Sermon
To Help One Another
The
Rev.
I
was in about forty feet of water, alone.
I knew I should not have gone alone, but I was very competent and just
took a chance. There was not much current, and the water was so warm and clear
and enticing. But when I got a cramp, I
realized at once how foolish I was. I
was not very alarmed, but was completely doubled up with stomach cramp. I tried to remove my weight belt, but I was
so doubled up I could not get to the catch.
I was sinking and began to feel more frightened, unable to move. I could see my watch and knew that there was
only a little more time on the tank before I would be finished with
breathing! I tried to massage my
abdomen. I wasn’t wearing a wet suit,
but couldn’t straighten out and couldn’t get to the cramped muscles with my
hands.
I thought, “I can’t go like this! I have things to do!” I just couldn’t die anonymously this way, with no one to een know what happened to me. I called out in my mind, “somebody, something, help me!”
I was not prepared for what happened. Suddenly I felt a prodding from behind me under the armpit. I thought, “Oh no, sharks!” I felt real terror and despair. But my arm was being lifted forcibly. Around into my field of vision came an eye – the most marvelous eye I could ever imagine. I swear it was smiling. It was the eye of a big dolphin. Looking into that eye, I knew I was safe.
It moved farther forward, nudging under, and hooked its dorsal fin under my armpit with my arm over its back. I relaxed, hugging it, flooded with relief. I felt that the animal was conveying security to me, that it was healing me as well as lifting me toward the surface. My stomach cramp wen away as we ascended, and I relaxed with security, but I felt very strongly that it healed me too.
At the surface, it drew me all the way in to shore. It took me into water so shallow that I began to be concerned for it, that it would be beached, and I pushed it back a little deeper, where it waited, watching me, I guess to see if I was all right.
It felt like another lifetime. When I took off the weight belt and oxygen, I just took everything off and went naked back into the ocean to the dolphin. I felt so light and free and alive, and just wanted to play in the sun and the water, in all that freedom. The dolphin took me back out and played around in the water with me. I noticed that there were a lot of dolphins there, farther out.
After a while it brought me back to shore. I was very tired then, almost collapsing, and he made sure I was safe in the shallowest water. Then he turned sideways with one eye looking into mine. We stayed that way for what seemed like a very long time, timeless I guess, in a trance almost, with personal thoughts of the past going through my mind. Then he made just one sound and went out to join the others, and all of them left.
Sermon
Four weeks ago I began a series of sermons based on the invocation I use at the beginning of our service. This is the fifth and last sermon in the series and it addresses what I think may be the greatest challenge presented by those words. That is the obligation, the covenant, to help one another. I believe to help one another is a difficult task; and to accept help from another can be even more challenging – even frightening. I also believe there is a natural human instinct to want to help. My colleague, the Rev. Suzanne Meyer, puts it this way:
We human beings . . . [have]
an instinctive need, desire, [and] impulse to heal, to nurture, to respond, to
help, to rescue, [and] to give of ourselves to others in need. Empathy, compassion, [and] affection spring
forth naturally from a healthy human spirit.
We want to help each other.
But helping others
isn’t always easy. And help offered is
not always help accepted. Last week I
mentioned the angry letters to the editor in the Tulsa World, denouncing Lynn Schusterman’s offer to donate Ten Million Dollars to higher
education in
Sometimes there is good cause for being suspicious of those who want to help us. But too often we are suspicious, even fearful of those who want to help. Those who want to help are labeled do-gooders, bleeding hearts, and fuzzy thinkers whose actions just cause co-dependency and encourage people to be lazy, welfare cheats. Helping others is for the gullible and the weak minded. Real men, real women, real Americans are self-sufficient and look down their noses at any suggestion that they should accept or give help.
I believe such attitudes are part of the myth of the rugged individual. Oddly enough, it is a myth that is shared by people across the political spectrum – although it takes different forms. The neo-cons on the far right want to abolish all taxes and government services. Everything will be privatized. It is an attitude that says, “I’ve got mine, you get yours.” But consider the extreme left and the opposition to globalization. Ironically, the organizers of demonstrations against the World Trade Organization a few years ago, coordinated their massive demonstrations with cellular telephones that had a built-in walkie-talkie function – a technology made possible because of the coordinated efforts of massive global companies that invested billions in research, development, and marketing. The very globalization they protested made their protests possible. And it is the purchases by billions of people that make possible the corporate and individual wealth that allows the neo-cons to declare there is something wrong with government concern for the general welfare.
I believe reality is quite different from the angry rhetoric that dominates our culture today. I believe the anger is symptomatic of a different kind of truth – the truth that we are all part of an increasingly interdependent web. I believe that we are more interdependent on one another than at any previous time in human history. And I believe it is that interdependency – not dependency, but interdependency – that frightens many people today. I believe it frightens them because they don’t want to have to admit just how interconnected our lives have become. They don’t want to admit it, because it means admitting that no one has complete and total control of his or her life. Whether we like it or not, we need one another – and we need one another’s help.
There are many
traditional ways in which people help one another. This Sunday after church, for instance, we
will have a baby shower for a member of our congregation – and another in a
couple of weeks. Last weekend members of
All of these
are traditional ways of helping one another – the kind of activities I suspect
most of us think of when helping is mentioned.
