Basic Generic October Sermon

Rev. David E. Bumbaugh
The Unitarian Church in Summit
Oct. 18, 1998

Recently, I received a letter from a member of the congregation, expressing his continuing disappointment in what he perceives to be my lack of respect for the Jewish-Christian tradition, and expressing the fervent hope that this time, in selecting a new minister, the search committee will not make the same mistake the last search committee made. He went on to remind me that he had stopped coming to church precisely because my blend of paganism and earth worship and my refusal to use any language which suggests a faith in the existence of God seem to him such thin theological gruel that it is no longer worth the effort to attend. He went on to assure me that he was not alone in his judgment, but that he represented the opinions of a lot of people who resent and reject my agnostic if not atheistic stance, and that if the church is to hope for their support in the future, it must not repeat the folly of the past 10 years.

As I read his letter, I found myself remembering something I had read from Jacob Trapp. Dr. Trapp said, "A Dutch theologian once wrote of paganism that it is everyone's first religion, and that it underlies and is a part of all religion past and present. To despise paganism, he said, is to despise the human." However, Dr. Trapp's opinion notwithstanding, I found that I had to agree with many of the points my correspondent made. It is true that there are people who have dropped out of our fellowship over the more than 10 years I have served as your minister. They have departed for a variety of reasons, but surely some of them have left because they have not found in my ministry the kind of sustenance and support they have been seeking. It is true that my theological position has evolved over the past 10 years and that evolution has moved me further and further away from the Jewish-Christian, God-centered tradition out of which Unitarian Universalism emerged and in which I was nurtured.

It is also true that I have refused to interpret openness to diversity as meaning that I should make certain that the sermons I deliver reflect all the varied opinions within the congregation on a roughly proportionate basis. I have believed that such an approach inevitably makes the Sunday service a political process -- making ministers not much different from politicians who try to discover what their constituents want to hear and then hasten to say it. I have believed that the strength of our movement rests on the integrity of its ministers and I have interpreted that to mean that I should preach the truth as it is given me to see the truth and not worry about who might be pleased or offended. Frankly, this job has never paid enough that I have been tempted to pretend to believe or affirm positions I do not in fact believe.

When I wrote back to my friend, I chose not to defend my ministry, but assured him that I would play no part in the process by which the congregation selects my successor. I certainly hope that whatever errors may have been made over a decade ago or have been made during my tenure will not be repeated or continued. On the other hand, I would also hope that the congregation would not be dominated by the fatal desire to repeal the past 10 years and attempt to return to some imaginary golden age in which everyone was satisfied and everyone's spiritual needs were fully met.

The letter was not a new experience for me. These kinds of communications come occasionally. Every minister, of whatever theological stripe, receives one now and then. And, no matter how thick a shell we grow, it is always painful to recognize that we have failed to reach, to serve, to satisfy those who have sought spiritual sustenance. But such communications also serve another purpose: They function to invite introspection, an examination of who I have become in the process of meeting the challenges and responsibilities of 10 years of daily service to this congregation, to this movement, to this vocation.

I discover, as a consequence, that it is true that I am not the minister this congregation selected 10 years ago. It is not so much that my direction has changed, but that I have moved quite far along my established trajectory. Over the years I have found less and less spiritual nourishment in the traditional texts and mythologies of the great Western religions of the book. When I have found myself enshrouded by the dark night of the soul, when the future has seemed more a threat than a promise, when I have been disappointed in myself and in those upon whom I had relied, I have found little to succor me in the stories, the rituals, the assumptions, the confessions, the prayers and convictions of the tradition in which I grew up or the resources I studied in seminary. In my pain and in my joy I have seldom found myself driven to or remembering the stories from the pages of that Bible which I knew so very well as a young man. That is not the soil in which my spirit is rooted.

And is it true that over the course of the past decade, I have become something of a pagan and that my faith is earth-centered. I find that the holy, the sacred, the divine reality is rarely encountered in the pages of a book -- despite my continuing love affair with the written word. I encounter the sacred in the natural world, in its cycling processes. It is this world which gave us birth, and our interaction with this world which overwhelms me with awe and wonder and gratitude and endows my journey with deeper meaning and purpose. It is not in the pages of the Bible or the Koran or the Torah that I find the sacred power I need to survive disappointments and surmount defeats and fully embrace life. It is in the book of nature that my soul finds renewal.

