Shifting Ground:

Moving Beyond Geologic Time in Unitarian Universalism

A sermon offered at The Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Reading

From the sermon: FROM THE FUTURE COMES A CRY

By Rev. A. Powell Davies, D.D.
Minister, All Soul's Church (Unitarian)

December 30, 1945

This year, however, events have so exceeded all previous lengths and breadths of computation that the scale of reckoning itself has been eclipsed.  Nowhere within the period known as history can we find a reference point coordinate with our present situation.  We have to go beyond historic time to what we only know through myth and folklore: the pains and perils of the dawn of human consciousness, the fabled threat of universal flood and other prophesies of dissolution; or, as most of the commentators seem to prefer, to the audacious moment when man first began to subdue to his own uses the furious majesty of fire.
But even when we have considered both history and the prehistoric, there was never a time quite like this.  We ourselves are not contemplating events which might be brought about by gods or demons; we are not thinking in terms of earthquakes, floods or natural calamities; we are not even reflecting upon the ultimate exhaustion of the earth we live upon, as scientists have sometimes done, or upon its destruction through some cosmic accident; we are not thinking at all of something which might happen to us, but of something which we ourselves might cause to happen.  Now we wonder how we ourselves can cope with overwhelming problems, with dangers close at hand. 
 
Yet, as the most eventful year in history passes, we who have lived through that year are filled with fears.  What are we afraid of?  We can answer the question in a single word: ourselves.  Not of natural forces, uncontrollable or hostile to us.  Not of gods and supernatural beings.  We are not even, in the last analysis, afraid of other men, other kinds of men.  We know at last how very much all other men are like us.  We are not afraid of their acting as we, ourselves, could never act.  We are afraid that they may do just exactly what we might do in provoking circumstances, or when we are irresponsible, prejudiced, greedy, stupid, stubborn, or impelled by our lower motives away from our best and towards our worst.  Will human nature prove sufficient to the opportunities and dangers of this new age?  
 Yet, I shall not be surprised if we grow more hopeful.  It is not impossible, that we shall transcend our mediocrity, our narrow vision, our cowardly habits and indulgences, and meet each crisis as it comes, if not triumphantly then earnestly and bravely. 
Human life itself has reached a crisis.  The present culmination was predictable.  Anyone who cannot grasp the larger truth of what the present crisis means--the truth that man is required to raise the level of his life to the point of actual transformation--will prove incapable of understanding the situation of which he is a part.  To people accustomed to truth dispensed in retail sizes, it will seem too wholesale to be credible. All older, easier ways of life are ending.  It will be a higher humanity than our own which will inherit that future: it will be and it should be.  We are too full of prejudice, of blindness, of greed, of hate and superstition--yet we can prepare the way.  To survive, we must.  To that level we must rise.
For "from the future comes a cry"--a cry of challenge, a cry of entreaty.  It is what we aim towards that gives our lives their meaning.  Evolution is not the blind pushing of life forward so much as the purposive pulling of it onward.  There is no interpretation of life at all except as growth; and growth can only be explained in terms of what it moves towards.  The refusal of a fuller human stature when the moment which requires it has arrived is an invitation to death.  We must begin to be altogether human, building a fully human world, or return--as to ourselves--self-defeated and unfulfilled, to the dust from which we came.  "From the future comes a cry."
Let no one suppose that this is a time to lose or lessen faith.  It is a time to lose worthless creeds.  The greater truths remain more true than ever.  Yes, and faith is not, as some have said, a meager candle in the dark, but a thousand, thousand torches.
It was for times like these and faith like this that humanity was made: we with our fears and doubts, insufficiencies and contradictions; with our loves and hates, joys and pain; we that have never been altogether human -- but shall be.  For "the spirit in the life" is in us.
 

