Order of Service, 4/9/2000, Hope Unitarian Church, Tulsa OK

Greetings & Announcements

Sounding the Bell

Prelude

Opening Words

Hymn #1 "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door"

Ritual of Friendship

Chalice Lighting

A Time for All Children: "Inshallah" (a Nasr-din story)

Offering/Response: #379

Foundational Reading: #444

Heritage Reading: #592

Meditation

Sermon: "Humanism Meets Mysticism" Rev. Paul R. Beedle

Hymn #23: "Bring Many Names"

Closing Words

Postlude

SERMON: “Humanism Meets Mysticism”

I've deliberately made you change some of your accustomed habits this morning. I know full well that you're used to singing “From all that dwell below the skies” after the offering, not “Ours be the poems of all tongues.” And I know full well that you're used to sitting there and listening to your Foundational and Heritage readings, not participating in them! Of course, I had you sing “May Nothing Evil Cross This Door” before any of that happened, a little spell of protection. But I made those changes so that you would have a vivid taste of a vital aspect of our liberal faith. In this tradition of religious liberalism, the only constant is change. And change often happens gradually, here and there, in small ways that add up to something bigger. And those small changes take hold when people pay attention, like what they see, and let go of old habits to embrace the change.

How inconvenient to have to pay attention! How we resist letting go, even for a moment, of our accustomed patterns and habits! How does change ever take hold among us? And doesn't having a tradition mean adopting certain habits and patterns? Well, yes it does. But remember Channing's words, that a free mind does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, resists the bondage of habit, does not mechanically copy the past. Though we adopt certain habits, like our practice of lighting a chalice in our worship services, we also innovate – like when we sing new words to old familiar tunes. Now I'm not saying that every worship service must be a tumult of experimentation. But I am saying that no accustomed element or pattern of a worship service is sacrosanct. I am saying that in worship, and indeed in all of our living, we ought to be mindful of our habits, critical of them, and know why we are following them.

I might have had you sing another set of words after the offering, also found in our hymnal: “since what we choose is what we are, and what we love we yet shall be, the goal may ever shine afar – the will to win it makes us free.” We can choose our habits, and ought to choose them, because what we choose is what we are. And what we love, we yet shall be. Emerson wrote: “A person will worship something – have no doubt about that. ... That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. ... for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” (That's in the hymnal, too. Emerson. Check the index of authors in the back.) What we are worshipping we are becoming; what we love we yet shall be. That's the whole point of a liberal faith. To be mindful, attentive, critical about our habits – to know what we love and what we are doing, and why.

The whole point of Unitarian Christianity in Channing's day was to get back to the essentials of Christianity – Jesus's essential message, teachings, and example. Unitarians, like the Puritans before them – and very much in the Puritan tradition, actually – wanted to practice Christian principles, not repeat Church dogmas. That's why we are a creedless faith – that, too, is our heritage from the Puritans: we are not bound by a creed, but by a promise or covenant to seek the holy together in the spirit of love. Because what we choose is what we are, and what we love we yet shall be. And we need each other – our diverse points of view, our diverse experiences, and our common humanity and love and good will – to get to the essentials, to seek the holy, to find truth and meaning and growth and belonging, wholeness and wholesomeness. “The goal may ever shine afar – the will to win it makes us free.”

The great historian of our Unitarian heritage, Earl Morse Wilbur, wrote of unitarianism that “its primary psychological character is ... best described in terms not of the intellect or of the emotions, but of the will.” Channing spoke of “the free mind”: we hear the word mind, and we think of intellect. But mind is larger than intellect, it takes in the emotions, and has a purpose: a will. Channing said that the free mind passes life hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness, rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions, offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of humankind. “Deeds, not creeds” is one of our more modern slogans. Whatever the free mind might think, its purpose is to get to the essentials; and the tool and test of the essential is what we do with it, how it translates into action and how that action bears fruit, what new seeds it holds within.

The seed of mystic seeking is the perennial of our liberal faith. It grows where love and freedom nurture it. It sends its shoots toward the light of reason, it strikes its roots deep into longing and feeling. Each long season it blossoms anew: as essential Christianity, as Transcendentalist nature mysticism, as evolutionist natural theology, as religious humanism, as a quest for the essentials of all world religions – from Channing to Emerson to Darwin to Dewey to Ken Patton, generation after generation, it has flowered and borne fruit and reseeded itself again. Today we are in an early spring: the flower of humanism has borne its fruit and gone to seed, and new shoots are rising toward the light, new roots are taking hold.

