Praise of Life
Life, unfathomable plenty –
You carry us and imbue us and flow around us,
You call us like everything into being and give everyone our time,
That we may make use of it to come to know You,
To encounter You in light and shadow.
We take and accept You and we are thankful.
Find us prepared!
Sermon: On being human at the turn of the year.
January is traditionally a time to look forward after having looked backward – Janus, the Roman God after whom the month is named was the two faced god who looked both ways. We’re in the middle of the month rather than the beginning -- ALREADY!, pretty soon we’ll be asking each other where the winter went!
If we stretch our sense of 2005 to include the last few days of 2004, that is to include the Boxing Day Tsunami that killed 200,000 people in a wide swathe of the world and which directly led to two very strong earthquakes during 2005 (Indonesia and Pakistan) and a record number of tropical storms in the Atlantic which converted to a record number of hurricanes hitting the countries of the Caribbean, the past year was a real high for the extent and amount of human tragedy caused by natural forces. It might, in fact, have even been worse, for the day after the Boxing Day Tsunami, astronomers around the world noted an enormously powerful energy surge from a distant star that would have killed all life on Earth if our Sun had been within 50 light-years. As it turned out the stellar explosion was 50,000 light years away and contained as much energy in half a second as our sun puts out in 100,000 years. So we are under threat, not only from the natural forces of our planet, but also from distant objects in space that we cannot even see on a clear night.
If being human means to be sensitive and caring about human suffering and need (and there are those who consider this a good beginning for approaching a definition of “human”) then 2005 was a good year in our developing sense of humanity. The outpouring of donations and aid to Tsunami casualties and Pakistani villagers and the mostly poor black residents of New Orleans; the incomplete but real steps to reform unfair trade rules and expunge massive, crippling debts; the progress on authorising cheaper medications to alleviate HIV and AIDS treatment in the poorest nations; and the cooperative scientific attempt to get to grips with Asian bird flu – all these point improvements in our practical caring for each other.
Today is 15 January, the birthdate of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King. It is celebrated in the US as an official holiday, because of the work he did to try to create a more inclusive sense of identity, surmounting the very high walls which separated then, and continue largely to separate, different racial communities. He was a great man – a man with many faults, no doubt, but still a great man whose life continues to inspire people towards an inclusive sense of justice. As it turns out, King was born on the seventh anniversary of the creation of the Irish Free State and the Partition which created Northern Ireland, the British government’s attempt to keep a toe-hold in Ireland in spite of an overwhelming vote by the Irish for independence. The consequences of that gerrymandering decision are still working themselves through British politics over 80 years later.
My main theme this evening is that a sense of social justice is a key element in what it means to develop our human potential, but that various attempts to draw “clear blue water” (as they say) between our human community and the rest of nature are not only doomed to fail, these attempts can actually interfere with us making progress.
We are creatures of the spirit; we are who we are not just because of the way our physical needs for food and shelter have been met, but because of the way our social and community needs have been met.
Many religions emphasise the special/ unique nature of humanity, for example by talking about being made in the image of God – the creator of the whole shebang. Some talk about an eternal soul which other life-forms lack. Oh, you'll get the occasional fridge magnet that says something like "people who don't like cats must have been mice in a previous life" – I’ve actually got that one myself. And there will be some dog or cat lovers who protest that their pet is "almost human" and they expect to be re-united after death, but generally when people from a Christian cultural background talk about Heaven they don't include pets or mosquitoes. The majority of Christian praxis for 2000 years has emphasised the special nature of being human (made in the image of God) which involves original sin and the need for baptism to remove its effects.
As Unitarians, of course, we have taken a dim view of original sin; baptism for us is symbolic of welcome into the community and respect for individual identity and freedom rather than a cleansing ceremony. But even Unitarians have in the past taken a view which includes a fairly sharp distinction between humanity and the world we live in.
Modern 'green' theology, of course, talks more of co-operation and responsibility for environment than dominion over it and New Age thought emphasises spiritual linkage between people and natural objects, but these ideas are only slowly finding their way into traditional religion, including Unitarianism. For many of us in the 'rich' Western world things are more important than relationships, in fact, the first understandings when we hear the word 'rich' are centered on accumulations of things, not on plenitude and quality of relationships.
So, we are creatures of the spirit and for some this means a conflict with things of the flesh. We hear news about hurricanes and earthquakes and ask where is God -- implying that the God that we are made in the image of is NOT the God that creates natural patterns of such destruction; we read stories about the rich, beautiful, powerful, and famous and are taught that the trappings of success lie in collecting expensive things and power over others rather seeing a successful life as one lived in harmonious relationship with others and with our environment. I watched five minutes of the pre-lottery show on TV last week where people were tested on their knowledge of the price of very expensive objects and praised and rewarded when their materialistic knowledge was up to the challenge. As I watched, slightly disgusted at the values being expressed, I wondered how to make an attractive programme where people were asked to show that they knew the ecological cost of various “items” and whether they could describe their usefulness in reducing human suffering – perhaps a test of what was involved in running a shelter for battered wives or in providing public transport worthy of the name.
We are creatures of THIS world and all our petty attempts to carve out a unique separate identity fall down.
