Sermon by Rev. Clare Butterfield
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 1, 2005
Reading:
from Living the Word in the February Christian Century by Stephen
Paul Bouman
Here is what transfiguration
looked like a few years ago in the streets of New York. You are driving
along the FDR at night, you notice a car coming up on the right, sparks flying
along the concrete. You think, “The poor guy’s losing his tire.” You slow
down, drift to the left, watch the other car careen off the side of the road.
Then, blam! His tire tears into your car. Glass is flying, the front
windshield and the roof are coming in on you….you smell fresh air and fresh
blood.
It happens just like that. You lose a job. Your water
runs out in the Sonoran desert and you lie down to die. The doctor diagnoses
the lump.… You lose your way. The point of the journey is lost. There is no
big picture, just helter-skelter chaos. Blam. Your best friend tells you he
must go to Jerusalem where they will kill him, says it has to be that way. And
they might find a cross to fit you too. Blam. In a New York minute, as they
say.
You are looking through shards of glass, wind whips through
the car. You keep driving….
Kind people in cars note the bashed-in car and form a kind
of motorcade guiding you to the hospital. This is what transfiguration looks
like in the streets of New York. You stagger out of the car at Metropolitan
Hospital.… A street person sees your clerical collar and moves in to ask
for spare change. He sees your blood-spattered face and takes your arm. “It’s
all right brother, come with me.” … Transfiguration.
Later I see him in the park across the street, lighting a
fire to keep warm …
Transfiguration is the appearance of God’s glory in the
midst of our journeys to the cross. Out of the darkness God sends transfiguring
presence. It’s OK. I’m with you. You are my beloved child in whom I am well
pleased. All will be well. A trail of altars.
At the cross the journeys will converge, home will come
into view. “And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.”
Sermon:
I can’t tell you how good it
is to be at home this morning. I’ve been away a lot lately, preaching and doing
workshops in many other congregations. More than 30 in the last six months. I
know most of you know who I am, but a few of you don’t so let me say that I’m
the community minister here. My ministry is to direct Faith in Place, an
interfaith environmental ministry. Our offices are in Logan Square in Chicago,
but we work with about 100 congregations now, all over the region, to improve
their ecological stewardship and to make care for Creation part of their regular
religious practice. We do this with energy conservation programs, support for
renewable power, direct connections between congregations and sustainable
farmers, and youth programming that uses urban agriculture to teach young people
about their own agency in the care for Creation.
Part of my deal with this congregation is that twice a year
or so I come back and report in with you, let you know how it’s going.
Maybe that reading makes you think it isn’t going very
well.
Actually, the opposite is true. It’s going, in some ways,
better than I ever expected. Two weeks ago we had a workshop on some very
concrete practices for congregations – solar thermal systems, lighting
retrofits, sustainable food issues, fair trade – and 74 folks showed up from 33
congregations from as far away as Elgin, Wisconsin, Indiana. Last Saturday I
spoke to 100 Catholics from the Joliet diocese where things are getting
interesting on these issues. As I said, in the last six months I’ve been in
more than 30 congregations. They have been Presbyterian, Catholic, Unitarian
Universalist, UCC, Zoroastrian, Jewish Conservative, Jewish Reformed, Lutheran,
Episcopal, Methodist, Muslim. They’ve been in the city and in the suburbs.
They’ve been well-to-do and quite marginal, and in-between. They’ve been
peopled by white people, Latino people, African-American people and people from
the Asian subcontinent.
In between visits, I’ve been taking a course in 20th
century theology.
The developments covered by the course are mostly in
Protestantism but also with some reference to Catholicism and Judaism. And the
theologies we’re looking at come not only from Europe and America but from the
liberation movements of Latin America, Africa and Asia. We tend to cover a lot
in three hours, but it’s quite a feast. Taken up against the experience of
being with so many people of so many faiths, it’s doubly-so.
Now at Faith in Place we are always, in some manner,
engaged in answering the question how shall we live, and our answers generally
linger on a pretty practical level. We shall live by recycling and by
conserving energy. We shall live by supporting local wind power and by eating
organic food from local farmers. This congregation has joined us in many of
these things. But our practices by themselves are too thin an answer for the
deeper question. Truly – in this world, in the world we see out our windows and
the world we read about every day in our newspapers, how shall we live? How
shall we remain ethical people, how shall we love one another, how shall we keep
from sinking into despair?
How we should live has to have something to do with the way
we understand the truth of our situation here. The truth of our situation here
is both theological and ecological. We live on a smallish planet, ideally
located with reference to other bodies in the solar system, containing mostly
water but some arable land and, currently, 6 billion humans and a whole bunch of
other living things. That’s one truth that should be informing our answer to
the question “how shall we live.”