Ken Patton, whose work I have used extensively in this service, is lionized by many UU humanists as their inspiration and guiding star. Patton did not call himself a humanist. He called himself a naturalistic mystic. One of his first books, Man's Hidden Search, (1954) was pure mysticism in a humanist inflection. “The hidden search,” he said, “is the search of becoming. Since we are seeking for that which we would become, and since what we would become does not yet exist except in our searching for it, even when we are acquainted with the search in its fullness we will possess it only as an ideal, as something wished for and striven toward, not as an accomplished fact.” Patton's method of exposition in this book is all metaphor – his method is that of mystics in all traditions, because a mystic is after a truth that defies description through rational exposition. The humanist inflection is seen in the content of those metaphors – he draws images from nature and science and psychology, images that conform to modern scientific understanding but point to something beyond mere fact or measurement, toward meaning and wisdom and a reality of our experience that can be called transcendent, a reality describable only indirectly, through symbols and stories. In one passage, for example, Patton writes:

If we would liken our lives to a tree, our roots are the past, suckling upon the dark, strong compost of history and memory. The trunk and the branches are today, breathing and bearing the wind. The growing tips of the branches, the unfolding leaves, these are our becoming, brushing and stirring against tomorrow. The search is nurtured in every rootlet in the deep ground, upheld by every cell in the woody trunk, but its exploring and luring hunger breaks open in the twigs and leaves. Here are the taste-buds in the tongue of our curiosity; these are the vine's feelers into the future. The sap of our whole vitality runs everywhere in our being, but its purpose is to feed the latest outposts of growth, the reaching out of its own life. Here the tree is alive and aware as in none other of its cells. The old cells have already accomplished their mission, their being, and they live now to be the feeders and sustainers of the questing cells on the frontiers of the tree's progress. (MHS, p. 2)

You might remember that our old hymnal had a tree on the cover: Ken Patton was chair of the hymnbook commission that produced it.

What Ken Patton said almost 50 years ago in that passage is an echo of what Theodore Parker said over 100 years before that, in his landmark sermon, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” As was then still customary for us, Parker took a biblical text as the starting point for his sermon: Luke, chapter 21, verse 33 – “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” The context of this verse is an extended passage in Luke's gospel where Jesus instructs his followers about the end-times. “And he told them a parable: `Look at the fig tree, and all the trees; as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near. So also, ... you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all has taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

And here is what Parker said: “Christ says, his Word shall never pass away. Yet at first sight nothing seems more fleeting than a word. ... It leaves no track where it went through the air. Yet to this, and this only, did Jesus entrust the truth ... for the salvation of the world. He took no pains to perpetuate his thoughts; ... He only bids his friends give freely the truth they had freely received. He did not even write his words in a book. With a noble confidence, ... he scattered them broad-cast on the world, leaving the seed to its own vitality. ... Through centuries of wasting, these words have flown on ... The old heavens and the old earth are indeed passed away, but the Word stands. Nothing shows clearer than this, how fleeting is what man calls great; how lasting what God pronounces true.”

It is all the same as what Ken Patton said, from the image of the tree to the truth of our own becoming. It only relies upon a different content – the gospel passage, and the facts of science and history then known – to bring its message home. In Patton's hand, in Parker's hand, in Jesus's hand, the mystic message is the same. The views and understandings that we cling to, all will be turned under again, as compost for a new springtime. The fruit which nourishes us when ripe, nourishes the new growth when it rots. And the new fruit to come possesses the savor and sweetness of the old in its new, fresh ripeness.

Humanism – sprung, grown, flowered, fruited, and now gone to seed – is the soil that faith grows in today. Humanism – victorious – is now the common ground of religious life. It is the mainstream of religious thought. Just as Calvinist Christianity set the religious agenda in Channing's day, humanism has set it today. Make no mistake: even Pat Robertson is addressing himself – with palpable desperation – to the questions posed by humanism. The ideas contained in the Humanist Manifesto of the 1930s – that the universe is self-existing, that we are part of nature and emerged from it as part of a continuous creative process, that nothing human is alien to religion, that nothing supernatural guarantees human values, that human growth and wholeness and social justness and wholesomeness are the purposes of religion, and that our economic life should be part of practicing our faith – these humanist ideas now define religious seeking and interfaith dialogue. They are the trunk of the tree. New leaves are unfurling. Deeper roots are being struck. The mystic search for truth and the holy, is the principle of their growth.

In this new age of globalization – freer communication and closer contact between cultures through the internet and expanding trade – in our changing world, Ken Patton's vision offers us hope, and his old poem offers a guide:

Ours be the poems of all tongues, all things of loveliness and worth.

All arts, all ages, and all songs, one life, one beauty on the earth.

So, think globally, and act locally. What is a church? Patton says it is a house is for the ingathering of nature and human nature, a house of friendships, a haven in trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggle, a house of truth-seeking that offers a platform for the free voice, where scientists and mystics can abide together, a house of art and prophecy, a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor. A church is all of this, and more. A church is a countercultural institution whose mission is to transform the world. A church is a countercultural institution whose mission is to transform the world. How else are heaven and earth going to pass away? But faith will not pass away, hope will not pass away, love will not pass away, so long as our church is a cradle for our dreams and the workshop of our common endeavor – a place where we are mindful, attentive, critical, and ever striving-in-love to be more whole and live more wholesomely. So long as we kindle our flame.

The mystic quest at the growing edge of life, our own becoming and our seeking after truths we can only describe in symbols and stories – this is our common quest, the call of our living tradition of religious liberalism. We reach together toward the transcendent, toward the part of our experience which defies rational description, yet leads us to higher and deeper truth, higher and deeper values, and better, more wholesome and harmonious living. Let us be mindful, attentive, and dedicated to this, the quest and promise that binds us in beloved community and carries on our great faith tradition. And let us seek the holy together. So may it be. Amen.