Sermon
WHO RE U(U)?
Frank Carpenter, D.Min., February 4, 2007
St. John's UU Church
Cincinnati, OH
Who are you?
Who are you?
What an awful question! It's like, maybe, someone is asking if your fly is open, or maybe your mascara is running? Why is somebody, anybody asking, "Who am I?"
In a small New Hampshire town stories were told of a sheriff and his brother. The brother, you see, had this problem with alcohol. Not infrequently late at night one of the local officers would stop the sheriff's brother. It was a problem.
One night a new officer was on patrol. He stopped the sheriff's brother, who was as usual drunk. Belligerently he asked the officer, "Don't you know who I am?" The officer called the sheriff and said. "I've stopped your brother. He's drunk and doesn't seem to know who he is..."
It is an awful question, this "Who are you?"
I recall one time during my ministerial education I took clinical pastoral education. A group of us spent three months in training at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital as chaplains. One time I went in to a room of a fellow. I started to talk with him and he held a mirror so I could see my face. I was so startled I can't remember what happened next. Who am I?
Who are you? Or as it is put more often in our society, what do you do? Do for a living it is supposed. As if how you pay the mortgage is the most important thing to be known about you.
In his essay, "Self-Reliance," Emerson asks
... the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. (page 168)
In our consumerist, materialist culture, Emerson words remain true: it's more about the size of your swimming pool than the size of your soul.
Who are you? An awesome question. It challenges us to think to the quick of what we are about, to recall youthful dreams of what might have been and how we have come to where we are.
This morning, I wonder how many of us would answer this awesome question with the response, I am a Unitarian Universalist. I go to a Unitarian Universalist church. I am an active in the ministry of my UU church.
Not that the answer the slips most quickly off the tongue.
Surely there are those for whom their religion is their most immediate answer. Sometimes I think, that one of the doctors I see might answer the question most quickly, not with 'doctor,' but with 'Christian.' As we want to understand what is going on in the Middle East, we need to understand that various identities that people have there. The idea that someone might respond to the awesome question of identity with the word "Iraqi' seems to be history. Today it is Shia, Kurd or Sunni. Sunni and Shia are religious terms. Kurds is an ethnicity term as religiously they are Sunni.
What is our Unitarian Universalist identity?
Waxing philosophic for the moment, allow me to recall to your mind the first of our UU principles as you find them in the front of the gray hymnal. There read, "We covenant to affirm and promote... the inherent worth and dignity of every person... ."
Our Unitarian Universalist identity, who you are is beauty, is good: Our prophet Emerson called each person to "hold his own nature in a reverential awe." (Richardson, THE MIND ON FIRE, page 99).
There we are back at awe, awesome. Each one of us is unique, awesome. Asking you who you are asks you to recall once again, to get in touch with that very special sense of your unique identity. We loose that unique sense as we go our daily rounds. As we talk in a normal day to day way, we know that we are just like everyone else, and we forget that we are each awesomely unique. So we come to church to sing:
How could anyone ever tell you
You were anything less than beautiful?
How could anyone ever tell you
You were less than whole?
How could anyone fail to notice
That your loving is a miracle
How deeply you're connected to my soul.
One of the fabrications, deceits of our culture is the idea that you can answer the awesome question, who are you, without reference to your past. Can we forget that the child is parent to the adult? Can we forget the homes we grew up in? Can we forget the joys and sorrows our parents revealed to us? Here in our childhood did the buds come to the flower which we are today. So awesome a question, 'who are you' takes us back. If we would have a full answer into the lives of our parents, we would seek then into our grandparents and finally into the history of the entire cosmos itself. We are star stuff. But let us not wander too far this morning; let us not loose sight of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist, to be an active member of a UU church.
Just as who we are today was much formed in our beginnings, so we must we look back to the times when our faith was coming to see itself as it was, was beginning to look at itself in the mirror. And we can do no better than turn to our prophet Emerson. turn to his essay 'Self-reliance.'
'Self-reliance' is understood to be not only a founding rock of our liberal religion but a seminal document of our American way of life. Some how or other, Emerson's self-reliance was misconstrued, got all deck up as 'rugged individualism.' Emerson wrote 'Self reliance' at the same time as his essay, the 'Oversoul,' and the two must be read as companions, if they are to be understood. The self which Emerson calls upon us to rely upon in the first essay is described in the second, this self is the Oversoul.
