LEARNING TO LIVE WHAT LOVE TEACHES

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

September 9, 2007

READINGS

Words from James Vila Blake, a Unitarian minister who wrote these words in 1894 for the covenant of the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois:

Love is the spirit of this church,
and service is its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love,
and to help one another.

Words from Lewis Lattimer, son of a runaway slave, inventor who perfected the carbon filament lightbulb and founding member of the Unitarian Church of Flushing, New York:

What is there in this world, besides our loves, to keep us here?
Ambition’s course is paved with hopes deferred,
With doubt and fear.
Wealth brings no joy,
And brazen-throated fame
Leaves us at last
Nought but an empty name.
Oh soul, receive the truth,
E’er heaven sends thy recall:
Nought here deserves our thought but love,
For love is all.

SERMON

It was shortly before his death in 1932 that the great chief of the Crow Indian tribe, Plenty Coups, sat down with a white man to tell the story of his life. It was by any measure an eventful life. Born in the 1860s, Plenty Coups had come of age during a time of turmoil: first, the murderous wars among tribes in the Western United States, and, ultimately, his own tribe’s relegation to a reservation occupying a much reduced parcel of land in an area they had laid claim to in western Montana.

Plenty Coups described the nomadic life his tribe had led in his early years in some detail. Yet, when asked about his time on the reservation, a time comprising the last 45 years of his life, the chief demurred. Of those years, he had little to say. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them again. After this, nothing happened.”

Of course it was not as if time had stopped. But it was true that the rhythms of life by which the Crow measured existence had ended. Instead of being nomads, they were relegated to being farmers. And for a culture that measured social standing by the achievements won at war with neighboring tribes, there were no longer any wars to be fought.

And yet, in truth for Plenty Coups much did happen in the years ahead. As the philosopher Jonathan Lear points out, not only did Plenty Coups survive, but he led the Crow people so adeptly that they managed to escape many of the woes of other tribes.

How did he do it? Lear suggests that the Crow chief relied on a strategy he calls “radical hope,” a strategy that paradoxically arose from the chief’s earlier observation that after a certain time, nothing happened.

By radical hope Professor Lear said he means anticipating some future good that we not only don’t understand, but that we can’t even conceive of. In Plenty Coups’ case, the object of his radical hope was existence on the reservation that preserved the integrity of his people. He could not imagine what this would look like, but he was guided in his actions by a hope that had that end in mind.

Now I need to make clear that when Lear describes radical hope, he is not talking about really, really strong hope: a perspective full of sunny bromides that if you hope for something hard enough it will somehow magically come true. Nor is he talking about what is often taken to be conventional religious faith, that if we trust in God we will be taken care of. He is talking about orienting oneself in such a way that even when the world seems to be turned upside down we are able to avoid despair and stay focused on the good.

I chanced on Jonathan Lear’s book, Radical Hope,* this past spring when my attention was occupied with the home meetings that many of you took part in that kicked off our strategic planning process in this congregation. We have embarked on a process of strategic planning at least in part because we are facing some profound questions about who we are and who we want to be as a congregation.

Some of those questions center on practical concerns, such as how will we accommodate the growth in membership that we have experienced in recent years? Much of our space is crowded on Sunday mornings and the growing size and complexity of church programs are demanding more staff. But to respond to these concerns we must also be sure that we have clarity on some deeper questions: What is our vision of ourselves as a congregation? What do we exist for?

These are difficult questions, not least because the way that we respond to them changes over time, as it must. We are a different congregation, living at a different place and time than, for example, when we first organized in 1950, or when we broke ground for this building in the mid-70s. We are linked to those earlier times by core values and traditions, but we are also facing new challenges and new opportunities.

Our times hardly compare in intensity to the turmoil that the Crow people suffered at the end of the 19th century, but with the magnitude of change we are experiencing it’s easy to understand how many people feel that they are losing their moorings. Political and economic uncertainty worldwide leaves many of us feeling that there is little we can be confident about when it comes to our careers and communities. Time pressures splinter our families. Meanwhile, a stagnating war drags on, wealth and income disparities grow, and our warming climate brings haywire weather and warnings of global catastrophe in our lifetimes.

Amidst all this stands religion. We see some believers spiral off into apocalyptic imaginings, be it the Christian Rapture, the Shiite’s expectation of the Twelfth Imam, or, as I read recently, the return of the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl. Others seek comfort at the coffee bars, gospel bands and scripture groups of megachurches. And others still carry on at the cathedrals, churches, synagogues and meetings houses of their childhood, though their number continues to decline.

Many fly outside the radar altogether, uncounted in church surveys, dipping occasionally into established churches, dabbling perhaps in Buddhism, prayer groups, or just the chapel of the green and shady forest path.

In this mix we find ourselves as Unitarian Universalists: inheritors of the liberal way of religion. We have come to this church because we see in this way a path to healing, reconciliation and hope for ourselves and the world. And we recognize that if this way is to endure, even more if it is to deepen and to grow in this world, and more particularly in this corner of Western North Carolina, it will be through us that it does so.

That said, though, we have little guidance in where we are going, or what this church of the future that we are planning for will look like. I want to suggest that like Plenty Coups we are confronted with a situation that demands of us an act of radical hope. Facing a future we cannot know and in some respects have a hard time imagining, the best that we can do is be clear about the vision that drives us and stick with it, trusting that if we do what we need to do, it will take us where we need to go.

This year you’ll have many opportunities to shape the process of vision casting. As an aid to your reflections, I will be offering a series of services throughout the year focused on what I want to suggest could be elements of that vision, answers to the foundational questions before us: who are we, and who do we want to be?

Today as you can see in your order of service I have begun by proposing that a defining characteristic of who we are and hope to be is that we gather in community seeking to learn to live what love teaches. I want to ground what I have to say about this in an idea that we use fairly freely here, and that’s covenant.

