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By Rev. Preston K. Mears Jr.
January 9, 2005
“To be or not to be…” begins Hamlet’s soliloquy. Confronted with
difficult choices, Hamlet is trapped in his own indecision over what
to do about his father’s murder. One may wonder if Hamlet, with his
ability to debate within himself and his “on the one hand” and “on
the other hand” was not a closet Unitarian. Hamlet did not choose
his circumstances but was free, to a degree, to make choices. He
chose tragically; one might wonder, though, if he had an un-tragic
choice.
While our lives are hopefully not of the tragic proportions of
Prince Hamlet, it would seem our freedom is limited to choices
within the circumstances of our place and time and individual
ability. None the less, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” really does outline
our human predicament very sharply. I want to suggest to you that
unlike Shakespeare, I do believe that we do have freedom, if we look
to our future and not be limited by our past. Bear with me as it is
harder to speak of what we are for, as compared to what we are
against! Sermons on "sin", however one might define sin, are the
easiest ones to do.
Theologically, the idea of “Freedom” has been defined by the twin
doctrines of “Grace and Free Will.” If God’s Grace is emphasized,
and with it God’s omnipotence and God’s omniscience, then how can we
be free to choose, to make choices that make a difference? As in the
hymn “Amazing Grace:” “T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear and
Grace my fears relieved.”
So Hamlet, while he debates his choices, does it really matter?
Shakespeare knows the end. If we don’t have any important choices,
then how can we speak of freedom? Freedom from oppression and want
are not small matters. What choice did thousands of victims have in
the face of the tsunami? How forward looking were are election
choices this past Fall?
At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, theologians generally
conclude that God allows us a window of choice; the rest of the
discussion is over how large or small a window. The 5th century
theologian St. Augustine concluded that we are to believe in Grace
in order to believe rightly and in Freewill in order to live
rightly.
My point is that freedom is an old question. Both an old play and an
old theological view illustrate how we understand reality. There is
also another whole vantage point and another old debate that
operates as well: Where are we going? What is it that we would
strive to accomplish, or more importantly perhaps, who do we want to
become? What is the future we would move towards, as though there
might be more than one future out there for us to move toward? Can
we look forward in a way that does not tie us tragically to the
limitations of the past?
To get there from here, allow me to nudge our thoughts around just a
little. I start with a vantage point laid out with great irony by
Mark Twain in a scene between the Widow Douglas and Huckleberry
Finn. In it the kindly Widow Douglas tries to explain to Huck that
he needs to be good and virtuous so that when he dies he will get to
go to Heaven and sing praises to God. Huck asks if he could smoke in
Heaven and the Widow exclaims, “Of course not!” Huck concludes that
he might just prefer the other place then. Fishing and smoking for
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is Heaven enough. What about Heaven?
The Apocalyptic language of both the Old and New Testaments had it
that the conflict between Good and Evil was so painfully tangled up
in this world, that it required a cataclysmic event in which God
would overthrow the old order and institute a new reign of peace and
fulfillment. Apocalyptic language also included resurrection
references to the coming back to life of the prophets, the leaders,
and the righteous who had gone before. Today, I suggest to you,
there will be those preachers who will point to the horror of the
Tsunami and its devastation as proof that we do now, in fact, live
in the apocalyptic times of the last days. So, repent and be saved.
In earliest Christianity, even before the term “Christian” was in
use, people expected that final judgment was to be within their
lifetime and would be lead by the second coming of Jesus and, by the
way, would include the throwing out of the Roman oppressors. Freedom
from oppression and slavery is deeply imbedded in our psyches and
resonates strongly among all people, particularly people who have
been oppressed.
The second coming did not happen in the 1st Century AD nor with the
collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, nor in the year
1,000 nor in the year 2,000. Language and people being adaptable,
apocalyptic language was soon reinterpreted to refer to Heaven as a
whole other world, a whole other life.
In this broadly prevalent version of things, this aging and
conflicted world, like our aging and sometimes aching bodies, gets
replaced with resurrected bodies to another world, a heavenly world
of God’s reign. Call it Heaven, call it Paradise, call it Nirvana.
The only important choice, the only critical step in terms of
freedom, is that little window Grace allows for us to believe and so
be included in the Heavenly Kingdom of another existence promised to
believers. Various traditions in Christianity and Islam assert a
variety of terms and conditions that flow from that choice. All
“choices” after this one decision, however, pale in comparison.
Political freedom is not a primary concern and certainly any long
term pro-environmental concerns irrelevant. This straight forward
version of how things really are is a very narrow, and I find,
unfreeing version.
A larger view: Part of all of our religious histories (East, West,
North South), are stories of the Garden, the perfect place of plenty
and harmony. Deep within the human psyche is the longing for inner
peace in harmony with the created order. You may remember last
month, that I described the nature writings of a Thoreau or the
theoretical studies of an Einstein into the nature of the Universe
as religious undertakings. The combination of science and religious
study has been a compelling one to me in seeking to be a free and
freeing person within myself and to those around me.
