Sermon

The Visionary Church

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

November 6, 2005

First Reading: Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet.

Then said a teacher, Speak to us of Teaching.

And he said:

No man can reveal you aught, but that which already lies half asleep, in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his livingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you o the threshold of your own mind.

The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding. The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.

And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.

For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man. And even as each of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone, in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.

Second Reading: William Stafford. A Ritual to Read to Each Other.

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Sermon

Vision. We’ve been talking about vision for two years. We’ve poked and prodded, discussed and analyzed, read and written a lot of words about vision. We even know the words for our vision - Seeking Truth, Sharing Love: Within - Among - Beyond. We know the core values on which our Vision stands: reason, integrity and tolerance. And we know our mission as a church:

Supporting the free and responsible search for truth and meaning; teaching the history and traditions of Unitarianism; promoting and defending freedom of thought; celebrating life’s passages; and serving the larger community with justice and compassion.

Those are a lot of good words. They are worthy of our church and we should be worthy of them. But recent events have raised a question in my mind about those words. Those events include the two recent Supreme Court nominations and the debate over how judges interpret the Constitution. Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t the language of the Constitution plain on its face? Of course not. Just because there is a Constitution that doesn’t answer the question. Just because we have a vision, a mission and a set of values, that doesn’t answer the question of what our vision, mission and values are - because words alone aren’t enough.

I ran into another example of this yesterday. I went over to McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa to attend the Welch lecture series. I wanted to hear Andy Dearman speak, my old testament professor from seminary in Austin, Texas. Andy is a wonderful human being and a great biblical scholar and I was delighted to hear him speak to the assembled group and then to be able to chat with him for a few minutes. In his remarks he mentioned several times how the Triune God and the coming of Jesus the Christ are revealed in the Old Testament. To Andy it is obvious. To me the exact opposite is obvious. We read the same bible and come to opposite conclusions.

The words of the bible, the words of our Constitution and the words of our vision, our mission and our values are just words. They do not answer our questions, they are the basis for our questions. Biblically based religions aren’t really based on the bible, they are based on how people respond to the bible - and everything else in their lives. And our church’s vision, mission and values aren’t to be found in words alone. Our vision, mission and values will ultimately be found in how we respond to those words, how we answer the questions they present, in what they teach us.

Then said a teacher, Speak to us of Teaching. And he said: No man can reveal you aught, but that which already lies half asleep, in the dawning of your knowledge.

What is it that lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge? When you hear the words: Seeking Truth, Sharing Love, what is that you hear within yourself coming to life? I don’t know, but that is the question that we now confront as a church. Does seeking truth mean you will try anything once? Does it mean you can’t really know the truth, so just do what feels good? Does it mean each person has his own unique truth and no one else may question it, that all such truths are equal and must be accorded equal time - a kind of theological fair and balanced approach to truth? Does it mean we should shout down error and use every opportunity to tell people how foolish they are for believing differently than we do? Or does it mean each person has the responsibility to say, “Here I stand. I can do no else.” Does it demand personal responsibility? Does it call for us to speak with “I” language. “This is what I believe” - instead of “You” language - “How can you believe that?”

I believe seeking truth is a journey without end. I believe one can never know the entire truth, but that doesn’t mean I can’t know part of it. I believe one should hold to what one believes with passion and commitment, but be able to balance that passion and commitment with an openness to new evidence. I believe the truth about people is that they have the inherent ability to do good. I believe the truth about people is they sometimes do what is evil. I believe a lot of things are true. But I don’t think that’s how to get to what our vision statement is about.

I think there are two ways to look at the vision statements of churches. The first is as an intellectual idea. Such an approach calls for us to debate the meaning of truth, it calls for us to debate the meaning of love, to parse every word in our vision statement from “Seeking” to “Beyond”. There is need for such intellectual activity. We need to think about the meaning of truth and the meaning of love. We need to understand the facts of our tradition. We need to understand what integrity, tolerance and reason mean. But I think we could spend the next thousand years in such an intellectual pursuit and never become a visionary church. I think that being a visionary church requires a second kind of approach. It is not an approach that rejects the intellect, but understands intellect is a part of something larger. And the heart of that something which is larger is all about passion. And that is where I come back to the words of Kahlil Gibran:

Then said a teacher, Speak to us of Teaching. And he said: No man can reveal you aught, but that which already lies half asleep, in the dawning of your knowledge.

If all we do is talk about the intellect, if all we do is parse the meaning of the words, our vision, our mission and our values will be nothing but cold and lifeless abstractions. If we are to take the idea of vision and mission and values seriously, then we have to ask ourselves where the passion lies. The real question is not what the words mean, but what kind of passion do they awaken in us, in you.

