SERMON: "Living As Love Demands: What Confucius Said"

Rev. Paul Beedle

February 3, 2008

I spent most of this past week at the annual retreat of Unitarian Universalist ministers in the Southwest Conference. Colleagues from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, southwestern Missouri and Memphis gathered for four days at Camp Allen, an Episcopalian retreat center near Navasota, just a couple of hours northwest of Houston. This was not a retreat in the sense of going away for a little downtime and meditation and things like that. This was more like a seminar. Most of our time was taken up with a presentation by Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, a husband-and-wife team who call themselves evangelists for evolution. You might have heard of them, they were featured in the UU World magazine a couple of years ago. They spend all of their time doing these presentations – they don't own a home, they live on the road, traveling in a van that has their logo on it, a Darwin fish and a Jesus fish kissing, with hearts rising from their kissers. Their message is that evolution is The Great Story, a sacred story in which we participate and which has a cosmic, mystical religious significance – or can have it, if we choose.

Everything they preach and teach is grounded in science – the latest and best scientific understanding of the cosmos. And they take on creationism directly by speaking of evolution as an unfolding of creativity in the universe. They talk about the structure of the universe as “nested creativity” – after billions of years of evolution of more complex elements and then strings of molecules, life arose in the form of cells without nuclei that began to photosynthesize. Photosynthesizing, they created oxygen, which was toxic to themselves. The earth's atmosphere filled up with oxygen. Dowd and Barlow call this the first pollution crisis. How did these primitive cells overcome it? By cooperating. Cooperative individuals and organizations outcompete non-cooperative individuals and organizations. They survive. And at each stage of greater complexity in the forms of life, the most complex organisms figure out how to cooperate to become parts of a larger whole and survive. So Dowd says that creativity in the universe is not only nested but directional – each level of complexity creates more complexity. That's the direction: toward more complexity, to the point that we have not only physical cooperation (more complex individuals) but social cooperation (more complex organizations). Cosmologist Brian Swimme has summed it up as: “You take a gigantic cloud of hydrogen and just leave it alone, and it becomes rosebushes, giraffes and human beings.”

And with human beings comes more complex social organization which drives an evolution in social consciousness. Religious consciousness and religious systems evolve as part of that. So when families and clans combined to form tribes, and the world was conceived as a mass of chaotic forces, there was a shaman to mediate and keep them safe. And when tribes were combined into kingdoms, epic heroic myths were told to unite the spiritual culture of those kingdoms. This is when all the world's major religious traditions emerged. And when nations replaced kingdoms, stories of mythic order like the first chapter of Genesis served that purpose – long after that story was written down, of course, many centuries later – changing the meaning and application of those traditions. And now, Dowd says, this understanding of the universe as nested creativity is driving a new religious consciousness. He quotes Brian Swimme again: “...the story of the universe that's come out of three centuries of modern scientific work will be recognized as a supreme human achievement, the scientific enterprise's central gift to humanity. ...[W]e now have a creation story that's not tied to one cultural tradition nor to a political ideology, but instead gathers every human group into its meanings. We are in the midst of a revelatory experience of the universe that must be compared in its magnitude with those of the great religious revelations, and we need only wander about telling this great story to ignite a transformation of humanity.” And that's what Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow are doing.

What sort of transformation are they working for? “To ensure a just, healthy, beautiful and sustainably life-giving world for future generations of all species.” That's their mission statement. And they strive to do that out of a sense of hope and possibility instead of fear and overwhelm. We can look at the problems facing us – particularly the environmental ones – and just not know where to begin or what it's in our power to do. Even when we chunk it down into small, simple things that you and I can do in our daily lives, we wonder if these small, simple things will be enough. But if we remember our ancestor, the photosynthesizing single cell that overcame the terrible problem of oxygen pollution, we know that if we're tapped into and aligned with the nested, directional creativity inherent in the universe, we'll find a way to create a more complex form of social organization that will make it possible for us to address the challenges of our time.

Now, what does all this have to do with Confucius?

Sometime before Confucius was born – long enough before to shape the whole of Chinese culture – the idea of “the Tao” (“the Way”) became part of Chinese knowledge. Let me explain what I mean by knowledge. It used to be that in the West, people understood the heavens to be static and unchanging – this was not a belief, it was knowledge of the sort that makes people say, “well, go out and look – duh!” Conveniently, this “knowledge” supported the nation-states' ordered view of the cosmos and the mechanistic idea of how the universe works that was aligned with it. The eternal state in a clockwork universe removed creativity from an inherent place in the universe of here and now, and put it into a pre-existing Creator. And even though stories in the Bible show God intervening in history, the scientific establishment – for political, not rational reasons – needed to keep God in the past in order to stay out of trouble with the state, not to mention the Church. That's why Darwin's theory was resisted by religious and political authorities, while creative thinkers – particularly in business – were really jazzed by it. The Tao in ancient China was like the clockwork universe in the West 200 years ago. It was “knowledge” that pervaded folks' understanding of the world. The ancient Chinese knew that the cosmos had a “Way” of operating, a regularity that one should strive to be in harmony with.

There were certain other ideas that were “knowledge” in ancient China: a reverence for ancestors (who might be family members or people outside the family who were great teachers), and the related ideas of current devotion to one's living parents (often called “filial piety”) and divination as a means of maintaining contact and alignment with deceased ancestors; and a personalized concept of the essence and power of the universe – not a god, not a pre-existing Creator, but the active inherent force and direction of the cosmos (this is what is meant by the terms in classical Chinese literature that are translated in English variously as “heaven” or “the supreme ruler in heaven” or “the mandate of heaven”; these English terms distort the ancient Chinese idea of the universe having a nature and force of its own, a “personality” so to speak) – and the related concept of “yin and yang,” opposite, complementary forces in the dynamic process of the universe. All of this adds up to a commonly held cultural knowledge about the importance of being in harmony with the universe and of our relationship to the universe as emergent: we from our parents, they from our ancestors, the ancestors from the Way of the universe itself.