In Unitarian Universalist congregations we’re often better
at framing the answer in terms of data than in terms of theology. But data is
small-scale stuff. If we think, for example, that 6 billion is too many, we’re
going to need some kind of ethical framework, some notion of good and evil or
universal imperative to guide what we do about it. This is where theology can
be more than helpful. It can be life-saving.
My response to the luxury both of moving among people of
many faiths and reading this profusion of ideas is that on some level they all
have some kind of truth in them, and they remind us of the strange and sometimes
terrible beauty of the world we’re all traveling in.
One thing I’m sorry to have to report, as we engage in
these wonderfully interfaith events of deep richness and reward, is this: I’m
afraid that it is pretty consistently among Unitarian Universalists that we get
questions about religious language and whether or not we should even be using
it. I mean that at our events, attended by Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians,
Protestants of every stripe, Catholics, Baha’i, Buddhists, Sikhs, the only folks
who have ever come up to us after an event or e-mailed us later to ask why we
used a particular word, indicating that they got stuck on language and didn’t
hear the larger message, have been UUs. Our self-image as a movement is one of
great tolerance. But I’m afraid we are not as far out in front of our brothers
and sisters on participation in interfaith groups as we want to think we are.
Talking to a colleague who attended McCormick Seminary – the Presbyterian
seminary in the Hyde Park cluster – he mentioned that it was always the
Meadville students who would get offended in interfaith classes. They would not
only disagree with the ideas being expressed, they would be personally offended
by the use of a Christian vocabulary by the students from Christian seminaries.
We do not want our reputation on the seminary campus to be one of small-minded
grouchiness, but I fear that it might be.
Our world – the world of UUs – is rather small. We are a
small association to begin with, and our numbers are currently in decline. There
is some talk within the movement about why this should be so, and there are many
theories advanced for it. One I’ve read in the sermons of one of my colleagues
from Texas (Davidson Loehr of the First UU Church in Austin) is that our
movement comes out of the political tradition of the American enlightenment
rather than out of a theological tradition.
Do not misunderstand me. I treasure the democratic ideal,
and political ideology is important stuff. But in that moment when the tire
hits your car, when the wave strikes, when you become aware that the appetite of
the people in your country for fossil fuels, water, stuff, outstrips the
capacity of the world to produce it and that our profligacy inflicts suffering
unto death on millions of the world’s poor, when you yourself hover on the
borderline between death and life, you need a really big idea. And you need it
at the ready – you aren’t going to think it up on the spot. In our movement
there is very little theological conversation going on. Maybe because, as this
minister suggests, ours is more a political than a theological tradition. And
maybe because we think we can’t talk about the really big ideas without damaging
one another’s feelings. Because one of the weaknesses of a tradition that
emphasizes democratic processes so much is that the individual prerogative to
say “no” can come to be valued more than the responsibility to say “yes.”
We can do better than this. I’ve put myself back in what I
consider to be a remedial PhD program in part because it was quite possible to
evade theology at the time that I attended Meadville, and to much too great an
extent I did. I’m making up for that now. I’m making up for it over at the UCC
seminary, along with colleagues who are Mennonite, Quaker, an early pre-curser
to the Mormons, and, of course, UCC. I’m trying to bring what I’m learning
there back here because I think we need it. I do, so I think maybe you do too.
The more that I learn myself the more it guides my feet. The more access I have
to these ideas the more I depend on them to save my life in a world that is
doing much more dying than living. I bring them home in the conviction that all
of us benefit from being in the company of ideas that were designed to save
lives and souls. Particularly in a culture in which so much of what circulates
is designed to diminish the human spirit – these ideas were designed to lift it
up.
I am, of course, a Unitarian, but in my current
self-imposed exile of study I have been reading a fair amount about the
Trinity. And I read in Leonardo Boff’s book on trinity and society, the idea
that we start in our understanding of the nature of God with the whole Triune
God so that we understand that from eternity God’s nature is communal. That God
begot the Son and breathed out the Spirit so that the three could exist,
co-eternal, as a community of Divinity – to be companions for each other – to
make relationship possible. I will die a Unitarian – find not much use and some
frustration in long treatises on the Council of Nicaea, but a God who is by
nature in communion is a God I can understand. “Yes,” I say to my brother the
former Franciscan priest, and liberation theologian from Brazil. I am not a
Trinitarian in any sense that Boff would recognize, but God the Father, God the
Son, God the Holy Spirit? God as a community of creativity, revelation and
love? I know those people – I have met them out there in the world. They have
saved my life over and over again.
If you start by shutting down any conversation about God
(which I must say we don’t do so much here these days) then you will absolutely
never get to the conversation about the nature of God. About what kind of God
(whatever you want to call that) could save your soul in a dark and weary world.