Sermon

Some years ago, I packed my things and drove north from Georgia to Chicago.  I remember that first night, with Maeve, in the back in her car seat sleeping.  At some point the quiet and dark crept up on me.  I wasn’t sure where the next exit was to spend the night and I wondered where I was really headed.  What was Unitarian Universalism anyway, that I should give my life to it, what would I discover at school about this religion – would there really be a there – there?  What was it all really about – all this unity in diverse belief, all this – religion?  It did not take me long to find many answers – answers which outnumbered questions, answers which prompted further questions.  And yet, I still want the question asked again and again – what are we about, what are we about that we should hang a sign outside claiming to be descendants of a great tradition?  

It is in this spirit that I welcome you this morning.  Thank you for rising on this Sunday morning and choosing this place for your sacred hour out of ordinary time.  Some of you may be here for the first time and wondering what this church is all about.  Some of you may have been coming for months or for years and wondering what this church is all about.  You may be sitting with a sense, an opinion, a growing awareness of the meaning of this place and this faith -- Today I want us to delve deeper than our simple questions or answers and even beyond the hard-won and carefully reasoned answers.

Today I am calling the question.  Because we, this congregation, is in a great transition -- making ready to break ground for a new building. Because this transition demands so much of us and we ought to know why we are giving it -- why we should build for the future.  Because this is world at risk and we must know if our risk is worthy, if we are truly building toward the future or if we are attempting to set in stone -- or more likely concrete -- some vestige or even a paean to the past.  I am calling the question because there is something holy and vital here, in this place, in this Unitarian Universalism.

I am calling the question -- because it is being called all around us by history and we carry, indeed, precious answers.  I am calling the question because we should be calling the question every time we gather -- what is the meaning of our meeting -- what is purpose, for what do we hope, by what are we drawn, by what are we commanded. 

However, I am not going name any answers today -- I only hope to name the ground upon which to ask.  I hope to come closer next week, but I know that everyone of you -- I hope that every one of you -- in reason, in love, in wisdom, by experience, and in hope will be asking and answering, yourselves, working in the expanses of your hearts and minds.  Our venture will require nothing less. 

It’s often easier to say what we are not -- to describe ourselves by what you won't find here -- the negative is secure, concrete, permanent, clear -- I can surely say some of what I am not, what I have left behind -- but to say what I am, what we are is like trying to hold water in your palms.  So too often we simply affirm what we like, what seems safe, general and yet is an insufficient reason for coming here or calling this a church -- if we were simply here to enjoy one another's company and have coffee -- as even we sometimes jest -- we might as well change our name from church to club.

So, welcome this Sunday -- to our small but powerful faith with a long and powerful history -- and a catalogue of great names and leaders to look back toward.  Sometimes this past and those names make me feel more secure -- when people make foolish light of our small religion -- from Garrison Keillor to the Simpsons -- to the man or woman on the street, at the local gym, on the phone -- "Isn't that the church where you can believe anything?" or "I've heard that Unitarian Universalism is a non-prophet religion." 

In truth, my reasoned faith is not so easily shaken -- I have searched my soul for too long and I have studied too many other religions.  I hear in these questions and quips our nearly universal human insecurity about the whole religious venture. 

Organized religion has taken some serious blows from modernity and then again from post-modernity—the ground shifted and shifted again.  Science bumped religion up against evolution and reason and the ancient religious stories, which had been variously sacrosanct paled and wavered.  An the stories of the world’s religions bumped up against each other causing each one to both brighten a little and pale a little.  At college Joseph Cambpell came to speak to us about myth—about religion as empowering myth and even about our individual lives as made of myths which can—with the power of Gods—create, or destroy. 

The ground beneath us has shifted—we have charted the shifts, sometimes we have been the agents of those shifts, often we have shifted with the ground—resetting with joy and discovery.  At times we, too, have been shaken by those seismic shocks. 

We have not escaped the challenges of our times.  There have been Four Great Awakenings and we have responded to each one, tempered each one, brought reason into the equation and emerged, ourselves, with the best.  Yet, we have sometimes fallen short of the cry of history – because we have been subject to many of the same pulls, pressures, and erosions, which have faced other religions. 