Some of these Chinese cultural ideas you may be familiar with because you know something about Taoism. According to tradition, Lao Tse – the founder of Taoism – lived at about the same time as Confucius. Some say he lived later. So it is not a case of Taoism influencing Confucius, but of Taoism and Confucianism being influenced by a common set of cultural ideas. Lao Tse took the idea of The Way in a mystical direction. Confucius took it in a social and moral direction. What we know about the historical influence of each of their systems is that Confucius's ideas prevailed from about two centuries before until about two centuries after the life of Jesus, and Taoism prevailed during the next four hundred years. The period when Confucianism prevailed is the time of the first great dynasty in China's history, the Han dynasty. The period when Taoism prevailed was a time between dynasties, a more chaotic time when China was not united. The next great dynasty, the T'ang dynasty, claimed that its imperial family was descended from Lao Tse. And so the T'ang dynasty tried to put mysticism in harness the way the Church tried to with the gospel of John. It domesticated it. Because the concerns of a unified political organization are social and relational and moral, Confucianism was shaped by those concerns. And Taoism had to be harnessed to such concerns.

Confucius was a civil servant. So what Confucius talked about was how to serve the state and people's needs in ways that are in harmony with the Way and yin-and-yang and force and direction of the universe, and with those who have gone before us including our own parents. Here's something he's supposed to have said – it's in the seventh book of the Analects, which is a collection of quotations by or about him – he said: “I set my heart on the Tao, base myself on talent, lean upon good will, and take my recreation in the arts.” And that sums up Confucianism as a faith. Let me restate it: “I long for harmony with the universe, I base myself on my particular gifts (which are “givens” – I didn't create my talents, they just are), I depend upon good will (which I cultivate in myself), and I take time to appreciate how artists cultivate their gifts.” This is what Unitarians like William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson preached 200 years ago: self-culture in the context of appreciation of the divine or natural order of the universe, however you want to conceive of that order. Mind you, they too belonged to and served the ruling class. Survival is taken for granted in this teaching. Social support is taken for granted.

What did Confucius say about living as love demands? You will not be surprised to hear that the Golden Rule pops up among his sayings. His second-favorite disciple, Tzu-kung, asked him: “Is there a single word which can be a guide to conduct throughout one's life?” And he answers: “It is perhaps [to use oneself as a measure in gauging the wishes of others]. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” Notice that this is the point of view of a civil servant, who often is in the position of imposing laws or rules or interpretations of them on others. But hidden in that first quote is a more substantial answer to how to live as love demands than the Golden Rule: “I set my heart on the Tao, base myself on talent, lean upon good will, and take my recreation in the arts.” When he says he leans upon good will, he's in the territory of living as love demands that Martin Luther King Jr. explored: King said that the highest love – called agape in Greek – is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all [people].” Understanding is about knowing and appreciating the Way of another, whether it's the universe or another person. Creative means looking for that which connects and unites us, the common ground, and finding ways to stand on that ground and act together. It also can mean “in harmony with the Way of the universe,” if we understand the universe as nested creativity the way Michael Dowd does. Redemptive means – what happens when you redeem a coupon? what happens to it? Its value is recognized and accepted. Isn't that what happens? Its value is recognized and accepted and acted on. So if you have redemptive good will for another person, you affirm their value. And finally, the good will that King talked about, that highest form of love, is for all people. I believe that Confucius is saying something very like this when he connects depending upon good will with harmonizing with the Way of the universe and cultivating one's gifts and appreciating the gifts of others.

I mentioned Confucius's second-favorite disciple, Tzu-kung. His favorite disciple was named Yen Hui. What made Yen more favored in his eyes than Tzu-kung? In the eleventh book of the Analects, he categorizes ten of his disciples, including Yen and Tzu-kung. Tzu-kung, he says, excellent in speech. Yen is excellent in conduct. You'll remember that Tzu-kung asked what rule could guide a person throughout life, and Confucius answered with his version of the Golden Rule: “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” Tzu-kung is supposed to have said, “While I do not wish others to impose on me, I also wish not to impose on others.” To which Confucius replied: “Tzu-kung, that is quite beyond you.” And that reply can be understood on two levels: first, since the universe is interdependent and so are we in community or in society, sooner or later we're going to impose on each other; and second, it's hard to have such perfect good will that we do not impose on others sometimes. But in the sixth book of the Analects, Confucius says: “In his heart for three months at a time Yen does not lapse from good will. Others attain good will merely by fits and starts.” So what makes Yen the most favorite disciple is his steadfast achievement of good will, while Tzu-kung is second-favorite because of his steadfast intention to achieve it. Confucius also said, “Yen is no help to me at all. He is pleased with everything I say.” [XI.4] “I can speak to Yen all day without his disagreeing with me in any way. Thus he would seem to be stupid. However, when I take a closer look at what he does in private after he has withdrawn from my presence, I discover that it does, in fact, throw light on what I said. Yen is not stupid after all.” [II.9] Yen is not excellent in speech, but he is excellent in good will. And Confucius himself learns from what he does.

May we, too, become excellent in good will – understanding, creative, redemptive good will that puts us in harmony with the Way of the cosmos and the best strivings of our ancestors. May we set our hearts on the nested creativity of the cosmos, base ourselves on our best gifts, lean upon and cultivate that good will that makes all the difference, and take time to appreciate the self-culture and acheivements in good will of others. So may it be. Amen.