Sermon

The Authority of Vision

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

August 28, 2005

First Reading: Isaiah 1:10-16 (NRSV)

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation-- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Second Reading: Amos 5:21-24

I hate, I despise your feast days; and I will not savor your solemn assemblies. Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not be pleased; nor will I regard the peace offerings of your fat animals. Take away from Me the noise of your songs; for I will not hear the melody of your lutes. But let justice flow down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Third Reading: Micah 6:6-8

‘With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Fourth Reading: Robert J. Ingersoll

Real religion means the doing of justice. Real religion means the giving to others every right you claim yourself. Real religion consists in duties of man to man, in feeding the hungry, in clothing the naked, in defending the innocent, and in saying what you believe to be true.

Sermon

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news this week about Pat Robertson and the accusations that he called for the assassination of the President of Venezuela. According to Mr. Robertson the press distorted what he said. He claims he was incorrectly reported as having said, and I quote, “If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop.” What he actually said was, “If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop.”

The truth, of course, is Mr. Robertson said just what he said. His claim to have been misinterpreted is just part of the usual circus that surrounds his public pronouncements. He unambiguously called for the murder of a foreign head of state, a statement that produced a shocked response from most people. For myself, Pat Robertson has made so many shocking statements over the years that I don’t know if I would be surprised by anything he might say. I was, however, amused by an editorial cartoon I saw yesterday. It was drawn by Jeff Danziger and has Mr. Robertson holding a rifle and saying, “Actually, I’m not a Christian, I just play one on television.”

But as I reflected on Mr. Robertson’s remarks I thought of something Helen Keller once said. Something that seemed to fit the situation with a blinding moral clarity. “It is a terrible thing,” she said, “to see and have no vision.” The world is full of people who see, but have no vision beyond their own meanness of spirit, their own prejudices, their own need to control others, their own desperate need to destroy anyone or anything that dares to disagree with them. They are people who look out at the world and can see nothing but themselves. To the extent they become aware of something or someone besides themselves they seek to reduce it in size so that they can tower over it. But in truth, all they actually do is diminish themselves. As the good book says, “Where there is no vision the people perish.”

It is, of course, not just people who lack vision. But institutions - of what ever kind - are never more than the people. It doesn’t matter if an institution publishes a million copies of its vision. If the vision isn’t in the hearts and minds of the people it means nothing. And if it is in the hearts and minds of the people there doesn’t have to be a single scrap of paper. So it always comes back to the people. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” And where there is vision the people prosper.

The bible, of course, has a lot to say about vision. Read the New Testament and you will discover there is a core message taught by Jesus. It wasn’t about salvation or anything you were supposed to believe or about baptism or communion or any other ritual or form of worship. It was a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. Now what was this Kingdom of Heaven? He wasn’t saying anything new. There was nothing original about his message. He was just repeating the essential vision set forth by the Old Testament prophets. In Isaiah it was the obligation to “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow”. In Amos it was to “let justice flow down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”. And in Micah it was, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God”. It was a vision of a just world. And it was a vision that has nothing to do with what you believe. It doesn’t matter if you believe in one God or a thousand gods or none at all. It doesn’t matter if you believe in the Apostles Creed, the Trinity or Baptism or the Eucharist or none of those things. And if you don’t believe me consider the last reading this morning from Robert Ingersoll. If you knew nothing about Robert Ingersoll it would be reasonable to presume that he was speaking directly out of the biblical tradition. But Ingersoll despised the bible, thought it a work of evil. Yet his words harmonize perfectly with the Old Testament prophets and the message that Jesus preached about the Kingdom of Heaven.

Real religion means the doing of justice. Real religion means the giving to others every right you claim yourself. Real religion consists in duties of man to man, in feeding the hungry, in clothing the naked, in defending the innocent, and in saying what you believe to be true.

The prophets of the Old Testament would have said, “Amen, Brother.” The power of such words, the authority of such words, is in their ability to lift our eyes from ourselves, to see beyond ourselves, to lead us to the acts of self-transformation that change the world - because no one changes the world by trying to change the world. The world is changed when one person, heeding the call of vision, says, in the words of Gandhi, “I will become the change I want to see in the world.” Stop and think for a moment what would happen if people, if a lot of people, had a sense of vision and began to follow it like that.

