This Sermon is Part 1 of a three-part sermon series entitled Unitarian Universalism and the Crises of Life | Unitarian Universalism has sometimes been accused of failing to provide sufficient comfort & guidance during the crises of life. This sermon series will refute that view, providing both theists and humanists with a (not the!) Unitarian Universalist approach to these common human struggles. We will draw from a new emerging “myth” contributed by process theology and our belief in the “interdependent web” of all life. ((This sermon series is loosely based on A Faith for All Seasons: Liberal Religion and the Crises of Life by UU minister William Murry))
August 18, 2019
How do your beliefs support you in times of crisis? How does your faith – your God, your community, your truth, your hope…how does it sustain you when the bottom drops out? When you suffer? When you witness suffering? When you grieve? When immense change rocks your foundations? When you come to die?
Some say that liberal religion – meaning any religion which emphasizes reason, liberty, and ongoing revelation – falls short during these crises because it doesn’t have black and white answers about truth, suffering, & death.
How can fuzzy gray sustain you when you are flailing for a foothold?
Our tradition embraces mystery, paradox, diversity, and ambiguity instead of ONE, certain “capital T” Truth.
How does mystery sustain when you’re in that ambulance on the stretcher facing death, or when your child dies, or when you lie awake at night wondering why am I even here?
Today is our first installment in a three-part sermon series entitled Unitarian Universalism and the Crises of Life.
Today, for Part 1 we’ll consider the search for meaning and purpose. Next week, we’ll consider suffering; and finally we’ll consider facing our own mortality.
When it comes to crises, many motivational speakers, including JFK, Condoleeza Rice, and Al Gore, will tell you that the Chinese ideogram for crisis has two parts: one means danger; the other means opportunity.
Turns out, that’s not true. At least not about the Chinese character. But I think they were right about the nature of crisis.
Crises in our lives can be dangerous in that they can destroy our foundations and leave us completely adrift – but they can also be opportunities for great growth. (That’s not to say that we’d ever wish a crisis on someone!)
The hope is that our beliefs are such that they give us resources to cope with crises and even emerge wiser, or more resilient, or more focused, or more human.
But if you’re new to liberal religion and have left behind more black and white beliefs, you wouldn’t be alone if you wonder whether mystery and ambiguity will serve you in crisis the same way your previous beliefs might have served you before the veil was lifted.
Maybe you’re wishing you’d stuck with the blue pill.
That’s of course a reference to the film The Matrix in which the main character Neo is told by his mentor that he can take either of two pills, red or blue. Extending the two pills in his palm to Neo, his mentor says, “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
Today I’m referring to taking the red pill as agreeing over and over again to seeing the world as complex, mysterious, full of questions… and yet demanding our free and responsible participation.
My colleague Bruce Clear((“Fuzzy Questions, Fuzzy Answers” by Bruce Clear: https://www.uua.org/worship/words/sermon/184057.shtml)) says that Unitarians are sometimes made fun of for having fuzzy – or ambiguous answers – but that our fuzzy thinking is justified because the world itself is fuzzy. He points to the book by USC professor Bart Kosko entitled Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic.
Kosko says, “The fuzzy view says that almost all truth is gray truth, partial truth, fractional truth, fuzzy truth.” Kosko describes asking audiences to raise their hands in response to the questions: “How many of you are tall? How many of you are honest? How many of you are rested?” More or less…right? Some much more, maybe; some much less.
One more analogy about our fuzzy world, again thanks to my colleague Bruce Clear: ((“Fuzzy Questions, Fuzzy Answers” by Bruce Clear: https://www.uua.org/worship/words/sermon/184057.shtml))
The author James Gleick, in his book Chaos, tells the story of Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathematician, who asked the very sensible question, “How long is the Coast of Britain?” So he imagined measuring it.
Take a picture from an airplane or satellite and use reference points to measure it, and you’ll get a measurement, but you’ll miss all the subtleties of small inlets. So you’ll need to get closer and measure the inlets, and your measurement will be longer. If you get close enough, you’ll see the water flowing around large boulders that jut out into the bays, so you’ll need to measure around the boulders, and your measurements will be longer. But the coastline includes not just boulders, but also rocks and pebbles, and you’ll need to measure the water flow around them, and your measurement will get longer. And don’t forget the grains of sand. And the grains of sand contain a molecular structure that juts out, just as boulders jut out. They’re much smaller, but they should still be measured.
In this imaginary measurement process, each step toward precision reveals how much more still needs to be measured. Each attempt to be precise reveals how imprecise the answer is. In Kosko’s book, he says that “precision increases fuzziness.” He quotes his own teacher, Lofti Zadeh, chair of the engineering department at University of California, Berkeley, who said, “The closer one looks at a real-world problem, the fuzzier becomes its solution.”
So, what do we, who see all the fuzzy, the gray, the spectrum, the complexity, the mystery of life…how do we find meaning? How do we find purpose?
As a previous chaplain to college students, for years I felt steeped – delightfully so –in these questions of:
“Why are we here?” (The Search for Meaning)
&
“How Then Shall We Live?” (The Search for Purpose)
Two weeks ago, our own member Harry Nutter preached about the difference between truth and meaning and so eloquently stated:
Because humans live and will always live in a state of incomplete knowledge, not knowing everything which is true or not knowing everything which it might be possible to know, and because meaning addresses those existential matters which cannot be proven but only believed, then meaning is what allows us to persist even though we do not know everything.
