REFLECTION

I had sat with the question for almost two years -- and could hear my professor as he had asked it again and again. The particular course had not mattered; the question worked in virtually any of his lectures. Over and over he had asked, "How would each of us - and the world - be different if we truly felt that we were loved by God?"

Over time and to make the question accessible, I had simplified it. "How would each of us and the world be different if we truly felt deeply loved?" Period. Those of you who know me well, know that even to begin to answer a question like this one, I had to start by feeling my way. So I began asking myself some questions. "What does it feel like to be loved? How do I behave when I am truly feeling lovable? When I truly believe that I am loved? Do I know what it feels like to be loved without condition? To love without condition? When I have loved deeply and felt deeply loved, have I behaved differently toward others -- and myself -- from how I behave when I take it all for granted?

As I have sat with the questions, frequently I have thought of my grandfather. For as long as I can remember, those of us who knew him well, friends as well as family members, were awed by his phenomenally loving nature. In his presence, and now twenty years after his death, you knew he deeply loved you, and seemingly without condition! You simply knew that you were a lovable person. Accepted. Okay. Good enough. Just right the way you were. You did not have to be perfect, but you felt that you were just because you were you.

And even if you or another made unkind judgments about someone else, or a group of someone-elses, you knew that in his eyes, those others were just right the way they were. They were lovable, good enough, perfect in their own ways.

You could make mistakes, and you could misbehave, yet you knew you would still be loved. Grandpa did not "look the other way" when you pushed a limit; nor did he criticize unmercifully when you made a mistake. His was not an "anything goes" attitude. To feel that you were unconditionally loved did not mean you could just do anything you felt like doing. And, strangely enough, you did not want to do just anything you felt like doing ... when you were in his world.

In today's language, Grandpa had clear rules and clear boundaries. With a stern look, a few words, or even one single word, always accompanied with a certain twinkle in his eye, Grandpa could communicate clearly what was okay in his house and what was not okay. He would communicate in his scarcity of words what was okay when you ventured out into the world as well.

Most amazing and wonderful about being the recipient of those quietly communicated expectations was that being told "no" once seemed to be enough. Yet, you knew that you were a good person whether you behaved well or not. And because you believed that he believed you were a good person, you wanted to be one, to follow his example, to be a moral person. You wanted to please him.

Today, I ask myself what made the difference with my grandfather, what made it possible for me, at this stage of my life, to look back to that child's relationship with a beloved old man, to imagine how it might feel to be unconditionally loved? I think it was his constancy, not just with those of us who were his friends and family, but with strangers as well. Grandpa truly did see an inherent worth in everyone, even in those in whom others might not have seen worth. I cannot recall him ever being unkind to another living creature. Although he had his opinions, and expressed them, I cannot remember him speaking unkindly about another behind his or her back. If he had the opportunity, he always spoke clearly and directly, or as he'd have said, he'd hold his tongue. You knew where you stood with him and you knew that, in his eyes, others stood there as well. You knew that he stood with you, sometimes in spite of yourself. That constancy, which I saw in my grandfather, I experienced as unconditional love. Applied to others as well as to self, to strangers and enemies as well as to friends and family, it has provided me with a starting place for beginning to imagine, "How would each of us and the world be different if we truly felt deeply loved?"

SERMON

This sermon topic today is an exploration of a faith statement, a supposition about reality. "How would life be different if we looked at love as an unlimited resource freely offered." For some of you this will be as useful an exploration as imagining we had wings and could fly. (With the coming revolution in biotechnology, we may indeed be able to reengineer human DNA to allow the development of wings, but that is neither here nor there for our discussion) If this is the attitude you bring this morning, I encourage you to put on your sociologist's hat and hear my words as a researcher in comparative religions. For others of you, who may have had an experience you've labeled "unconditional love", but have not integrated it into your daily life and beliefs, my hope is this sermon will be particularly useful. And finally for those of you who already know what I'm talking about and are living it on a daily basis, I hope this sermon will confirm your faith and you can show me how to embody what I'm saying today even better.

As Lynn mentioned in her reflection, there are very strong Christian roots to the topic today. Almost all Christians believe that Jesus' death and resurrection persuaded God that we sinful humans weren't so bad after all and he was reconciled to us. If we believe in Jesus, the flood gates of God's abundant love open. The challenge as a Christian is to accept that love and allow it to work inside us toward God's loving purpose for the world and humanity. What gets in the way of that abundant love is our limited self-absorption in our private well-being rather than the betterment of those around us, our community and our world. Of course, allowing God's love to move through us all the time and not get in the way with our personal agendas is pretty difficult. Yet somehow God doesn't get angry with us, rather unconditionally continues to offer that love in deference to his son Jesus who cares about us pathetic wretches.

A lot of people are quite caught up in this kind of thinking, close to a billion of them. Now it is quite possible that they are all deluding themselves. Or it is possible that they are expressing a fundamental human experience in theistic language and symbols. My hunch is the latter is true. I believe if there is God behind it all in the heavenly control room listening to prayers and pulling the strings, that God cares primarily about what we do rather than how we conceptualize what we do. I believe one can be an agnostic or an atheist and be as devoted to humanity as Jesus was by living the meaning of the Great Commandments to love God and love thy neighbor. The operative word is love. (Subject for another sermon.)

This exploration of "what if" is deeply personal. Each of us will have our own answers to the question specific to our lives. Because this topic is so personal, I'm going to give you my answer and then bring the microphone to you and invite a few people to respond how they would answer the question.