If you’re involved in any way in leadership in this church, this is something that you know a bit about because for the last month or so it’s been the focus of much of our work. On our board of trustees, our program council, our social justice council and among church staff we have all spent some time building covenants for our work together.

It is an exercise that is both simple and profound. It begins with a question: What do we need from each other in this group to participate fully? The answer may be as simple as, confidence that everyone will show up and be on time. The discussion often moves on to questions of respect, willingness to share openly and honestly and provisions for how the group will handle conflict. No one dictates the process, no one controls the agenda. The discussion continues until everyone’s ideas are on the table and the group is able to frame in terms acceptable to all what their agreements are.

Those agreements are committed to paper and the words serve to guide the group as long as it continues meeting. Nothing is cast in concrete. The agreements can change, but the covenant endures. About five years ago this congregation went through a similar exercise resulting in a covenant that we read together each time we welcome newcomers into our community. In about a month we’ll be opening enrollment again for our small group ministry program that we call covenant groups, groups of 6 or 8 that gather under a covenant to share ideas, insights and reflections from their spiritual journeys.

So, you see, we as a church have evolved to a place where covenants are woven throughout the fabric of our lives together. There are good, practical reasons for this. For one, covenants are effective. They are not like contracts one is compelled to sign. They are agreements that we join voluntarily. We set their terms, and in so doing we agree to be held accountable to them, knowing all the while that they can be revisited and ultimately changed.

At the same time, the process of our building covenants speaks to something deeper that I think is central to who we are. In the making of covenants we touch the core of what we are about as a religious movement. We enter this church community committing to treat each other as individuals who are inherently worthy, recognizing that we can only be completed in relationship.

There is a longing that accompanies us when we walk in the door, a longing to be taken seriously, to be taken as we are, to leave behind preachments, creeds and catechisms and face up to the deepest questions of our lives in the company of those we can trust to listen and engage us without judgment or preconception.

It can be hard and a little bit scary, but at our core, I believe, there is a discipline that helps us find our way in. We touch it in the making of covenants when we agree to be present to each other as honestly, as faithfully as we can. The more we gather, and the stronger our connections grow. We not only get to know each other better, we touch something deep in ourselves.

I have been struggling to find the right word to describe this and ultimately settled on one: love. Let me be clear: I’m not talking hearts and flowers and sentimentality, but something deeper, something elemental, really. I think of it as that centered part of each of us that we act from when we are our best selves, that most hopeful, positive voice within us, source not only of our passion but also of our strength.

Central to our work as a religious community is to help us each come to know and learn to act from that place, for there resides our native wisdom that for all the doubts that may plague us all life is one, we are kin to all humankind, we are, each of us, worthy and whole.

We exist as a church not merely to teach that insight, but to help each other integrate it into our lives. It requires that we stretch and grow, that we risk encounters that take us beyond our comfort. Along the way our lives become richer and we learn to become more like the people we want to be in every part of our lives.

Elements of this, of course, resonate across religious traditions. The Gospels say Jesus preached of finding the Kingdom of God within, and Buddha taught that we find the source of compassion in our own natures. It is a thread of religious wisdom that we carry forward, embodied in a pluralistic movement that recognizes many ways to tell the human story.

Returning then to my premise that we are presented with a time that demands of us an act of radical hope, I want to argue that this discipline, learning to live what love teaches, is central to who we are and hope to be, that, if we attend to it, it will carry us forward into the future that looms uncertain before us confident that we are on the right path.

It is an element rooted in our past, in a tradition of covenanted churches that date back to our predecessors among the Puritans in the earliest churches of New England, words you could hear resonating in James Vila Burke’s covenant from the 1890s. Yet, it also points us forward to a message of wholeness that we and the world so badly need.

I want to return now to our friend Plenty Coups. Remember the Crow Indian chief from earlier in this sermon? Jonathan Lear writes that throughout his life what the chief cited as the source of the wisdom that helped him lead the tribe in his declining years was a dream he had during an initiation experience when he was 9 years old.

In the dream, Plenty Coups said, he saw the buffalo disappearing from the plains and then a strong storm that blew down all the trees in the forest but one. At this point, Plenty Coups said, a guide in his dream instructed him that the one remaining tree was the dwelling of the Chickadee-person. The Chickadee was a favored image among the Crow people. As the chief’s dream-guide described it, the chickadee “is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom, and he is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears.He never intrudes, yet never misses a chance to learn from others.”

This chief of a warrior people took from this voice rooted deep in his tradition a new wisdom to take what had been a neglected virtue in his tribe, to learn to listen and work for wisdom and place it in the first order. And it is certainly true, Lear tells us, that Plenty Coups’ adeptness at navigating the shoals of his tribe’s interactions with the white man, adopting some practices and discarding others, were crucial to the Crow’s survival, not only helping him anticipate the turmoil to come but also offering a source of hope throughout.

It is our work as well as we turn our eyes to the future to center ourselves on our sources of hope. The turmoil of our own times demands a response, and our tradition has one to give. It is built not on divisions into the saved or the damned, the sheep or the goats. It is built on the wholeness we experience when we live out of our best selves, a source within us calling us to a better way.

We have many wise voices from our tradition calling us to the work before us. To close today I invite you to listen again to the words of one wise to the pain of oppression and also clever in the ways of the world: Lewis Lattimer:

What is there in this world
besides our loves to keep us here?
Ambition’s course is paved with hopes deferred,
with doubt and fear.
Wealth brings no joy,
and brazen-throated fame leaves us at last
nought but an empty name.
Oh soul, receive the truth,
e’er heaven sends thy recall:
Nought here deserves our thought but love,
for love is all.

*Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope, Harvard University Press, 2006