Sermon

Transformation

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

October 2, 2005

First Reading: Genesis 17:1-9

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.’ God said to Abraham, ‘As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations.

Second Reading: James Fowler. Stages of Faith. Harper, San Francisco, 1995. p. 3

Once, about ten years ago, I started out from Interpreters’ House, where I worked, toward Asheville, North Carolina, where I was leading a workshop on faith. Driving along, I reflected on my plans for the workshop. I rehearsed a set of questions I planned for the opening session, a set of questions designed to open up some honest talk about faith in our lives. I thought about what I would ask:

- What are you spending and being spent for? What commands and receives your best time, your best energy?

- What causes, dreams, goals or institutions are you pouring out your life for?

- As you live your life, what power or powers do you fear or dread? What powers or powers do you rely on and trust?

- To what or whom are you committed in life? In death?

- With whom or what group do you share your most sacred and privates hopes for your life and for the lives of those you love?

- What are those most sacred hopes, those most compelling goals and purposes in your life?

Not an easy set of questions. No simple game of value clarification. I congratulated myself on my cleverness in coming up with such a useful, probing workshop opener. Then it hit me. How would I answer my own questions? My sense of cleverness passed as I embraced the impact of the questions. I had to pull my car over to the shoulder and stop. For the next forty minutes, almost making myself late for the workshop, I examined the structures of values, the patterns of love and action, the shape of fear and dread and the directions of hope and friendship in my own life.

Sermon

I grew up in a mild mannered Methodism. There was no shouting and hollering about hell fire and brimstone. The message - as best I remember it - was a positive one. People were invited to join the church, but I do not recall any emotional outbursts, any fevered calls to experience the transformation of a born again experience. I’m sure the phrase “born again” was used, but people weren’t beat about the head with it.

But I was not ignorant of the larger world. I knew there were people who preached a different kind of Gospel, one that demanded a conversion experience, one that called for people to rush to the altar and announce their conversion. My closest personal encounter with this kind of religion was during my college years. Some friends hounded me to attend a church pastored by the father of one of my roommates. It was a small Pentecostal church. I didn’t want to go, but finally relented. During the service people were invited to come forward if they felt they had been saved. People were shouting and waving their hands in an emotional torrent and against my will I was pushed and dragged to the altar. I was not happy. My friends found it amusing. Looking back I realize my friends had approached our visit to the church as a kind of amusement park experience. I believe I was the only one in our group who took it seriously.

When I became a Unitarian I eventually discovered that a belief in conversion experiences, of transformation was also part of our history. Our religious ancestors, the Pilgrims and Puritans, believed that one had to have a conversion experience in order to be a member of the church. Before becoming a member a person had to publicly describe their conversion. The congregation would listen and evaluate what they heard. They were looking for a moment of inspiration, of revelation, for an epiphany of some kind. Only if the congregation believed the experience was genuine would a person be allowed to become a member. Eventually that requirement was dropped. But does that mean Unitarians stopped being concerned about transformation? I think not. I hope not.

The idea of transformation is ancient. The first reading this morning is about a transformation. Abram becomes Abraham. It marks the transformation not just of Abram but of an entire people, a people who understood themselves as transformed by a new relationship. But it’s not just an ancient story. When a couple is married, the woman often takes the surname of the husband. Not always and not as often as was once the custom, but more often than not. There are practical reasons given in wedding guides for changing the name. There are practical reasons given for not changing the name. But I think the most significant reason is because it signals an important change in relationship. I think that’s why many people change their names - Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali being one of the most famous examples. Something important happens, and the way to recognize the change is to change your name - much as Joseph Ratzinger recently became Benedict XVI. But changing one’s name - in and of itself - is not that significant. Often times people do so for reasons that are trivial or superficial. It is significant if and only if it points to something of underlying importance. That is why I have never been impressed by most emotional displays of religious transformation. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, sometimes screaming and hollering - but to me it often looks superficial, lacking in depth and meaning. I am far more interested in the transformations that are quiet and happen without fireworks. I am far more interested in the transformations that happen when one seriously asks questions of oneself such as those suggested by James Fowler:

- What are you spending and being spent for? What commands and receives your best time, your best energy?

- What causes, dreams, goals or institutions are you pouring out your life for?

- As you live your life, what power or powers do you fear or dread? What powers or powers do you rely on and trust?

- To what or whom are you committed in life? In death?

- With whom or what group do you share your most sacred and privates hopes for your life and for the lives of those you love?

- What are those most sacred hopes, those most compelling goals and purposes in your life?

These are the kinds of questions that cause one to stop and look inside the heart. They are the kinds of questions that cause you to ask fundamental questions about not just what you’re doing with your life, but what your life means, but about who you are underneath the mask you present to the world.

Fowler’s book from which I read this morning is about faith, but not the faith of belief. It is about faith as the totality of how we relate to each other. And it is about faith not as something static, but as something that grows and changes. It is about a transformative faith.