In some churches, at this point, I would quote St. Paul in the
Epistle to the Romans and extrapolate from what he says about the
fruits of the Spirit and the signs of God’s Kingdom in the here and
now. I won’t do that here.
Instead I turn to a scientist, a naturalist, writing in the last
century, a paleontologist (somebody who studies prehistoric bones).
He was a Roman Catholic scholar, a French Jesuit priest who combined
his religious training with his work as a scientist. I suspect few
of you have heard of or read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His
fascination with the meanings of evolution as he could discern them
from his work in Paleontology did not endear him to the religious
establishment. His reflections on the meaning of religious
revelation in light of his scientific studies didn’t exactly
resonate with rationalists in the scientific community. His writings
resonated in the 1950’s and 60’s with people who wanted to see new
possibilities for human kind in the civil rights movement and
liberation theologies.
His major religious reflections are contained in a book entitled:
Alpha and Omega. These are the first and last letters of the Greek
alphabet and are used by the pious to express the belief that Jesus
is at the beginning and the end of all things. The very old Advent
Hymn, “Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel” expresses it familiarly as, “He
the source the ending he.” To use the very universal garden image:
We come from the garden and the garden is our ultimate end: beauty,
completion and fulfillment.
Teilhard starts with evolution as an under girding reality of
existence moving from the simple to the more complex. With human
kind as the crowning pinnacle of biological evolution (we don’t have
to adapt to the environment since we can adapt it to us). Instead,
says Teilhard, evolution for human kind switches to the
psychological and sociological. We learned to function in small
groups focused on survival. And knowledge and skill progressed in
building block fashion from individual to individual. Not smoothly,
mind you, but with hits and misses just as with evolution in the
natural world.
In the person of Jesus, Teilhard saw the individual being affirmed
in a new way. Salvation has to do with all people and the context is
not just the tribe. The evolution of the individual struggles
forward and hits a dramatic new high point in the Age of
Enlightenment and dramatic expansion of individual liberty, the
pursuit of individual religious understanding and the study of
nature. The minds of Franklin and Jefferson among many are often
noted. A nearby example, I was struck when visiting Mount Vernon by
George Washington’s writings on farming. Besides all the things for
which there are statues and monuments, George Washington was an
agricultural scientist!
Some of you may remember that John F. Kennedy reacted to an
observation at a White House Dinner in those “Camelot” days at a
large dinner of America’s intelligenstia. The observation was that
there probably had never been so much intelligence in the White
House at one time before. JFK is said to have retorted, “Probably
not since Jefferson dined alone.” His was an amazing period with
amazing people and with enough energy to form a critical mass that
changed the world. Others have followed and have expanded the
meaning and inclusivity of what it is to be an individual human
being.
The slightly cynical among you might ask, “What about Hitler? What
about 9/11? And, didn’t we hear a sermon on the rise of tribalism
and didn’t you, Preston, express grave concern right now for the
health of the Constitution of the United States?” Absolutely, and
Teilhard was a paleontologist. He looked at things in terms of
thousands of years, in terms of epochs. He also saw that evolution
mostly carries a great deal of old stuff forward with it; evolution
biological and human is not a clean process. Biologically, consider
that Chimpanzees and we have something like 98% of our chromosomes
in common. Psychologically, Carl Jung as a psycho analytic theorist
tells of our collective unconscious--that part of our psychic
make-up is a community of those who precede us. Spiritually, Alpha
and Omega means that what was in the beginning, and everything along
the way will be at the end. Teilhard’s response is that evolution
has taken a long time and human evolution in terms of what we may
become will take a long time.
The future that we are a part of becoming is one in which human
interaction and growth and mutual support are what is the usual and
that games of competition would be experienced more as a symphony
where the violin don’t beat the trumpets and even the bassoon gets a
turn at the melody. We live, we share, we grow by seeing more and
more in the other and discover so much about ourselves. A time when
it is the usual to recognize our common vulnerability as humans and
so share each others burdens. That happens now--something I have
learned in my years of work in the social welfare arena--we do want
to help when we see and understand the need but we miss seeing it so
often in the everyday experiences. A tsunami disaster touches us
all, thank goodness we know that and the time will be in the future,
and perhaps sometimes now, life touches each of us everyday and in
everyday way.
I sometimes have felt the Quakers caught hold of piece of the future
early. As a religious group, they hold up the value of all people,
that there is that of God in every person, an inner light, to use
their language. And they also committed themselves to community by
making important decisions by consensus, consensus that had to
respect the individual conscience of every person. They do and have
shown the first fruits of the future. Slavery disrespected the
divine in the human and to be a Quaker was to be an abolitionist.
Unitarians are also strong on the respect for the individual but,
seems to me, sometimes get hung up on issues over authority and
forget to get to the consensus part.
Another suggestion of the future, as has been noted by others, was
the Manhattan Project. A single genius, a Renaissance mind,
Einstein, building on the knowledge of others before, could conceive
of the equation that Energy Equals the Mass of Light to the second
power (E = MC squared). However, it took the combined energies,
skills, creative knowledge of over 200 people working closely
together to translate the equation into nuclear energy. It was an
accomplishment that required lifting up the contributions of many
individuals. Most of us are familiar with the metaphor of critical
mass in organizational work and the idea of synergy when enough
people come together with a single focus.