The words of our invocation include that kind of helping. But I believe there is a deeper meaning to
helping, a theological meaning that is not as obvious. I believe it is an idea that was suggested by
something said at
Tim Peterson, a
member of All Souls and a professor at
The traditional Unitarian Trinity is freedom, reason, and tolerance. Whenever I think about tolerance, whenever I ask myself what it means to live-up to the challenge of being a tolerant person, I don’t think of a Unitarian. I think of Terry Muck, one of my seminary professors. Terry is a conservative Presbyterian who calls himself an evangelical Christian. He is the former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, the national flagship magazine for evangelical Christianity. He was my teacher for Indigenous Religions – the very first class I took in seminary. I was scared to death. I was going back to school after too many years and I didn’t know if I could do the work. The class itself dealt with the religions of Native Americans and other non-technological peoples. I wondered how an evangelical Presbyterian could teach such a class with an open mind. I soon discovered how much I had to learn. Terry not only welcomed me with grace and love to his class, but also spoke with reverence about religious traditions I knew were at odds with his own beliefs. Then one day, while talking about a Native American ceremony he had attended – not one of the tourist productions, but the real thing – he suddenly stopped, looked around the classroom with his arms outstretched and a look of awe on his face and said, “You know, it’s wonderful to worship with other people.” Terry Muck is my referent for what it means to be a tolerant human being. By his example, he helped me.
Another referent in my life is a man named Alfred Greenfield. Alfred and his wife LaFinnis knew my parents before I was born. After my father was killed they remained some of our closest family friends – their late night visit on Christmas Eve being the most important event of that season. After I was an adult and LaFinnis died, Alfred married my mother.
Alfred was a
hard person to forget. He was short,
gruff, and loved to smoke Rum Crook Cigars.
He owned a small printing business in
One of his long time employees, a skilled pressman, - and a very gentle, but big guy – decided to take a second job as a bouncer in a nightclub to make extra money. Let’s call him Bob. That wasn’t his name, but that’s what I’ll call him. Within a short time Bob was shot and critically injured while trying to break up a fight. He lived, but it was a year before he was able to work again. Alfred told me – with anger in his voice – how foolish Bob had been to take such a dangerous job – especially since he had offered him the opportunity for extra overtime that would actually have paid him more money. What Alfred never told me, but I learned from the guys in the shop, was that for the next year, while Bob was unable to work, Alfred went by his house once a week and delivered his paycheck to his wife.
All the gruff,
belligerent talk, was just a cover, his way of hiding
the fact that he was a deeply compassionate human being. Alfred – Alfred the Great, as we called him –
is my referent for what it means to be a compassionate human being. He was a man who spent years working for Big
Brothers of Dallas as its volunteer president, the man who I think must have
provided half the printing needs in the City of
Becoming a referent for someone isn’t easy. Tim Peterson says it’s the most difficult kind of leadership power to acquire, and the most easily lost. So how does one do it? I think the answer is found in something that may sound silly to you. Do you remember what the flight attendant says when you get on a commercial airliner? If the oxygen mask comes down and you’re traveling with someone who needs assistance, you first put the mask on yourself – then you help the other person. In other words, before you can help another, you must first help yourself.
This isn’t a call for selfishness – it is a call for self-awareness and personal growth. I say that because I believe the way a person helps himself or herself in a church is by working for something called salvation. That’s a word with different meanings for different people, so let me tell you what it means to me. I believe salvation is what happens when a person finds his or her life has been transformed, when a person discovers he or she has become something more than they thought they could be. The old Army slogan was “be all that you can be.” Salvation, transformation, calls for a person to be more than he or she can be. It is something that calls for the impossible. So how does one do it?
I think a
person works towards the possibility when he or she decides to challenge
oneself – by learning and by growing. We
do this all the time with our children.
We expect them to grow by going to school. I believe we can help ourselves by attending
some of our adult education classes – our Adult Forum, the book discussion
group, the Questions? class this evening, or bible
study on Tuesdays at
I think we help ourselves by greeting the stranger who visits us for the first time. I think we help ourselves by acts of kindness to others. I think we help ourselves when we speak the truth as best we know it, when we are willing to confront evil, when we are willing – in a thousand different ways – to learn, to grow and to change.
I think that’s the kind of stuff that people watch – especially children. And as a person models that kind of behavior, that kind of personal exploration and growth, who knows who’s watching. We impart lessons to others, we help others, in ways we never know – like something that comes to a person out of the darkness of the sea. And we – in turn – living in that kind of community – the kind of community that values learning and change and growth, that values questioning and doubt and wonder – we in turn are helped.
Slowly, miraculously, in ways that are little and seemingly insignificant; in ways that are ordinary and conventional; and in other ways that are unconventional and extraordinary, we help one another. Then one day we are able to look around. We suddenly realize how we have helped ourselves and in turn been helped, how our lives have been changed, how our lives have been transformed. And somewhere, deep inside our hearts it gradually comes to us that the words of our invocation are true – and that they speak a truth that really will make us free.
Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law. This is our Great Covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.
Amen.