Sermon

Savoring the joy of being human can be intoxicatingly delightful coming off a beautiful day boating on Charlotte Harbor, then dining out with good friends and watching the sunset over the water lounging on the beach in Ponce De Leon Park. The years of struggle are over, and now, finally, a chance to enjoy the good life. Reaping a well earned reward by retiring to Southwest Florida helps many to make the most of their harvest years. Now the priority is to maintain as much health and wealth as possible and seek a stable, satisfying existence.

That isn't the only way to approach retirement. For a number of people the freedom from earning a living releases them to put more time and energy into their life long passion, working for peace, justice, social reform and equality in a world filled to the breaking point with suffering and misery. Finally, they can really make a difference working to move our society progressively toward more equity and compassion in human relations.

The tension between saving and savoring the world found in these two approaches to retirement is also found in our Unitarian Universalist congregations across this continent. The tension between focusing on individual and congregational needs verses community and world needs has been the source of many a heated congregational meeting.

We have a proud, progressive history. Our historians celebrate our leaders who spoke out against slavery and worked in many social reform movements such as Dorthea Dix in mental health, Clara Barton in nursing, Susan B. Anthony in woman's suffrage and Horace Mann in education who said "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." They are just a few of the Unitarians and Universalists who shaped our young nation.

In the sixties, many Unitarian Universalist congregations took courageous stands and faced adversity to promote civil rights. Many of our congregations were active resisting the war in Vietnam. For many of our social activists, those were our glory days.

What often isn't noted in our history is how much internal opposition these people faced. There have always been many who wanted to keep things the way they are, safe and stable. Congregations were split in half by the war. The Black Empowerment movement in the late sixties was extremely divisive. We had a tremendous membership hemorrhage in the seventies as we attempted to rebuild from the shaking of our foundations.

Our level of social witness and action has declined significantly since those turbulent days. What has captured our congregational interest in more recent years has been "spirituality."

Most people aren't joining our congregations today looking for a place to get involved in social change. Rather than focusing on social transformation, people are looking for inner peace. Today, many are looking for a place of refuge from a dehumanizing world and seek the meaning and satisfaction modern secular living only meagerly provides.

Many couples today are working two jobs and trying to raise a family without much support. Technology is overwhelming us with more and more information about the world around us. The young adults to the middle aged in our pews are not hungry for intellectual stimulation as their ancestors were 100 years ago. They are seeking paradigms and meanings to organize their fragmented existence. To cope with their lives, they seek a spiritual center to hold everything together. They care about the state of the world, but are mystified about what they can do to make a difference when they can't even keep up with their own lives.

I think I can summarize these two needs that people bring to our congregations as follows: The first group are people who look around them, see suffering and injustice and feel moved, either by fear or by love, to do something about it. They want progress The second group are suffering and feel the need for that help for themselves. They want balance, stability, harmony and a few minutes of peace.

Both groups will hear two answers to their struggles here on Sunday morning: one we associate with Western thinking and the other with Eastern thinking. Both answers have deep roots in our religious tradition.

The first solution arises from the very heart of the American ideal on which this nation was founded. We, as Americans, have a covenant to build a new Jerusalem here in this land and establish the reign of freedom, justice and equity as it has never been done in history of the world. This vision of establishing the reign of God on earth has deep roots in Jewish and Christian thinking that strongly shape our values and beliefs whether we are theistic or atheistic.

The early Unitarians and Universalists in America didn't diverge from this vision of a good society. In fact, they were some of its main proponents. They diverged only from the theological underpinnings of that vision which they believed undermined it. Believing in the depravity of man didn't encourage him to get to work building the good society. Our forbears rebelled against being controlled to do good by fear of damnation rather than being drawn to do good by the power of love.

Emerson, Thoreau, George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and the rest of the Transcendentalist Unitarians were drawn to another answer. Advances in Biblical criticism using the application of reason to revelation were weakening Biblical authority. Rather than depend on Biblical authority, the Transcendentalists wanted to find out the great religious truths of the Bible for themselves--in their own experience. The place they found support for this kind of approach was coming out of the East from contact with Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism[1]. These contacts were limited with much misunderstanding yet the ideas fired their imaginations.

Over the last 150 years, often through the some of the offshoots of Transcendentalism called the New Thought movement, Eastern thinking has been seeping into American thinking. Our war with Japan, then Korea, and finally Vietnam have given many Americans a great deal of direct contact with Asian thinking.

In Western thinking, time is linear. It has a beginning, middle and end. In the Beginning, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void...God said let there be light and their was light and so on. Many Christians believe Jesus' birth actually changed the universe becoming the axis mundi. And finally, at the end of time, will come the Judgment Day. We are in the middle of all this and have but one life to get it right. We have just this moment to strut on the stage and play out our lives before the curtain falls.