Boff speaks of the Holy Spirit and says that it sustains
the feeble breath of life in the empire of death. Look hard at this world. You
know what he means by the empire of death if you are paying attention. The
feeble breath of life needs some sustaining out there. It needs some sustaining
in here.
In our movement it wasn’t only the trinity that we
ultimately got rid of. In the long historical run we’ve replaced the depth of
this theological idea with a sort of reflexive reliance on democratic process –
as if these things were interchangeable. One man one vote is not a substitute
for an idea about the nature of what is holy. The latter guides the exercise of
the former.
We in this tradition tend to believe that we are moving
always upward, and through our own power. Our traditional documents speak with
a triumphalist view of the human project on earth. It is possible that there
was a period in history that justified that confidence but I do not believe that
we are living in it. Our tradition is so steeped in this sort of optimism that
it’s even hard for us to see it anymore. It’s the water we swim in. But it is
an idea that is not easily validated by the modern world. And the more we work
to protect this belief the smaller our world will be. If we insist on
protecting an increasingly fragile triumphalist position, then we will become
increasingly unable to engage with the world as it is.
Our communities will become communities
of self-protection,
Of self-congratulation,
Of littleness and isolation,
In which we abdicate the power we do have by non-engagement
with the world.
I come home to report because I feel that candor is a part
of our contract. I have this strange advantage of spending a lot of my time in
other religious homes. I have a basis for comparison greater than most folks
do. But like anything else, if I thought this was hopeless I’d maintain a
polite Midwestern silence on the matter. I don’t think it is – but I think I’m
obliged to come home and say what I see.
You know that the work of Faith in Place is about ecology,
but on one level it only happens to fall into that category. The real work I am
about, and Faith in Place is about, is creating a place where the ideas of
theology – ideas that can save our lives – are applied to the world.
With the Lutherans I read about unmerited Grace – quite in
contrast to the Unitarian philosophy. But if we read Luther himself, and not
some of the dismal filters through which his thought has come to us, what we end
up with is more salvific. It is the idea that no matter how unmerited, we
receive God’s grace. It is also, truly, the idea that nothing we could do could
ever be enough to merit the grace we receive, but this is much more in Luther a
statement about the magnitude of God’s generosity than it is about the magnitude
of our unworthiness. And look at the world. Sometimes the notion of unmerited
Grace will save your life, won’t it?
Personally I don’t need the literal truth of the bodily
resurrected Jesus, but I need the risen Christ. I have expressed that thought
to my friends who are Presbyterian ministers, Lutheran ministers, and they just
nod understandingly. There has been tremendous movement in 20th
century theology in the congregations of our protestant brothers and sisters,
and mostly it’s taken place without us. And because we opted out, and made some
assumptions about what was going on in those churches, we are often mistaken now
about where our brothers and sisters stand. Generally speaking, they stand all
over the place. There are Unitarian Presbyterians (though they have to find
some other language for that idea), and everybody’s a Universalist these days.
Among the mainline Protestant denominations, it’s quite possible to be a member
and to believe everything that I believe in the manner in which I believe it.
We should be aware of that, because it means that by not engaging with theology
in a deep way ourselves we give newcomers one less reason to be here as opposed
to some other church along Lake Street. Our failure to participate in the
broader conversation may ultimately be the reason that we disappear.
Which doesn’t mean that I and my Presbyterian, Mennonite,
Catholic or Quaker brethren agree about everything. We just find our
disagreements more interesting than otherwise. I’m not suggesting that by
accepting theological ideas as things of truth and beauty we surrender
discernment. Quite the opposite – I’m suggesting that we advance to a higher
level of ideas that make discernment more difficult and more necessary. I’m
also suggesting that all our words are inadequate, that they are signs pointing
toward the truth, and in this way an idea you do not believe in can save your
life. It can still tell you that the bridge is out – it can point out to you
the inadequacy of your own sign.
I have met such good companions from among the Muslims,
Lutherans, Presbyterians, Zoroastrians. They are a part of my ecological
system. They are a part of the ecosystem of the Chicago area, the great lakes
basin, the glacial terminal moraines of northern Illinois. The wood ducks, the
wild nodding onion, the dog-tooth lily, and the Lutherans. We all have to
inhabit this little bit of territory together, and the path toward figuring out
how to do that is one of open inquiry and generous spirit.
The bigger an event or an idea is, the more inconsistent
the accounts of it are going to be. That is why the gospel accounts of our
brother Jesus vary so greatly, for example. It is why any of the witnesses to
the tire hitting the car in Rev. Bouman’s essay would have told a different
story about what they saw. Your own views may be informed by someone else’s,
even if yours are more accurate. Your description of the infinite is likely to
be incomplete. It’s likely to benefit from someone else’s.
There is a lot of theology abroad in the world right now.