As Unitarians and Universalists, we optimistically claimed that humanity was inherently god-like and worthy:  the Universalist assertion was of the supreme value of every human personality.  And the Unitarians also championed the human spirit – without denying our shortcomings.  As the Reverend William Ellery Channing said in 1828: “I do and I must reverence human nature.  Neither the sneers of a worldly skepticism, nor the groans of a gloomy theology, disturb my faith in its godlike powers and tendencies.  I know its history.  I shut my eyes on none of its weaknesses and crimes.  But, injured, trampled on, and scorned as our nature is, I still turn to it with intense sympathy and strong hope.”

The Enlightenment made us think-feel free and hopeful.  Revolutions toppled autocracies (or so we thought), ended slavery (or so we thought).  It was looking good when our Ben Franklin harnessed electricity and others created great new gadgets to run on its power.  It was looking pretty good when as my colleague David Bumbaugh says, it turned out that Jonas Salk was, perhaps, a little brighter than God.  Humans were on the yellow brick road to enlightenment and the wizard was just an ordinary man from the Midwest. 

But it ceased to look so good for either God or humanity as our struggles failed to vanish, our reconstructions and revolutions were complex and often disappointing.  It ceased to look so good for either God or humanity when the 1st World War sent back its staggering death tolls and accounts of brutality -- when the recognized evil on both sides of WWII was revealed in the death camps and the dropping of the bomb.  When ideas turned into new Gods in Totalitarian systems such as fascism and Stalinism and trampled human lives.  Clearly God was on no ones side and it just might be that the road to good was always paved with hell.

By the end of WWII both God and humanity had taken a beating.  We were sobered and the day of reckoning had arrived.  The world was in our hands and our hands were shaking.  Although the greatest leaders of the 20^th century  had been religious -- in the persons of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King—the secure spires of the church seemed delicate as sugar icing. 

Of course, I am painting in broad strokes that overlook our finest accomplishments —but every human creation requires keen attention and care, require a constant vigilance to maintain.  Freedom is more of a verb than a place at which we arrive.  Democracy, as the bumper sticker says, is not what we have it’s what we do.

Perhaps to dull the pain of these sobering 20^th Century revelations, over Americans came a wave of intense consumerism.  New labor saving devices and expensive gadgets pulled us in and the lord of television kept us all home, losing sight of our common spaces—even of our churches.  I recall counting it a blessing when, in my childhood, I learned that church attendance was at an all time low.  For a while, Unitarian Universalist churches experienced a blip of growth based on an identity as the un-church – just like the 7Up the Un-cola.  Still the cult of consumerism, the death of the commons, and the supremacy of the individual grew in strength. 

And there came to pass—on multiple levels -- the death of authority.  Churches, including our own, experienced this death on many fronts.  The loss of authority of the stories—of the history of the tradition.  Churches, even our own, were no longer shored up by meaningful stories—either of the glory or of the falleness of creation.  Non-prophet, non-poetic, non-storied. 

The clergy were no longer the bearers of the prophetic voice.  The very notion of authority faltered—and became—to paraphrase my colleague David again—“well, here’s my limited opinion, from my shrunken vantage point, in my historically blinkered perspective”.  I invite you to consider authority not as in authority figures – but in terms of the authority of a life, of wisdom, of connection through history – the authors of a life of vision in the world. 

And this worsened as the cult of consumerism gained in strength and power.  In a world of ceaseless work to maintain and purchase new and better fruits of our ceaseless labors, leisure time has become a key industry.  The worship experience became another choice for leisure time.  It became a time for socializing rather than for the building of what Victor Turner called Communitas—or what MLK, Jr called the beloved community.  How deep do we delve? Do we challenge ourselves or only superficially soothe one another’s ruffled feathers.  Worship—worth schippen—the shaping of that which is of worth, cannot be shallow. How deeply are we each willing to put our hands in the common clay and our common spiritual life and shape it?  And pass it through the real fires of our mind to fashion something which can, as Kim Harden used this metaphor months ago, something which can hold something life giving.  Can we take ourselves seriously without becoming carved in stone?

