A Sermon for the Service of Ordination of Emilie Boggis
A long time ago, I wrote a paper at the beginning of my sojourn through seminary. It was a declaration of faith that drew on the landscape of my childhood -- the harvested fields and outspreading grid of rural central Illinois -- the landscape of reason. Much about my own theology has grown and changed since I wrote that rather unsophisticated paper, but it ended with an assertion I would still make today -- though I would mean something more nuanced now than I did at the time. It is the assertion that there is a God, and she hears us.
On this occasion, I thought rather hard about what I want to say to Emilie in particular and to any new minister joining our tradition. “Don’t do it” was one piece of advice that certainly occurred to me. But I think the die is cast in that regard, and besides, I think our movement needs Emilie, so I can’t discourage her any more than I already did when she interned at Faith in Place some years back. What I want to offer her tonight is this same little stone that I continue to carry with me -- that there is a God, and she hears us.
Theology is a particular type of story. It is the type of story that helps us to see the path before us -- to know why we are here and to have the courage to declare, in whatever theological language we choose, that the Earth is good and that we are accountable to that goodness.
Emilie knows that I work in a community ministry giving people of all faiths tools to become better stewards of the Earth. One thing implied by this occupation is a preoccupation with the data on the state of the Earth. From the Earth, too, Emilie, I bring you greetings. The Earth in its mystery congratulates you as its sister, it welcomes you into the role of minister. But it cries out to you at the same time. It asks you to be awake -- it asks you to be disturbed -- it asks you to be uncomfortable in the knowledge that much of what we love is right now passing away. This is a truth that will only grow more painful in the course of your ministry, but you must find a way to tell it.
The poor of the Earth send you greetings. They in their claim for justice congratulate you as their sister, they welcome you into the role of minister. But they cry out to you at the same time. They ask you to be awake. They ask you to be disturbed. They ask you to be uncomfortable in the knowledge that many of them and their children whom they love are right now passing away. This is another truth you will have to tell -- that your true congregation includes those who are present only in their suffering. They must always be with you in the sanctuary.
The non-human creatures of the Earth send you greetings. They congratulate you as their sister, they swim and slink and creep and rustle and flow and soar their welcome to you. But they cry out to you at the same time. They ask you to be awake. They ask you to be disturbed. They ask you to be uncomfortable in the knowledge that they and the habitats that support them are right now being destroyed -- are right now passing away. They ask you to keep them before you.
The thing that we must do, as people of faith, is to know what we know. We may prefer not to live in a world in which we are surrounded by millions of suffering people, in which wars rage everywhere, in which inhumanity asserts itself daily in unimaginable forms, in which the polar bears are vanishing, in which the fish are filled with mercury, in which the air is too dirty to breathe and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is rapidly approaching the point of no return. But that is the world we do live in, and we must know all of this and shrink from none of it. We must open ourselves to the pain of the world.
We must know, too, that most fragile and central knowledge of all religious life -- that everyone and everything will die someday. To love our children, partners and spouses, and others around us is an act of great courage because it requires that we open our hearts without reservation to people from whom we know we will ultimately be separated by death. Don’t hide from this -- you cannot live a religious life in denial of it. We cannot love fully unless we can continue to love in the face of loss. To love is the greatest risk we can take -- and the risk most worth taking.
So the question becomes how we know this -- how we live in the world. This is a theological question, but within our movement, we have drawn away from many of the resources that might help us to answer it. We have in some ways become a movement without theology. We seem to think that we have reached a point in human development at which we can afford to dispense with these ideas. In a world that increasingly operates to rob us of our dignity and humanity, we need ideas big enough to restore and preserve them. I would not care to live in a world that kept rampant consumerism and threw away Jesus, though I am equally troubled by some of the ways in which he is preserved.
If Channing were here tonight trying to speak to us of the power of love in the face of the inevitability of loss, he might talk about the Christ and the power of the story of crucifixion and resurrection. He might say, without resort to the literal truth of the bodily resurrection, that at any moment in history, a man or a woman might come among us whose love for God is so complete that it does not fail even in the face of physical suffering and the separation by death -- and that this very love could be exactly what makes that separation from the love of God impossible. Our brother Paul said it in his letter to the Romans:
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.