For example, We share 97% of our basic DNA with chimps, -- over 90% with dogs, over 50% with bananas!
For example, We define humans as the species that has language and then find that we can teach words to dogs and sign language to chimps and still cannot decode the complex language of porpoises.
For example, We define humans as the species that uses tools and then find that birds and gorillas use natural objects to accomplish goals -- gorillas will even modify natural objects to make them more efficient. Did you know that another anniversary today is the opening of one of the world’s great collections of culture? It was on this day in 1759 that the British Museum was opened.
And another example of the attempt to separate humanity from the rest of nature, is the definition that humans are the species that has culture, that transmits knowledge between generations, and then we find instances of our ape-like ancestors doing this too -- a recent published study noted that after two separate tribes of monkeys were taught two different but equal ways to do a task, a few generations down the line one could tell which tribe a monkey came from by the way it did the task. Learning and transmission generally came from the mothers to the daughters, although a few sons were also teachable; and recent studies have tried to determine how birds and whales learn their calling signals from their parents.
So the final reserve of those who want us to see ourselves as separate from Nature with rights, even obligations, to exploit her, is that People Have Souls and benefit from God's commandments and Glorious Sacrifice which is to make us glorious and fit for a heaven where we will spend eternity praising God in splendid isolation from other living creatures.
But if you remove something from its context you are in real danger of distorting it. This is true whether we take a fish out of water or a person out of community, or humanity out of our natural world. When Jesus finished his pastoral and healing ministry and headed into Jerusalem to challenge the religious and political authorities of his day, the priests fought back, trying to tempt him into saying something that could be used as a complaint to the political authorities. The priests were in secret contact with Judas Iscariot, who as a Zealot was disappointed with Jesus' pastoral ministry and wanted a political revolution that would overthrow the Romans; the priests were toadying to the Romans to keep their authority; but never mind, they both were upset with Jesus. And both were astounded by Jesus' replies to the trick questions he was asked: about paying taxes, about who was our neighbour, about observing the restrictions imposed by church and custom when these stood in the way of human need, about stoning sinners.
Our difficulty in understanding his message and why the priests were discomfitted lies in the fact that his message is usually presented out of context for us. He was speaking to Jews of his day, Jews, as already noted, under foreign occupation, for whom their Bible and their rituals were the stuff of daily life. Their Bible, of course, is what we call the Old Testament, particularly the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the Prophets with their call to personal renewal and social justice.
Since the time of Constantine Jesus is portrayed as affirming existing political and religious authority, but his central message was the importance of social justice. Important passages are often taken to mean that we are obliged to pay our taxes, that charity begins at home, that things of the spirit belong to God who speaks through the church which must be obeyed, but material things belong to the Political Ruler we are also obliged to obey. Notice that in this distorted perspective, things of the spirit are disjointed, separated in treatment from things of the flesh -- we are in this world but not of this world.
What Jesus was actually saying was often almost directly opposite to this and was very radical.
Any Jew hearing Jesus answer his questioners would immediately connected his references to their Scriptures – for instance in the passage commonly known as Ceasar’s coin, they would connect his reference to the image on the coin to Genesis in their Holy Book and its Creation Story where humanity, men and women, are made in the image of God. At the same time he radically challenged the authority of the church as well as the state: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. We are part of God's creation, not separate from it.
Yesterday Barbara and I travelled to Bristol to see an excellent performance of Charles Dickens’s “Scrooge”. To be a Scrooge has come to mean to be selfish and parsimonious – but Dickens wrote the play to illustrate that we could and should change from being wrapped up in our own little worlds to incorporating love and justice into our daily lives and Scrooge does just that! So a Scrooge is someone who reforms their life and their values and others benefit from this.
To appreciate our enmeshment with the natural world, we have to see with our hearts as well as our eyes. We wouldn't just see surface beauty, we’d feel the connections, we’d value the world as our home, not as something that will make us rich or powerful. We have to see ourselves as part of our context, the natural world with all its beauty and its tremendous, awesome destructive energy. Death is part of the on-going process of this world, and death is integral to our existence. This radical vision is what undergirds, what supports, what guides, the person who is spiritually at one with nature and is what makes religious maturity possible.
Creative Art helps rescue faith from an intellectual coldness that ties faith to beliefs rather than actions. The Unitarian distrust of enthusiasm, of emotion in religion, has a strong historical basis, particularly here in Wales with the area around Lampeter called Smotyn du, Black spot, because the 19C Calvinist revival didn’t make any headway there. But this has led us, and could continue to lead us, away from a fuller appreciation of our world, of life, and of social reality. For the truth that liberty of individual conscience is an essential element of freedom, is by itself, insufficient for a definition of Unitarian Faith. Without the equally true insight that human freedom is nurtured by human community, our Unitarian Faith is without depth. The metaphores we use need to describe our goals effectively -- that is, they need to draw us closer to a larger vision, a creative process, a cooperative venture of actually building the Kingdom with our daily activities. To be human is to be part of our human community and our natural world. To be fully human is to be fully integrated in a cooperative and caring relationship within both contexts – our divine and human potential
John Clifford
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