If worship time is just another leisure time activity the professional religious leaders cannot proclaim or declaim —only talk.  There is no claim, only the management of leisure time activity.  The creation of time set apart for the cultivation of the soul is made superficial, simple, and of course, short enough to get on to other leisure activities. 

So the authority of the tradition is weakened—the line from which we come as professional clergy is weakened.  And this results in the lay people—the people in the pews or chairs—becoming a mere social group, a group of consumers and critics. The authority of what James Luther Adams Unitarian Universalist theologian called the Prophethood of All Believers—is reduced to a gathering of those who opine and privately, when they have time, do good without sharing our good news.

Of course, we are—and wisely—reacting to the Fourth Great Awakening, that began in the 60s.  We are responding to the easy-answer fundamentalisms that attacked the spirit of the Enlightenment.  We -- Unitarian Universalists will never choose the graven answer, the final solution, the story unable to stand in the light of reason.  When we refer to fundamentals we most often mean the periodic table of elements. 

But we too are distracted from the serious business at hand.  In 1945 Rev. A. Powell Davies of the UU Church of All Souls in Washington, DC preached  “From the future comes a cry…” We are that future.  This church is stretched by the challenge to cease crying and answer.  And the challenge is hard and it is easy to be tricked by the superficial answers and formulas.

I proclaim – we are not just a church façade where those who disbelieve stories ABCDorE can hide on Sunday morning.  What faces us now is not served by formulations such as the conflict between Theist and Humanists, between Puritan patterns of worship versus the re-emergence of enthusiasm, between science or faith in an ancient mythic story, between one generation and another, between an informal religion of consensus and a religion of democracy. These formulations do not serve us because none of these things mean what they once meant – for example -- the theists here are not the theists we once decried – their God or their Gods are new and different and evolving and the humanists have, by science, grown to embrace a fuller cosmos of being.  And our science is beyond simple reckoning…But, let me leave some for next week…These formulations do not serve us because they distract us from the real challenge that faces us now – that of affirming our deep story – not story, as in fiction, but story as in history, understanding, vision, revelation.  Let nothing distract us.

We have faced the same challenges and deconstructions that all religions have faced – in part because of our very role in the American Project, in part because we, too, are knee to knee with all other religions.  We have faced those deconstructions but we have chosen this seat.  And we are greater than all of that.  We are not the Church of the Lowest Common Denominator but of the highest. 

Hidden in our very core is our answer – in the deep, velvet folds of our principles, purposes and living tradition.  Not graven nor final – but dancing and alive in a balance between science and story, process and experience, knowing, and intuiting.  If we are too distracted by the superficial formulations waved before us we will never get down into those folds and find our true and current ground.  And we, too hear cries as solemn as those heard in 1945. 

Yes, our ground has shifted – it always has and ever will – that is why we are principled and yet creedless.  Let us not be distracted, but delve deep for meaning and worth. 

My friend David also says that the sermon is not over when the words are done – but that every hearer writes it and works it further through his or her life.  We are the teachers for whom Emerson called.  Therefore, I await your reflection, your response, your work, your expanding revelation.  Empower your church by attending our congregational meeting today and the growth workshop in a few weeks.  Take these thoughts and live with them and return next week to carry them further.  Call the question within yourself – ask yourself about the heart of our Unitarian Universalism.

There is something holy and vital here in this place and in Unitarian Universalism.  History prays that we shape something redeeming of our broken world, the present and future cry out for us to build, not only edifices, but to build the ongoing revelation of our faith and the foundation of a just world.  It is worth our every risk.  We need only begin here, where a powerful story lives and breathes – in our principles and purposes and our living tradition -- you.  The answers to the prayers of history and the cries of the future live in your minds and hearts and hands and are working through your lives – like the journeywork of the stars, of hope, and the promise of deep Spring.