We need to find resonant ways of hearing and telling the story of the love of God -- though we might disagree greatly on what that means. We need to know it because we need to hear the cries of the Earth, of the poor, of the non-human, of the whole of creation. They wait, they have been waiting -- they do not have the power to move us even by their truth -- but we have the power to allow ourselves to be moved by them. We will not have the courage to hear them without what Channing would have called a confidence in God’s unfailing love.
When Channing stood in this position in 1819 and gave his historic sermon on what is transient and what permanent in Unitarian Christianity, he said:
To turn away from the disputes of the Catholics and the Protestants, of the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, of Old School and New School, and come to the plain words of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance. The only creed it lays down is the great truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart -- there is a God.
Even that much is problematic for much of our membership, unless they are willing to allow the possibility that Channing could be right even though what he meant by God and what we mean by it, or by the word we use in its place, are different things. There is something greater than all -- there is something on which all life depends -- there is something toward which the grateful heart of the believer should be turned every day.
I need the language of the wisdom tradition -- the poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures. The language of Job, the voice of God from the whirlwind, in which, when asked to justify the suffering of the righteous, he instead describes the majesty of creation, before which the suffering of any individual shrinks to insignificance. “Where were you,” God asks him, “when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements -- surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” We need language that proclaims the majesty of the non-human Earth -- that makes a claim upon us for its preservation simply because it is here and it is wild and beautiful.
Do you know the traditions of the Greek Orthodox, in which the word of God is illuminated by iconography -- paintings of light, light in the cathedrals, light in the liturgy, light on the walls, light in the Logos -- the word with which the world began? “What has come into being in him was life,” says our brother John in his gospel, “and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” It is dark here. I need this light.
It is not only the biblical tradition, and a careful theology, that I need to live in this world. It is the exercise of questioning my own nature, and of not assuming my own goodness, which Unitarians too often do. We believe in the perfectibility of people. Well, some of us do. I don’t think I could count myself among them anymore. I do believe in the essential goodness of our nature, as I believe in the essential goodness of all things Earthly. But there is ample evidence that we are also troubled, terrible, evil, sinful. Is there a way of understanding what is now going on in Iraq, in Iran, at Guantánamo, in our own government, without a theology of sin? If we are too quick to assume the perfectibility of people, we will find ourselves creating communities in which we simply protect ourselves from the distressing reality of the world, rather than operating prophetically in it.
A theological view of the world allows us to keep seeing both what is and what is implied. Death is implied by life -- this is the central paradox of our existence. Everything that lives devours, and all of us will cease. As our brother the theologian James Thurber put it, “the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” Destruction is implied by existence -- no two molecules can occupy the same place at the same time, and we all must eat. From this need we can understand the theology of original sin. It is not that we are fallen, or disobedient. It is that none of us can be here without expense to some other living thing.
From our sisters the fungi, we can see also that from death blooms the next generation of life -- amid the rot and decay, beauty breaks forth and flowers. Everything is put to use -- we are here on this Earth to do work and to create the conditions for those who come after us in our passage here. And so we learn the theological proposition that everything we need is here. As much and as deeply as death is implied by life, so is life implied by death. What else could the story of the Christ be trying to tell us?
Making the trustworthiness and abundance of the Earth plain and visible is a sacrament. Our brother St. Augustine defined a sacrament as that which makes visible the invisible presence of the holy. We have weakened the practice of sacraments, and with this weakening we have diminished the sense that anything can be here that is not immediately in view. Our eyes, our senses have no capacity to take in all that is here. The sane and functional engage in constant filtering. There is always something here we do not see. A practice of sacrament will help us to see it. The breaking of the bread with words of thanksgiving makes visible the invisible presence of all the work that has been done to bring the meal from the earth to the table. Sacrament points to the unseen guest. I need the unseen guest beside me.