Our church has its own vision. Seeking Truth, Sharing Love: Within - Among - Beyond. Think what our church would be like if every member of our church truly embraced that idea. It’s an interesting thought. It’s the idea that stands behind what some people have called the permission giving church. That’s a church that has a vision, which means the people have a vision. They understand the vision. And when faced with a decision they ask themselves what the vision requires. In such a church the vision becomes the boss of the church. If a policy isn’t consistent with the vision, the policy is changed and any action proposed is measured against that vision. The vision gives approval to action; and the actions of each person are held accountable to the vision.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt the power of a small group of people to change the world. That's about the only way it has ever happened in the past." In a church that’s driven by vision all it takes to achieve great things is for three or four people to be inspired by vision to work for change. It begins when one person seizes on an idea consistent with the larger vision and is willing to commit their time, passion and treasure to its pursuit. If they find just two or three others who share that idea and they have the funding or can find it, then change and transformation is almost inevitable. But it always begins with vision - a vision that is the true authority of the church.

I said earlier that our vision as a church is Seeking Truth, Sharing Love: Within - Among - Beyond. It is not a vision that requires us to believe alike, but it is a vision that gives us a basis for walking together, it is a vision that tell us we are called to seek truth within ourselves, that we are called to find a way to love ourselves. It is a vision that calls us to seek truth and share love with one another and with those beyond our church. It is not enough to do just part of that. It is a vision that calls for us not to ignore the self and the needs of the self, but also to lift our eyes beyond ourselves.

Alice Walker once said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.” That’s why I don’t believe in talk about empowering people. People are already powerful. The purpose of leadership is enable people to recognize the power they have. Likewise, the purpose of vision is not to create power in someone, it’s purpose is to unify and bring together the power of many people.

Too often, however, churches don’t focus on Vision. Instead they focus on the past, on the status quo, on the way things have been done, on the paraphernalia that churches accumulate. That’s a favorite topic of Bill Easum, a well known church consultant (Bill Easum. Clarifying Our Mission, Vision, and Values. 1997). He gives the example of stained glass windows. When stained glass windows were first used most people could neither read nor write. Windows were a way of telling the story, of communicating an idea. They were always beautiful works of art, but they weren’t used just because of that, they were used because they pointed to something larger than themselves, they pointed to the vision and mission of the church. The same is true of organs. For some churches it is how things are done. It’s always been done that way is the familiar cry. It’s as if the purpose of the church is to ensure that Bob is always the head of a particular committee, that no tree ever be cut down, that the pulpit always be in the center of the chancel, that church always starts at eleven and that nothing ever change, nothing ever interfere with the way things are done. In such churches people have forgotten why they have a church, they have forgotten the vision behind the church. Look on the wall behind you and you will find a copy of the dedicatory sermon preached for this building by Dr. John Wolf in 1977. There’s nothing in that sermon about the status quo. There’s nothing in that sermon about the need to preserve doing things they way they’ve been done. It doesn’t say this church and this building were created as a nature preserve. It says it was created in the image of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill - not to be a place that never changes, but a place that will change the world. In other words, it was created for the purpose of change, the purpose of moving forward an ancient vision.

Twenty-seven hundred years ago that vision was expressed in the words of Isaiah - to “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow”. Then it was the call of Amos to “let justice flow down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” And Micah’s demand, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God”. Centuries later Robert Ingersoll reminded us of the nature of “real religion”. Today we challenge ourselves with the obligation of Seeking Truth, Sharing Love: Within - Among - Beyond. We could, of course, turn away from that. We could, instead of answering to the authority of our vision, become defenders of the status quo, defenders of doing things the way they’ve always been done, of preserving this church instead of making it an agency for change in the world. If we did so, then we would be left to declare - in paraphrase of what Jeff Danziger said in his cartoon - that we aren’t really Unitarians, but we play one on Sunday mornings.

The authority of our vision doesn’t call us to do that. The authority of our vision calls us to be “a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit”. The authority of our vision calls us to be the change we want to see in the world. It calls us not to talk about the truth, but to actively seek it. Not to talk about sharing love, but to actually share it. Not to talk about having a change of heart, but to see our hearts change - and to see that change take root not just within ourselves, but within our church and the larger world. But that can only happen if we acknowledge the authority of our vision, if we acknowledge that the vision of our church is the boss of the church and make ourselves answerable to that vision.

It is not an easy path. It is the hard and difficult path. But it is the right path. It is the path of the prophets - from Isaiah to Jesus to Robert Ingersoll to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr, to Nelson Mandella and to you, the people of this church. And ultimately - and perhaps most importantly - it is a path that goes forward to our children and their children. I don’t believe the world of justice and peace - the world that some have called the Kingdom of God - can ever be fulfilled. But I believe people can forever work for its fulfillment - and it is in the striving for that fulfillment that we achieve the fullness of character that is and has always been the genuine root of salvation. For the vision of our free church and its authority in our lives, Amen.