There are theological ideas that claim to uphold or protect life which really do
quite the opposite. There are ideas that have long been supported by the new
Pope Benedict, for example, which on the one hand are very careful of the
sanctity of life but on the other hand in one manner or another disempower at
least 2/3rds of the people on the planet – all of the women and quite a few of
the men. But they are well-formed, well-reasoned, deeply inspired and truly
held ideas. Whatever else the man may be he is not stupid and he is not a
hypocrite. His ideas have power and they will have to be answered on their own
terms – not with political responses, but with theological ones.
Do we want to be bystanders in that conversation?
We gloss over both the depth and the importance of
theological ideas, and so we remove ourselves from it except in a political way
– and politics are not going to persuade people to come over to our side who are
on the other side for religious reasons.
Our seven principles and purposes, which are, frankly, not
our proudest accomplishment as a tradition, refer to the sources of inspiration
from which we draw – Jewish and Christian teachings, inspirational women and men
– as if these things were all of a piece and not in conflict. They are only not
in conflict if we stay on the surface of things. Rev. Loehr in his sermon
suggests that they were derived from a series of focus groups in our
congregations at the time, and represent a profile of the liberal and
economically comfortable group that happened to be present at the time. In
other words, they described the seekers, not what was being sought. But over
time they have come to substitute for what we are seeking – and then we end up
only seeking ourselves. We celebrate them as an accomplishment, but a document
which makes us the center of our own worship lives is not, I think, a thing to
be celebrated. We should use them as a description but not as a roadmap.
It is hardly an original observation that the ideas in
which our culture traffics are very, very small indeed. I could point you to a
dozen television programs that contain no thought at all – more if I were as
well informed on this topic as my children are. But I’m afraid that we have a
lowest common denominator tendency within our own congregations as well.
We smooth over difference, assuming that on the big ideas
we’re really all the same – that Buddhism and Christianity and Judaism and Islam
are all alike at their core. We assume that because we pull selectively from
these faiths only the things that tend to affirm us are where we’re already
standing. To diminish the differences in these and other traditions is a subtle
way of assuming that if people only got their heads on straight they would think
like we do.
But they are not the same. They are wonderfully big ideas
and many of them are absolutely antithetical to one another both within each
tradition and among them. Only an idea powerful enough to disagree with is
powerful enough to save your life.
I do not believe in Boff’s Trinitarian God in the way that
Boff believes it, I’m quite clear on that. But I do depend for the shaping of
my own life more and more on ideas from the Christian tradition. Not only on
the life and sayings of our brother Jesus, but on what theologians call the
Christ event in history. This is the transfigurative moment, when Jesus of
Nazareth became the Christ – when the infinite and eternal was admitted into
history on Earth. I’m quite aware that not all of you share that view. You
have allowed me to develop in it among you, and I believe that you have
benefited from my belief in it, whether you agree with me or not. It is having
an idea of such depth among us that conveys, I believe, the benefit to the whole
group. The depth of an idea that says that at some moment of great need on
earth a completely discontinuous event is possible. Not that the laws of nature
are ever suspended, and certainly not a simple-minded belief in some sort of
hovering divine hand steering human events. But a moment in which things become
possible that are not possible. A moment in evil is unquestioningly and for all
time redeemed by the power of love.
I really do not care by what tradition you come to
understand that we live in a world of vast, hidden possibility and also vast and
unspeakable evil and suffering. Only I maintain that all of us without
exception have a need for ideas as deep as the story of the Christ event. The
conversion of Saul into Paul. John the Baptist preparing the way in the
wilderness. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, ascending to heaven at the
end of his teaching. The Buddha tree. I would ask you to allow yourself to
depend on something, deeply. I would ask you to find an idea big enough to save
your life, and then surrender a little of your own authority to the authority of
that idea. Your own theology of the cross may have no intersection at all with
the Christian narrative. But it will be the theology you can turn to in the
emergency room, waiting for your child. The one that waits with you for the
report from the pathology lab. The one that guides you through war, through
the ruin of children, through the loss of the gifts of a beautiful Earth by a
generous God. The last line in Rev. Bouman’s essay comes from the gospel of
John. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, shall draw all people to
myself.” It is a saying given to our brother Jesus by the John who wrote this
gospel. The gospel of John does strange things with your head. And yet we know
what it means. “And I, when I am lifted from the earth, will draw all people to
myself.”
I work on my theology – on the ideas that bring God’s grace
to me – as a discipline of surviving here. I know too much now about how things
really are. I have no joy in the world any longer without these ideas. They
are that close to my heart. I read them because I need them with me.
Transfiguration.
“And I, when I am lifted from the earth, shall draw all
people to myself.”
So may we all be lifted.
Amen
© Copyright 2005
Clare Butterfield, All Rights Reserved.