But more than that, more than an essay on the Oversoul, more than some thoughts on self-reliance, the essay 'self-reliance' is really about something other than self-reliance. Indeed, what the prophet, the poet is talking to us about is quite the opposite of self-reliance. What Emerson spends most of his words upon in the essay is not 'self-reliance,' but the want of self-reliance.
The materialist, capitalist culture had already set in pretty deeply in Emerson's day. Indeed Unitarians were among the leading founders of American Capitalism. And Emerson thought materialism was spiritually corrupting:
Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion,. It loves not realties and creators, but names and customs." (148)
Have things improved since those days? Consider the state of religion. I recently had lunch with some of the other clergy of congregations along Clifton Avenue. We were all in pretty much agreement that what passes for religion to day, what causes excitement in religion today, the big mega churches, the Christian right wing has little if anything to do with spirituality but a lot to do with consumption. These places are more like malls than houses of worship. They have high turn over rates in their membership.
How can bashing the poor be passed off as spirituality? Many churches today are calling for Israel to go to war with Syria, to bring on the Second Coming of Jesus. Now, how in God's name has religion ever come to such a pass?
America is spiritually adrift, lost.
But you need not wander into strange houses of worship, or read about Christian militias. Look into your own heart, consider your own soul.
Who has not a sense of spiritual emptiness? Can we be alive without feeling that something is missing from our lives? Something perhaps rather big is missing from our lives?
In Twelve Step meetings they call it the hole in the soul, or the God hole. Addicts stuff things into the hole: booze, drugs, food. It doesn't work. But there is a sense of emptiness, a sense that we lack something, but we turn outside ourselves for resolution.
And here the poet Emerson wants to jerk us out of old habits. For Emerson, nothing makes our spiritual emptiness worse than imitation. His constant refrain is 'imitation is suicide.' (page 146) Rather than looking into ourselves, rather than trusting that what is deep is holy, we imitate. Isn't that what advertising is all about? Advertising is about imitation. The logic then is simple: advertising causes spiritual emptiness, spiritual suicide. You just don't have what it takes, so buy this multicolored toothpaste. This tooth whitening toothpaste will distract you for the moment.
If Emerson be our prophet, he calls us to self-reliance. And self-reliance is the opposite of imitation. Self-reliance is the trust that what is deep is holy.
So he writes:
Trust thyself-: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. [The] great have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart... (page 146))
If I am to be me, then, and imitation is suicide, is not going to church imitation? -- conformity?
What!? Is that why you come here? Who are you imitating?
The call for self-reliance is not a neglect of our relationships with one another. Emerson first began to wonder about the themes of self-reliance during the illness of his first wife, Ellen. She soon died, young, of tuberculosis. Marriage and her illness deepened and matured Emerson , had brought out his capacity for sympathy. In some way or another, Ellen was his muse, giving Emerson to himself, founding his fundamental and particular conviction in the authority of the individual self.
His love for Ellen taught him the difference between the motions of love and the actuality of love. The reality of love knows nothing of imitation but each moment recreates the soul of lover and beloved.
If we go to church because that is the thing to do, then it is imitation and will avail you little. But if you go for spiritual growth and insight; if you go because you share in the spiritual emptiness of our days, that is not imitation but honest spirituality. Spiritual emptiness is not about god, but knowing the absence of God, that something is missing in our lives.
Spirituality, religion, is about community, one of the basics which we know can be missing. Jesus had his disciples. The Buddha, the Enlightened One had his sangha, Moses was followed by his tribes. Muhammad was followed by a caravan when he traveled from Mecca to Medina. Community is genuine when it is part of the great whole, part of the Oversoul upon which you rely, part of the interdependent web of all existence.
We each need to be part of this community. As Emerson would remind us, we must understand, we must answer the question, who are you, understanding that we are spiritual beings. To be fully human is to be spiritual. Among the things that means is to be actively involved in the activities of our spiritual fellowship, the communion that sustains you, that reminds you of your high calling.
Here at St. John's, we talk about the combined work that we do that makes our congregation a shared ministry. Shared ministry is an expression of spirituality, an expression of your self-reliance.
Emerson remarked in our reading:
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver,. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no intervention; no hope. (146)
Who are you?
An awesome question!
Let us keep in mind that the prophet, poet Emerson calls us to "hold our own nature in ... reverential awe." We are spiritual beings and we are to trust that what is deep is holy. Thus may we share in the ministry of this congregation, gladly joining with friends to realize our hopes for the future of St. John 's, and of humanity