As I've said before, my experience of what I believe is best expressed in the words "unconditional love" has profoundly oriented and transformed my life. My root experiences, first after playing an inspired game of chess, and later confirmed in a healing circle, opened me to an exploration of the religious and spiritual dimensions of existence. After enough tastes of this unconditional love experience, I made a decision to dedicate my life to finding out what's really going on here and sharing what I find with others. Part of that journey has been gradually taking on today's "what if" hypothesis as an operating assumption to see what happens. For me this is what ministry is all about.

The hardest part about working with the assumption of unconditional love for me has been overcoming the fear that my giving will deplete me. As my parents grew up during the Great Depression, I'm sure I inherited some of their anxiety that there wouldn't be enough and I'd starve. The attitudes and behaviors shaped by that anxiety don't work very well in times of abundance. Today, many of our mental and physical health problems are linked to excess rather than scarcity. Unfortunately, the emotional roots of anxiety rarely see the light of reality.

My personal experience has been, on the whole, that giving creates more rather than less. When people start giving to each other rather than withholding from each other, tremendous energy is released that inspires more giving. This is often seen during capital campaigns in churches. At the beginning of the project people stagger under the fear of the amount of money that needs to be raised. And after the money is raised, they wonder how they'll ever meet the budget. More often than not, more money is raised for the yearly budget than was expected. Giving deepens people's commitment and willingness to support their congregation.

You've seen how hard I work around here and you'd think I drag myself home each night exhausted. This is not the case. Sometimes I have so much energy I can't go to sleep at night after a long day. I find the more I'm present in the moment with the people with whom I'm interacting each day, the more I get revved up by our creative interchange. I try to approach every personal contact I make as a chance for mutual enrichment, a chance for the Spirit of Life to become more substantial and thus more inspiring.

I'm finding when I really believe I'm being unconditionally loved, my life has great meaning. It validates my inherent worth and dignity. I'm an expression of life and all life has value. Even in my darkest hour, even when I've summed up the value of my life, crumpled it up and thrown it in the trash can, that love is still there ready and waiting to shine through me. I could be on death row waiting to be executed and the potential to experience and live out that love in my life would still remain a potential. As much of a potential as for a saint. This is the depth of the Universalist faith we inherit.

Unfortunately, the way I resist this radiant potential for my being is through self judgement. I look in the mirror and see my flaws rather than the light in my eyes. What is self judgement anyway but the record of past failures. If our past completely determined our future, we'd be lost. There would be no point to any program of character development.

The most precious dimension of human existence is the ability to choose. We cannot erase the effects of our past choices that strongly condition the present moment. We can always begin making new choices that turn away from the failures of the past and point our life in a new direction that engages the power of unconditional love. Painful as I often find it to make those new choices and turn away from the ways I want to close off my heart, the ways I want the satisfaction of making another person wrong, or the ways I might want to control another person, my commitment is to choose to engage the power of unconditional love.

One of the things that I've noticed about making these choices is how un-utilitarian they are. Emotionally, the cost-benefit analysis often feels like a losing proposition. Opening my hand to someone I fear may be my enemy is a risky business. The transformations that happen through the power of love are very hard to predict and analyze before the choices are made.

This risk feels the highest in dealing with people who are different. Whether it is skin color, racial and cultural background, economic status, class, intelligence, political ideology, etc., the experience of difference can cause me to want to close my self off to that person and objectify them, put them in a category and dismiss them. Remembering their inherent worth and dignity, remembering the Spirit of Life flows in their veins too, remembering that we share a common humanity, helps me keep my heart open and choose to be in relationship.

And sometimes preserving that ongoing relationship will mean I may have to act to prevent harm to myself and harm to others. Preserving the peace is different from using force to control and dehumanize.

For me that hardest part about opening my life to unconditional love is failing frequently in living up to my highest ideals of what I sense is the potential for bringing alive this unconditional love. Again and again I see myself making little turns away from opening myself to the vastness of love's potential. And once in a while I'll blow it, usually with the very best of intentions. My heart will ache and the tears will flow as I agonize over what I wish I'd done.

But the spigot remains on. Love is still there waiting to be actualized. In fact sometimes in those moments of greatest failure is the greatest potential to allow the false and untrue part of me to die and allow the new to be born.

I was talking this week with the members of the Committee on Professional Ministry, who help me to be effective in our congregation, about where I find the passion in my ministry. The more I think about it, the more I find it right in this experiment. The experiment of living as if I am unconditionally loved without knowing whether I am or not. Let me tell you, at times this takes tremendous courage. I'm not operating under the assurance of salvation. I'm not preparing for my cloud seat in heaven and singing in the heavenly choir. I'm not expecting a quick trip to the Buddhist Pure Land for an easy preparation for enlightenment. If there is reincarnation, I'm planning to come back until the very last sentient being is awakened. This is what fills my life with meaning and energizes me, as I open up the doors of my life to be one of the many conduits for unconditional love to enter the world.

One of the strangest byproducts of this experiment is how it has changed my feeling about death. When I experience this sense of being loved, my grip on life relaxes a little. There is a peacefulness in my being that suggests there is more to existence than what the senses can report. There is much more I wish to do in my life, yet experiencing the vastness of love puts me at ease. I know I do not labor alone and recognize those all around me working for the same end in differing disguises.

Whether I say it or not, every sermon I offer is an invitation for you to join me in this experiment. It isn't a thought experiment and there are no intellectual answers to be had. Each moment of our lives is unique and cannot be fully calibrated to some ethical or moral standard. Whether by gift or accident, we do have the power to choose. Each choice matters. And there is always the opportunity to try again.

Remember though, time is short. Death is part of life. Our children will only be this age but once. Our friends and spouses may be gone tomorrow. Sickness and old age are the prices we pay for surviving.

And yet, if we truly let it in, like a grandfather's love, the awesome beauty of existence is so grand and the privilege of being able to participate in it as a human being so humbling, the doubts vanish and leave only love.