This is not something that can be taught. I - or someone else - may allude to it, but all that will come forth will be empty words, devoid of meaning unless there is something already half awake in you, something of passion and commitment. The process that our congregation went through to obtain its vision statement is a good process. But it’s not complete. It’s not complete because such a process cannot - by itself - produce passion. That is something that only happens organically. It is something that is asleep inside us already waiting to be awakened.

So let me talk you not of truth and love and what those and other words mean, let me talk to you about passion and see if there is something of my passion that touches something already half awake in you.

I have a passion for justice. I think it has something to do with the death of my father in an accident. I cannot abide someone being injured and not fairly compensated. That does not mean I always favor trial lawyers. Having been a lawyer I know firsthand the reality of how our court system can be manipulated and abused in ways that have nothing to do with justice for those injured. I want justice for both sides and I cannot abide the politics of money that cheapens and distorts our legal system. And I have a passion for criminal justice. I have twice found myself looking down the barrel of a gun during armed robberies. I believe criminals should be punished. But I have seen firsthand police and prosecutorial abuse and I believe the Innocence Project that uses DNA evidence to clear wrongfully convicted defendants is one of the greatest projects our country has known in the last ten years. In both civil and criminal law I am convinced that too often the adversarial legal system is one in which neither side is concerned about justice. Justice, for me, is not something that assumes one side or the other will win. That is the distortion of justice that politics has shamelessly foisted on our country.

I passionately believe that children should not be abused, that children should be loved and cared for. Janusz Korczak's Declaration of Children's Rights resonates with my souls:

The child has the right to love.

The child has the right to respect.

. . .

The child has the right to fail. We renounce the deceptive longing for perfect children.

The child has the right to be taken seriously.

The child has the right to be appreciated
for what she or he is.

The child has the right to desire, to claim, to ask.

I believe the entirety of his document is one of the greatest declarations of the twentieth century. But we continue to live in a world where children are routinely used as pawns for politics, we continue to live in a country that is the wealthiest in the world, but has second rate medical care for its children.

I have a passion about gay, lesbian and transgender issues. I don’t believe a person’s worth is determined by their sexual orientation anymore than it is by how much money they have, the color of their skin or any other such nonsense. I believe the current efforts against gay marriage have nothing to do with protecting the institution of marriage; rather they are about finding someone to hate, some group that we can be carefully taught to hate so that we, as a culture, can blame someone else for our own problems. I passionately believe the anti-gay movement of the radical right is a hate movement that stands hand in hand with anti-Semitism, opposition to civil rights and racism and all of their friends. I believe the anti-gay movement is a window into the heart of darkness of the human soul.

And I passionately believe there is something in this world greater than myself. I am sick to death of those trends within our own religious movement that sound - to my ears - not like free religion, but too much like narcissism - a narcissism that is a kind of reverse echo of the televangelists who constantly proclaim God wants you to be rich. Instead of proclaiming God wants us to have our heart’s desire, we just make ourselves God, cutting out the middleman - or middlewoman, as the case may be.

I have a passion for a religious tradition that says a religion of the heart can and must also be a religion of the mind. I refuse to accept the implication that kindness and compassion and concern for others is inconsistent with reason. And I refuse to accept the idea that believing in something beyond myself is a sign of intellectual inferiority.

William Stafford said,

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

I believe a visionary church is one where there is not just intellectual discussion. I believe a visionary church is one where people share with one another who they are, the kind of person they are in the depths of their soul. A visionary church is one where people share their passions with one another that they truly know one another. And in that sharing something happens. In that sharing comes the recognition of the meaning of their vision - not as something cold and lifeless, not something just of the intellect, but something that is alive, something that awakens passion not just in the individual, but in the church as a whole.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The darkness around us is deep. The darkness is the place where there is no passion. The darkness is the place where words are parsed and syllogism argued, but without meaning or purpose beyond the lifeless words themselves. The light of day is that place where the words are married to our passion, where we come alive with purpose and commitment, not just of mind, but of heart.

I wonder what you are passionate about? I wonder what makes you angry? I wonder what makes you sad? I don’t just want to know what you think is truth or love. I want to know what is the truth that makes you want to run into the street and to tear down the barricades that hold back the innocent. I want know what you love so strongly that you will risk your life for its sake. Kahlil Gibran said, “For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.” And that is true. But what we seek is that place where our visions come together and compliment each other. And when we find that place, then we will be a church of vision, a church that changes the world.

Amen.