There was, of course, the underside of the Manhattan Project, one
was concerning to many of its participants, that the motivation was
war and the immediate output the Atomic Bomb. But even so, it
suggests a foretaste of human evolution towards future
possibilities.
Knowledge is built on knowledge and many different kinds of genius
creating new possibilities. I refer here to my having been cured of
prostate cancer through the use of radiation, an out come of nuclear
science different from the bomb. As a result of years of study and
effort by many people over time, a wide range of techniques and
discipline have replaced the word “remission” as one’s best hope for
the future with the word “cured.” My cure came about as a result of
a collection of efforts over time. No one enlightened, Renaissance
mind could put it all together by him or herself.
Let us be clear. Large group, collective human effort is not new.
Look at the pyramids. Their construction involved genius plus power
plus oppression and slavery. Twentieth Century Communism tried to
build a universal tribe built on an absolute called a collective and
to which the individual was subordinate. It set out to make one
over-sized tribe.
So, let’s try it again. The Holy future that Teilhard sees imbedded
in the revelations of religion, the visions of the prophets and the
teachings of the religious (and for Teilhard, Jesus is the high
point of religious teachings) is one in which the power of the tribe
is transformed by the expanding, evolving knowledge and capacity of
individuals who are transforming of each other. There is no
subordination and there is no loss of individual identity. Most of
us here know how we been transformed by important relationships in
our lives. Expand and multiply and vary that experience and you have
a sense of the Omega point, the Kingdom that is in the future.
We are far more free if we make choices looking forward than we do
if we look only to the past. Looking forward, the prophet Isaiah
spoke of freedom in terms of the beating of swords into plough
shares Next week, we will hear of it and celebrate it by remember
Martin Luther King, Jr. who declared a Holy future of freedom, a
future still before us.
Freedom? Individually and together at the same time? Sounds
contradictory. According to Teilhard, it is evolutionary! Discipline
and freedom sound contradictory. I enjoy the freedom of running
distances because of the nearly daily discipline of training.
We have the opportunity, the freedom if you would, to try to become
an expression of the future in this time and place, to discover
ourselves by discovering each other, and others outside our walls.
It is not that we give up the past, it is that we choose the future.
There are futures we are free to choose. It requires the discipline
of hard work, of choosing to hope more than to fear and willing to
be more than a little curious about what is next.
I really do hope and pray that everyone here will be able to choose
and will choose to come together for our Retreat on January 22nd. We
will understand our history and consider the future we choose. And,
yes, there is hard work in the details of all the what and how. We
are free to choose, we need to choose well and we need to do it
together.
I know I risk being confusingly abstract with an idea that we are
free if we are willing to make choices based on a future we would
embrace but, like Hamlet, not very free if our choices are based
only on our past and present circumstances. Hamlet may have fared
much better if he found a raft and floated down the river like Jim
and Huck. So let me try this at a personal level.
Every one of us has, in fact made choices for a future we would move
towards. When I told my parents I was going to marry Laurie. They
said it would not work because she was a Unitarian and I was going
to be an Episcopal priest. Our pasts were not going to allow us to
define our future. Now we find ourselves glad as our children are
defining their futures in their own ways.
Next week it will be 42 years and here we are and our lives are full
and challenging perhaps not without interest to this Church as we
add our voice and energy to what we might do and be at this place.
To look forward, we are free in this life, on this side of the
river, in this time. I don’t want to contemplate where I would be if
I followed a past my parents suggested.
In “Fiddler on the Roof,” the daughters sing, “Match maker, match
maker, make me a match.” For those of us who know and love them, can
you imagine a Match maker telling Estelle, “I have the perfect match
for you.”? Matchmakers are like my parents, they work from history.
George and Estelle chose to look forward and write their own history
in their own way. George has died and we will have a Memorial
Service next week, really a service of Memory and Thanksgiving.
He is personal to us. Part of his gift to us was his example of
saying exactly what he thought needed to be said and he would be
back the next day whether things went his way or not. Bottom line,
we needed to be a caring people. George is a good example of
Teilhard’s evolutionary future view of the Omega point. He was a
determined, creative, multi-faceted individual who would always have
us be a free people embracing the future.
I said that George is a good example. I believe with Teilhard, that
we carry our past, with us into our future. We particularly carry
with us those who have carried others in their turn as they have
embraced the future. He is and that is part of how I understand the
Kingdom to be.
I believe we are free to choose our future. We are not free if we
choose the past or accept being defined by the past. We are coming
together in this place wondering, hopeful, maybe fearful too, but
free to choose what kind of people we are and might become--learning
from each other, caring about each other and discovering our future.
We can, with the Preacher, use the old words, “Oh Lord, Free at
Last” for us in this place in this time, not in some far away place.
Today is a wondrous day. Most days are. I am most curious and
excited about tomorrow. I hope you are too.
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