“Meaning is what allows us to persist…”
So without further ado, let’s turn now to how we find meaning…
For all three of the sermons in this series I will be referring to what seasoned UU minister William Murry((A Faith for All Seasons: Liberal Religion and the Crises of Life by William Murry)) called “the new myth.”
For many people today, the myths – or structures of meaning – provided by traditional Western religion no longer work for many people, and neither does the myth of consumerism and materialism – the belief that I am what I own and consume.
But thankfully, a new myth is emerging from which we can draw meaning and purpose. As you hear it, you might find – yes, this is what I’ve always believed – how helpful to hear it articulated – and how beneficial it might be to mature and deepen my understanding and practice of this new meaning. Perhaps that is what called you here.
When I say myth, I mean not something factually untrue, but stories, symbols, and rituals which help us to make sense of our lives and call us to deepest living.
This new myth is inspired by a modern scientific understanding of the universe, and a new wave of philosophy and theology called process theology.
Process theology can be embraced by both theists and naturalists and humanists and atheists.
So I’ll be trying to provide translation as I go – but as always I invite you to be practiced Unitarian Universalists and work on your own translations and questions as you hear God language or lack of God language that doesn’t fit.
Here’s a stab at just five points summarizing process theology:
All things are in process, and the world is imperfect and incomplete.
God – or the foundation of all reality – is love and is omnipresent – here even in suffering, suffering with us.
All beings are wound together with God and interconnected, interdependent.
God – or “the Silent Working of Good” – as our emeritus minister Les Pugh put it – acts in the world like a magnetic pull persuading us… calling us…toward many options of greater good and love and justice.
We are free to choose as we co-create this ongoing process of evolution and transformation – Even God learns and grows as the universe unfolds.
This myth can be seen in the analogy used by Martin Luther King, Jr (who took it from Unitarian Theodore Parker): that the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice…and we are the ones called to help bend it.
SO when it comes to the question of meaning and purpose, we can compare the old myth to the new myth in this way:
The old myth, as process theologian Bruce Epperly says, can be seen in Rick Warren’s bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life:
“Warren charts a road map in which God chooses the most important events and encounters of our lives before we are born and without our input. Our personal calling, according to Warren’s vision, is to discover and live out God’s eternal purposes in our daily lives. We can find our true purpose only when we follow the directions and color inside the lines that God has already planned for us.” ((Epperly quoted by Carl Gregg here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/02/the-gospel-according-to-process-relational-theology/))
In contrast, Epperly says:
I believe God’s holy adventure calls us to be creative and innovative right now as we listen for divine inspiration, and then to respond by coloring outside the lines and giving God something new as a result of our own personal artistry….. God calls us to become creative companions in God’s new and surprising creation.
A child was once talking with the famous UU teacher Sophia Lyon Fahs. The child had been studying seeds that became marigolds in a paper cup, and she’d also just experienced the arrival of her newborn sister, which meant the arrival of both unprecedented hatred and unprecedented tenderness. The child told Fahs: “God is what knows how to grow.” ((Story told in Walking Toward Morning, Victoria Safford)))
In process theology, God is that energy toward creativity, beauty, love, life.
Process thinkers who are not theists still share the view that we humans are free and responsible, that we are wound and bound together in an interdependent web, and that we create the ever-changing world together…prompted by the callings of life and love.
And so when it comes to meaning and purpose, it very much matters how we live.
In doing the unfinished business of the great evolutionary process, our lives find meaning and purpose.
We are involved and implicated and embedded in the effort toward a moral and spiritual evolution, toward greater truth and beauty and connection and justice…
So, that may not be the easiest or most straight-forward answer to what meaning and purpose is… but it’s a start …and because we are Unitarian Universalists, it’s a answer…not the answer….
I invite you to keep learning about process theology in the coming two weeks as we turn next to the crises of suffering and mortality. I’ll close with this poem by adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy.
As I read it, think of that love luring us into a process of evolution…into a meaning and purpose embedded in our relation with all the world.
a complex movement
over and over again
it becomes known
the peace we seek
is seeking us
the joy a full bud
awaiting our attention
justice in our hands
longing to be practiced
the whole world
learning
from within
this thrilling mote in the universe
laboratory
labyrinth
internalize demands
you are the one
you are waiting for
externalize love
bind together us into
a greater self
a complex movement
a generative abundance
an embodied evolution
learn to be here
critique is a seductress
her door is always open
so what if you get some
we are going further
past reform, to wonder
this requires comprehension
that cannot fit in words
out beyond our children
beyond the end of time
there is a ceaseless cycle
a fractal of sublime
and we come to create it
to soil our hands and faces
loving loving and loving
ourselves, and all our places
adrienne maree brown
– adrienne maree brown, 10/25/12, detroit
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
For further reading:
Process Theology: A Basic Introduction – C. Robert Mesle
On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process by Catherine Keller
Monica A. Coleman. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology
A Faith for All Seasons: Liberal Religion and The Crises of Life by William R. Murry
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