In Eastern thinking, time is cyclical. The universe is created and destroyed in great cycles of time. This world is not here just for a short moment but keeps expanding and contracting in space and time. Human existence isn't a one shot experiment. The endless struggles of human existence cannot be solved or eliminated by conversion or redemption. The Buddha's first Noble Truth is the reality of Dukkha, the existence of an unsatisfactory quality of human experience which cannot be removed. We spend our lives designing elaborate ways to avoid this reality.

The solution to the unsatisfactory quality of life is not trying to fix it. The solution is finding out how to accommodate this reality.

The struggle between adjustment and resistance is at the core of the differences between these two ways of responding to life's challenges. One seeks to accommodate and find acceptance and the other to change and correct. One is an inner solution and the other is an outer solution. In the Eastern way, we settle into a harmonious experience of the Tao, flowing like a river around the rocks in our way. In the Western way, we follow the vision of the good and right guided by truth striving for an outer harmonious outcome blasting the rocks that are in the way.

So in Unitarian Universalism we find strong traditions for both savoring the world and saving the world from both the Western and the Eastern traditions. Are they in conflict with each other or are they compatible? Can we both save and savor the world?

The Rev. Richard Gilbert, minister in Rochester, New York wrote a meditation on this subject titled: "To Savor the World or Save it" I'd like to share with you which provides a poetic answer:

I rise in the morning torn between the desire
to save the world or to savor it -- to serve life or to enjoy it;
to savor the sweet taste of my own joy
or to share the bitter cup of my neighbor;
to celebrate life with exuberant step
or to struggle for the life of the heavy laden.
What am I to do when the guilt at my bounty
Clouds the sky of my vision;
When the glow which lights my everyday
Illumines the hurting world around me?
To savor the world or save it?
God of justice, if such there be,
Take from me the burden of my question.
Let me praise my plenitude without limit;
Let me cast from my eyes all troubled folk!
No, you will not let me be. You will not stop my ears
To the cries of the hurt and the hungry;
You will not close my eyes to the sight of the afflicted.
What is that you say?
To save, one must serve?
To savor, one must save?
The one will not stand without the other?
Forgive me -- in my preoccupation with myself,
In my concern for my own life
I had forgotten.
Forgive me, God of justice,
Forgive me, and make me whole.

I offer to you this morning my faith that not only are they compatible with each other, today, Eastern and Western thinking have intertwined in our tradition so that saving and savoring are becoming interdependent.

I'm reminded of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It is hard for us to care for our social needs unless our needs for food and shelter are taken care of. People who are struggling to keep their lives together have less free attention to focus on the larger needs of the society beyond the ones that touch their daily lives. Once some stability and balance has been found, they are more able and willing to respond to the needs of the community.

Social Justice work is very demanding because it puts people in close proximity with disease, sickness and social dysfunction. The massive scope of the problems in our world can be burdensome, wearing and discouraging. Those who are out saving the world need restoration as they take home the pain they come in contact with. Developing one's inner spiritual resources both heals and replenishes the energy and motivation to return to the work of saving the world. Direct personal experience of the transcending mystery and wonder of this world will not isolate us on cloud nine. It will connect us together in an experience of our unity rather than our separation.

The conflict and tension we feel in our congregations between the savers and the savorers is due to the state of the health of our religious lives.

Some of us come in wounded in need of healing and feel they have little to offer. Others come full of energy and ideas looking for others to join them in making a difference. The ability to respond to another's pain and suffering depends our ability to respond to our own pain and suffering. If we are afraid of our own hurts it will be hard for us to respond to another's hurt. The ability to respond to another's pain depends on the depth of our commitment to our own values and beliefs.

We can assess our spiritual health by asking tough questions of ourselves. Just how important is justice to us? What do we believe about those who suffer injustice? Are we willing to act when we feel empathy and compassion or do we shield ourselves from the impulse to respond?

Asking these questions creates inner tension. It is the kind of tension we need. We need to see the tension between stability and progress, between the liberals and the conservatives, between the do-ers and the be-ers, between the savers and the savorers. Neither pole holds the solution. We can give, and give, and give to others until we destroy ourselves through neglecting our own needs. We can become so self obsessed that we harmfully neglect those around us.

The tension between stability and progress can be very creative and energizing. The tension isn't safe. It isn't easy. It isn't pain free. It often isn't lovely and sweet.

This dynamic tension keeps us engaged with the real. It is meaningful. It is part of living an authentic religious life.

How do we balance stability and progress, saving and savoring? By becoming willing to live it every day as an opportunity to be a partner in the evolving creation of which we are "holy" a part, without a certain answer to guide us. The answer we need will appear in our hearts--if we pay attention.

Closing Words Hillel

"If I am not for myself, then who will be?
But if I am only for myself, then what am I?
If not now, when?"
Listen to the synthesis of Stability and Progress in my closing words:
Go in Peace. Make Peace. Be at Peace.
Copyright © 1999 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] To simplify my argument, I'm skipping over the significant role of Romanticism and German Transcendentalism. One can make an argument that they too have significant Eastern thinking in them as well but I'll leave it to others to argue this point.