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THE FREEDOM TO BECOME
by Rev. Preston K. Mears, Jr.
(Episcopalian priest and member of DMUUC)
1/9/05

“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 Manhatten 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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