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The Quest For Importance
(Sermon given by David H. Phillips at DMUUC on 06-29-2003)

Every newborn child that we greet - we look at them and say, this child may become President! We are free in this country and each child has that opportunity and we have every right to be proud that they have this opportunity. This week we are celebrating the Fourth of July (points to the pulpit arrangement of red, white, and blue flowers) red, white and blue and all the things America stands for, but this, this opportunity for every child is our most treasured possession.

Well what is important anyway? We listened to "Tyger! Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night" (Chalice Lighting reading). Can you imagine you being alone in a forest with a tiger out there? You wouldn't feel so important, all alone, having to arm wrestle a tiger. But we've had 175,000 years and we've done well with our 175,000 years. We've built tools and we've created so many structures and they have turned out to make us the ultimate predator. We have to worry now that the tiger is going to become extinct.

Now with all this freedom, we need to understand that freedom has a twin. That twin is responsibility. So every time you get freedom, responsibility is there too! Sometimes we have wishful thinking, thinking that we don't need to vote, somebody else will vote. But we're putting our freedom at risk when we do things like that and don't take our responsibility.

What makes us so special? What is this creativity? It turns out that we have ten to the fourteen bits. We have more than anyone else and we've made good use of it. We've built on it, we've built structures, we've created many more tools in 100,000 years than our other homo sapiens friends - I guess you'd call them Neanderthal people. They used tools, but they kept the same tool for 100,000 years. We really have something going for us, but we're going to have to be careful how we use it. We say to the child "when you grow up" as if it were size that was important. Well now we have our fancy tools - telescopes to look up and microscopes to look down in size. We have a lot of theoretical ideas and we find out that size is rather a strange thing when you get down to the size of an atom and all the electrical forces are insignificant. We would never predict an atom to be the way it is made with all the positive charges concentrated in the nucleus. That's out of our experience. And we look up and we theorize that there's a neutron star with everything crammed together. Compared to a neutron star and the nucleus of an atom, we're nothing more than a cloud. A neutrino can go through the whole earth without hitting it. So are we so sure (loud bang - glass lens exploded off a sealed beam in the ceiling and glass rained down showering mostly vacant seats with glass).

Oh a light. Is everyone OK? Good, yes that was more than a neutrino. Well these are the things in our lives that come out of nowhere and they are inexplicable. As much as we reach out and try to figure things out, for every question we answer, we seem to get two more questions. For example what made that light explode? Well there's probably a good answer, but it does seem strange that it happened right now. Right when I wanted to make a point! I consider myself a Prince of Serendipity. This is off my regular remarks, but this does something that makes me feel very special, because (Do it Again - said John O'Loughlin in the audience) I'm not in charge!

Joseph Campbell puts it this way "Follow your bliss" and when you are following your bliss, invisible hands seem to be helping you on your way and opening doors for you. And that's what we hope for the child. Now what's the point of our religion here? Why are we here? We're here because we're worshiping and worshiping means we are looking for worth! So we hope that by finding something worthwhile, this quest that we are hoping this child and we ourselves, who are nothing more than older children, are taking on will be worthwhile.

Now we have been at it for a long time, thousands of years, building religion. But sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes we get it wrong. Well here's an example - we thought that the earth must be the center of the universe and it was very hard for us to shake that view. It became clear that we weren't the center of the universe as soon as Galileo took out his telescope. And I suppose there are a few people that think the earth is flat, but most of us after seeing pictures from space are convinced that it is round. Those who have traveled know the time zones.

But that isn't the only mistake we've made. Let's just think of racism for example. Why this country was almost broken apart by the idea that people were so radically different. And we bought this idea, or at least many people did for years and years. Now with the genetic information, we find that we are all embarrassingly closely related. Why chimpanzees have six times the genetic diversity that we do. They could look at us and say - new kid on the block- and what would we say. Well we are and we're all so close and yet we imagined we were so far - Wrong!!!!

Well let's think about things we're doing wrong now. Isn't it strange that in helping the children of this country, we are busily building prisons to hold them? We are almost building more prisons than schools. And why do we build prisons and schools for the children - why don't we just bring them together and concentrate on making that dream for these children come true. Let's get them on a quest worthy of them and worthy of us. This is really where we should be thinking. I think of Unitarianism as a self correcting religion. We have no excuse to say it was all right in antiquity, so it should be all right for us today. We have to go to work and see the errors of our society, and reach out, reach out to these young people, reach out to each other, and reach out to ourselves.

Now let's think of the world wide web. Of what is the world wide web made? It's made of truth, it's made of love, it's made of courage. It's our soul saved by 175,000 years of building - all that the people before us have invested. And so we are indebted to them and our place in the web is largely fixed by them and their work and their lives. And then we find strangely enough that we can make a difference. Look at people like Mother Theresa, what an improbable figure, a nun off in India, making a difference!! By serving the lowest of the low, taking them out of the gutter, she raised the whole level of the web for everyone. But there are other people, Christians like Hitler, and Muslims like Mohammed Atta, who lowered the web. What we need to do is make sure that all young people have a quest for living that makes sense.

Let's think about some of our problems today. We know that complexity is about to get the most of us, but what we are finding out is that complexity wins. So how do we handle this? Right now we find that we are getting inundated by e-mail and phone calls we don't want. We're so busy that we hardly have a chance to think. How are we going to help the young people if we hardly have time for ourselves? Clearly we need to shape our complexity. We do not need to be like the diamonds that are generated under temperature and pressure left in the volcanic cone covered by rubble. We need to be using our complexity so that it is like a diamond ring, where we are the diamond sitting on top of the complexity, and the complexity is the ring supporting the diamond. And with the proper training of people and the interplay of love in the world wide web, we will glow like diamonds. Beethoven's Sixth that we played as the prelude - can you imagine generating music like that to last hundreds of years and express the interaction of a person to nature so well?

Yes we have a job to do. But we have the tools, the very tools like computers that are making our lives so busy can handle all this information and make it easy for us to live and make it easy for us to see the need which we can fill. So I'm really very optimistic that we can handle this. Let's look to the future of shaping this complexity and making sure that our place in the universe, which by Einstein's theory is not centered - there is no center to the universe - if you measure the speed of light from any point, it's the same - Einstein's special theory of relativity. Now what meaning does that have for our religion? Well it has a lot of meaning for it means that our place in the universe is as significant as any other place. We don't need to be overwhelmed by the size. What we need to do is tend to our business, help ourselves and our children, and make the web rise and be stronger because we lived.

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