Fowler attracted quite a bit of attention when his book, Stages of Faith, first appeared. It is not without its flaws. I believe it has some significant shortcomings. It is also a book that has had an impact on my life, for despite its problems it lifts up an extraordinarily powerful idea - the idea that faith isn’t static, that faith is something lived and living, faith is something developmental, faith is something that evolves and changes throughout life. It’s an idea expressed in the words of the Apostle Paul.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

When I was a child I spoke like a child and acted like a child. I believe I see any number of things more clearly today than when I was a child. I won’t claim to see them clearly, but I do see some things more clearly. In some ways I am the child who played in the back yard and rode his bike to school, the teenager who mowed yards for money, the student who left home for college. But in other ways I am not. All those people are both gone and here in me. The person I am today includes, but is not, my past. What I used to call my faith is not my faith today and I hope it will continue to grow and change.

A week or two ago I mentioned I was reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin and commented on the different roles he played. At various times in his life he was printer, publisher, humorist, writer, scientist, statesman, legislator, government bureaucrat, diplomat, husband and father. Throughout his life he was constantly re-inventing and transforming himself. But the kind of transformation that calls to me this morning is a different kind, a deeper kind. It is not about what you do for a living, although that can be important. It is about the questions that James Fowler confronted that morning on the highway. It is a transformation in the very nature of your being. Because even though I am leery of emotional claims to change and glad Unitarians no longer require public professions of conversion, I believe the deepest purpose of our church is to create an environment that helps people to personal transformation. It is to create a place where it is safe to take risks.

I think there’s a good bit of paradox in that last statement. I sometimes hear people say they want a church that is a refuge, a place where they can retreat from the world, a place where they won’t have to hear troubling words. I think our church should be a safe place. But safe in the sense that you feel safe enough to take chances, safe enough to speak from your heart, safe enough to ask yourself difficult questions and to hear unsettling answers. That’s because I believe transformation is the heart and soul of religion. It is the heart and soul of religion because religion is about choosing life over death, about saying yes to challenge and change - and I speak of choosing between life and death deliberately, because I believe that is the choice - a choice highlighted for me by some of the traditional notions about God.

Theologians like to talk about classical theism. That’s the God who is all powerful, all knowing and all loving. But there’s another attribute to that kind of God - it’s the God who is unchanging. The Greek philosophers, in their attempt to understand perfection, decided that if something was perfect it couldn’t be improved. It followed that if God was perfect God couldn’t be improved. In other words, God was unchanging, God was unaffected by the world. But if you look at the world and ask yourself what is unchanging - or appears to be unchanging - it’s not what is perfect, it’s what is dead. The Greeks were wrong. The perfection of God is not about being an unchanging fossil, the perfection of God is in perfectibility, the ability to learn and improve, the ability to change and to grow. This is why the process theologians say God is not the unmoved mover of the Greeks, God is that which is most moved. That is why if you are looking for the divine I say look for it not in stone tablets and monuments, but in everything that is alive and growing and learning and changing.

Religion, therefore, is not about finding what you believe and casting it in stone and defending it against any one who dares question what you believe; it is about knowing what you believe and knowing who you are, understanding the depths of your own soul and then being willing to test that understanding and see yourself change. That’s why when we invite people to speak at our adult education program on Sunday mornings it’s not for the purpose of challenging the speaker and shouting down words that disagree with our understanding, it’s for the purpose of hearing words that will challenge us.

When people ask me about membership in this church I tell them there are four things required of them. They are not written down. They are not part of the bylaws of our church, but they are there nonetheless and you won’t get much out of membership here unless you accept them. The one I think is most important is this. Once a year you have an obligation to take part in a religious education program of some kind that will challenge you and make you take some chances. It needs to be something that will lead you to look inside yourself and ask some tough questions - the kind of questions that may lead you to change in a manner you cannot anticipate. Now I said this isn’t in the bylaws. It’s a fair to question to ask how the church can require this of you. My answer is that it isn’t the church that requires this of you. It is something - if you want to get the true benefit of membership - that you should require of yourself. No one can make you do something like this. It is something only your own heart can require of you. It is the obligation to make your life not something fixed and unchanging, but something alive and questioning and growing and changing and transforming.

“As you live your life, what power or powers do you fear or dread? What powers or powers do you rely on and trust?”

- To what or whom are you committed in life? In death?

- With whom or what group do you share your most sacred and privates hopes for your life and for the lives of those you love?

- What are those most sacred hopes, those most compelling goals and purposes in your life?

To live such questions is to be a religious person. It is a dangerous undertaking because to be genuinely open to them, to be genuinely open to the answers is to be alive, to run the risk that your life will be transformed in ways you cannot imagine. That’s why I believe it is a dangerous thing to join a church such as ours, because that is our challenge. It is why I believe the motto of our church should be transformed and transforming. Join us at your peril.

Amen.