White clouds move over a blue October sky, casting drifting shadows across the landscape, filling me with a sense of the indescribable power and majesty, the aching, wordless glory of this world in which I find myself. More than the aphorisms of any of the great teachers, the beauty of the world which is our mother and our home draws out of me a recognition of the finitude of my existence and the infinity of the process in which it is rooted and an affirmation of the holiness of life and existence. In the inescapable reality of the sky and the clouds and the earth, I find cause to rejoice and my heart fills with inexpressible gratitude that I have been gifted to live and see and be part of this vast, beautiful world.

Early one October morning, before the sun has appeared above the horizon, I am roused from sleep by the sound of a chevron of geese flying low over the house. So low are they flying, I can almost hear the flapping of their wings. And above that gentle whisper come the honking cries of the geese as they encourage each other in their flight, or perhaps it is not even that -- perhaps they call out of sheer exuberance and delight as they sail through the still-dark sky, climbing high, up to the place where they can see the sun rising upon a darkened world. I lie still in my bed and listen. I remember the ancient myths which spoke of the hounds of heaven and I realize that these geese do, indeed, sound like spectral hounds barking across a dark and trackless sky. And at once I am overwhelmed by a sense of being part of a vast ongoing story -- one which includes me and the geese and all the generations of women and men who have watched the changing skies and who have listened in the dark night and tried to understand the unspoken word which this world whispers to our senses.

I walk down a street here in town, my dog, Waldo, tugging at his leash. Suddenly, I am shaken out of my preoccupation as I am struck on my shoulder by an acorn, one of thousands dropping, this October day, from the oak trees lining the street. It is a random thing; it is also a call to pay attention. Up the street, three squirrels taking a respite from collecting the autumn bounty frantically chase each other up and down the trunk of a great oak -- an expression of sheer joy and pointless exuberance. And across the street, half-hidden under the ivy at the edge of a lawn, sits a chipmunk, his cheeks bulging with acorns, watching the squirrels frolic.

Suddenly, Waldo sees the squirrels, and instead of lunging after them, he stops and stands still, watching, his broad, flat nose twitching, the tip of his red tongue protruding between his teeth. I stop, too. I feel the breath moving in and out of my lungs; I feel the pulse of blood coursing through my body; the wind moves through the trees and more acorns drop to bounce rhythmically along the street. And without warning, I am moved out of my little, local self. I am no longer an observer watching the scene before me. I have become part of the scene, part of a larger self, a greater reality. The squirrels, the chipmunk, the little Boston terrier, the wind in the trees, the dancing acorns, the breath in and out, the pulsing of blood, all are one thing, one sacred, holy thing -- like some vast symphony, the strains of which I sometimes barely catch drifting on the air. Something that has no name has called us into being, has orchestrated this moment, has graced me with a vivid reminder that this world is my home, that I am part of a vast process which extends back in time beyond my knowing and forward into the future beyond my imagining, a reminder that I have always been part of that sacred process and always will be part of that process -- a reality whose meaning I may never understand, but whose meaningfulness I can never doubt. And this is my psalm; this is my revelation; this is my moment of renewal and of promise and of salvation.

In October, the trees change color and the world glows in incandescent glory as the season slips from summer to autumn and on toward winter. In October, the promise of the spring finds fulfillment as the asters bloom and the orange globe of the pumpkin appears in the fields and roadside stands display mounds of apples and jugs of cider. In October, I am reminded that while great nature moves always in ever-repeating cycles of endless return, individuals -- plants, animals, human beings, even the stars -- experience a life which moves from beginning to end, from promise to fulfillment, from birth to death. I watch the leaves flutter down from the trees, clothing the earth with a transient but spectacular beauty. I listen to the melancholy music of the crickets singing the approach of winter and the hum of the hurrying bees collecting the gift of late-season pollen. I see the brief glory of the autumn flowers. I watch as the October rains fall from leaden skies, stripping the leaves from the trees and leaving the asters dark and colorless, like the sad cinders of burned-out stars. I see all of this and am saddened by the great truth that nature in its endless cycles sweeps all of us away, to make room for a new time of growth and promise and fulfillment.

