ultimate things and to the nurture of our inmost and highest selves.

What is particularly interesting about Unitarian Universalism is how ultimacy and intimacy work together.In most churches, it is shared ultimate beliefs that define the community and create the limits in which intimacy happens.Because a group all believes in God, the Torah, the Quran, the Prophet, the laws of Moses, the death and resurrection of Jesus, they can unify their community and define their relationship with each other.

Unitarian Universalism takes the opposite approach.We find ultimacy through intimacy.Through intentional community in which we share our religious journey and the truths we have found, we grow and change in response to those around us.As I take in your experiences and interpretations, I’m influenced.As you hear my stories, you are touched.In our appreciative dialogue sharing the truths we find with each other, we move together magically and mysteriously toward ultimacy.Out of our diversity, we find our unity.

In a twenty-first century’s increasingly pluralistic world, our diversity affirming approach to religion is a powerful path to world peace.We are not all going to decide to follow one religion.We are never all going to be Christians, or Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or Taoists.We need a respectful approach to religion that honors the truth found in each religion.The ultimate truths in these religions are really different.They contain unique elements that do not translate into other faith traditions.The Islamic concept of God is not the same as the Jewish concept of God.The Buddhist concept of Nirvana does not have a parallel in Christianity.The linear concept of time in Western religions is very different than the circular concept of time in Asian religions.

But when individual Buddhists and individual Christians and individual Moslems and individual Jews and individual humanists and individual agnostics and individual pagans and individual atheists engage each other respectfully and really listen to each other, an intimacy can develop that opens the way to an elemental experience of humanity from which contact with ultimate truth becomes possible.

Why does this approach work?It seems counter-intuitive.Religious groups around the world are at each other’s throats seeking vengeance rather than transcendence. This approach works because intimacy is another name for love.The presence of love is the ultimate of ultimate truths and the way to that truth at the same time.

This is our grand Unitarian Universalist experiment.We are learning how to practice love in a way that transcends the limitations of sociology, psychology, philosophy and theology.We are crossing the artificial boundaries of ideology as human heart touches human heart touches animal heart touches plant vitality touches the earth and reaches for the sky.Our religious tradition is in the throes of inventing a world-transforming way to find meaning that flies in the face of conventional wisdom – just as Jesus did in his day.

I predict that we will look back on the last 40 years as the gestation period of this new way of doing religion.Perhaps it is in the birth pangs now as we gather this morning.We are living at a particularly fecund time in human history as the Internet and international business break down the walls of separation around the world.

Unitarian Universalism is not the religion for everyone as we all have different needs we bring to our spiritual journey.For the one driven toward a personal search for ultimacy and intimacy in an atmosphere of mutual support, love and respect, and willing to accept the personal responsibility for deciding what to accept and what to reject, our way is one of the best religious traditions available today.

And there is always room for one more.

Copyright © 2003 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All rights reserved.