In the theology of Protestantism, there is a long debate over justification by grace and justification by works. Universalists have, perhaps, little reason to join this quarrel -- we offered option C, no justification needed. But the debate was useful for more than pointing out just how silly human beings can be in the things they choose to fight about. While we need neither creedal position, we need both a sense of the ongoing generous spirit of the life that surrounds us (justification by grace) and the demand that we respond to life with work.
Wendell Berry, in his poem called “Healing,” says this:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Look at the shattered world. Look at the time we have left to make God glad she created us. Find a way to tell this story. The story of Christ is the story of the in-breaking of the holy into the world. In the waste of war, in the morgues and the mortuaries and the smoking ruins, do we need this story less now than we needed it 2,000 years ago? Find language for this -- proclaim that in spite of all we have done, in spite of all the death and destruction caused by our too-selfish claims on life, the holy dwells among us, can be named and spoken to, will turn water to wine and a few fish to a feast.
Find language that will let you love the people and tell them this truth. Show them that it is possible to be fearless among ideas that make us uncomfortable. Show them that you are willing to live with painful and perilous knowledge because you know that the world needs such ability desperately now, from all of us.
And yet even as I reach back to the resources of the past, I want you to be a minister for the 21st century, not the 19th. I, though I am ever so much older than you, can envision a church in which denominationalism does not matter because as ministers, we want our parishioners to be more loyal to God than they are to any denomination, though they may also be loyal to a denomination, ours, because it helps them to have a place to call home as they live fully in the world.
I see a future in which we understand our every action as sacramental -- as unfolding and revealing the presence of the holy among us. And so we regard matters as simple as whether we turn on the lights or heat a room as fundamentally questions of faith. So that we learn that our buildings must be shared so that no space that must be heated or cooled is ever unused. So that we learn an ethic of care for the Earth that is so ingrained in our religious practice that no water, electricity or heat or cooling is ever wasted, and in which all living things within and around the building strive and thrive together, in communion with one another. I see buildings that are shared by those trained in multiple religious traditions, and by the people of the community. I see congregations that lack any building at all, and create communities of care in the homes of their members, and among the prisons and the hospitals and the homeless shelters. I see congregations that choose to build homeless shelters -- sanctuaries in the truest sense -- in which, incidentally, they also worship. I see congregations that are richly, deeply and rationally informed by the ideas of all traditions and all people but beholden to none of them. Where nothing is kept that can keep us from becoming who we truly were created to be, and nothing is discarded that can help us do that. If I can see that, then you must see it even more clearly -- and you must work to bring it about.
If we can learn this sacramental practice of the way that we put our foot down upon the Earth, if we can learn to live in peace with the nematode and the spider, then surely we can learn to live in peace with one another as well. The Earth, and all life, and the poor of the Earth -- these are our congregation and these are among those who ordain you. Do not forget them.
In his sermon, Channing called upon God to “send us a real religious life, which shall pluck blindness out of the heart, and make us better fathers, mothers, and children; a religious life, that shall go with us where we go, and make every home the house of God, every act acceptable as a prayer.” Have the courage of sacrament, Emilie -- have the courage to make visible everything that is here and valuable. The poet Rumi, in his poem “The Gift of Water,” says:
Every object and being in the universe is
a jar overfilled with wisdom and beauty,
a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained
by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth
more shining, as though covered in satin.
It is not only the death which life contains that is revealed in sacrament -- it is the life contained in death.
Every act of worship gathers the community of all life -- the rich, the poor, the human, the non-human, the dead of history, the unborn to whom we will pass this Earth. Every act of sacrament celebrates what we have been and what we are becoming. Lived rightly, every act of life is a sacramental act. The water falls into the glass and we drink it. The sea pushes up on the shore. The leaf falls from the tree to the Earth. The child cries out to its mother. We live or witness all of it. And in our living and our witnessing, and in our act of celebration, we testify to what is still true -- that there is a God, and she hears us.