But even in my sadness, I know, with a deep knowledge which is strangely healing, that this moment of fulfillment, of spectacular beauty, of transient glory is, somehow, central to our purpose, our reason for being, our high destiny; that in our dying, we return from the finitude of our linear lives to the infinity of nature's cycles, that even as we are born and die, we remain forever part of this great process -- we were part of the process before we were born and will be after we have died -- eternally part of the coming and going, the beauty and glory which is October -- that we are embedded in the implicate purpose and design of an undefinable whole.

Here is the heart of my faith, the source of my trust, the origin of my drive and determination. And I would submit, along with Jacob Trapp's Dutch theologian, that beneath the accretions of millennia, beneath the overlay of tradition and commentary and creed, this is the heart of all the world's great religions, including the tortured and torturing theologies of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. And here is the reason I am reluctant to talk about God or to use that loaded term. In our culture, that term suggests a power outside of, independent of, superior to the power which drives the seed and the bud and the fruit and the leaf, the stars in their courses and human purpose and design. In our culture, the term God suggests that we know more than we can possibly know about the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of our existence. Over the last 10 years, I have discovered that my faith is not rooted in knowledge -- though I want to know all I can know; my faith is rooted in awe and wonder, in a world so mysterious that it always escapes the net of words with which I attempt to ensnare it.

This is the religious vision which has grown in me over the past 10 years -- the religious vision which has empowered me to live beyond despair in a world of sorrow and pain and injustice; the religious vision which has deepened my sense of joy and purpose and delight. This is the religious vision I have sought to share in my ministry among you. It is clearly not a satisfactory faith for all people. Some find it cold comfort in the face of the catastrophes that sometimes confront us; some find it thin and shallow and unsatisfying in answer to the profound questions life often poses; some find it simply incomprehensible, as if it were couched in a foreign language or an unfamiliar grammar. I am saddened whenever I discover that I proclaim a faith which sometimes fails when it is needed most. It is, however, the religious faith which moves me, which defines the source of my confidence and whatever strength I may have. And I have never known how to preach a gospel which does not reflect my faith, which does not resonate with my experience.

As I reflect on the journey which has been the past decade, am I most surprised by one thing. However it may appear to others, I am surprised to discover how much my faith has grown, how it has broadened and deepened. As I have moved away from my Judeo-Christian roots, as I have grown distant from the God of my youth, as I have become less and less patient with the forms and the words and the usage of tradition, I have encountered the sacred and the holy everywhere I look. Over these years, I gave up God, but I have discovered the sacred in the skies and hills and valleys and cities of humankind. I gave up God, but I have encountered the holy in the birds and beasts, in all that swims and flies and crawls across the face of this fecund planet. I gave up God, and have found the divine staring out at me everywhere I look, through the eyes of women and children and men. Having given up God, I now find the holy everywhere -- in deep joy and inexpressible pain, in sudden delight and unfathomable sorrow. The world, for me, has become full of holiness.

October is a strange month. It doesn't even have the right name. It seems to be constantly moving from was to is to will be; from summer to autumn to winter. Its message seems to be that behind the appearance of things, there is a process at work which is full of hidden purpose and unspoken meaning. Its message seems to be that we are part of and carried along by that purpose. In many ways, this is the heart of my faith and the heart of the message I have sought to proclaim: Look behind the obvious, behind the customary, behind the accumulated encrusted habits of our lives and there, disguised as a quiet October day, hidden beneath the fall of acorns and the play of squirrels, is a source of power and strength to lend lives purpose and meaning and power, power to shape out of quotidian reality a brief, eternal moment of glowing truth and speechless glory. Seize that moment, embrace it as if it were eternity -- for it is -- and there discover the means to shape for yourself a life worthy of the holy power which lies deep within you.

The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.

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