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Sermon Index

Bread for the Journey

by the Reverend Dr. Rebecca Parker
at the Starr King School for the Ministry
on the 7th of May 2000
Union Sunday

There are moments when we can feel the abundance of life. How good it is to be gathered together here on a spring Sunday, a new century opening before us, and a rich heritage of faith behind us.

Let us give thanks for the spirit of life at work in all of us ¾ the power that can rejoice, and work, and persevere in hope, the spirit who has been with each of us from before we were born, whose mystery is beyond us, but whose tangible presence is sometimes felt in those "transcending moments of mystery and wonder." The spirit of life ¾ in whom we live and move and have our being, the power greater than ourselves on which we can depend and whose work within us leads us on the pathways to abundant life, provides us with bread for the journey, and accompanies us on the river crossings that carry us over the chilly waters into the promised life of sustenance,
and community, free from the yokes that would oppress us, and called forth into a covenant of justice and compassion for all people.

Unitarian Universalists begin a new century as a pilgrim people, with an evolving faith. This morningm I want to suggest that there is bread for our journey, bread to carry with us, from our past. This bread is needed, not only by us, but by our society, in which we are called to minister.

A story:

A few years ago, in the Fireside room of Starr King School for the Ministry, students and faculty were gathered for an evening conversation. The topic was worship in the free church tradition.

We began calmly enough, but before long, ideas and opinions were popping and sizzling as hotly as the fire sending its sparks up the chimney, and out into the cool night air.

What would it take for worship in our Unitarian Universalist congregations to bring us together beyond our individualism and personal preferences, embracing the diversity of who we were, while not being a superficial hodgepodge?

"Well," one said, " we cant do it by relying on scripture and the liturgical year, like the Christians do."

"But," another said, "we cant abolish all religious language and tradition!"

Then another, "Wait! I became a Unitarian Universalist to get away from Christianity. I dont want to come to worship and hear the Bible read. Christianity is patriarchal and oppressive. Im so glad we are beyond that."

Ive spent much of my life as a feminist, critiquing Christian theology, but in that moment, I couldnt sit still. I jumped into the fray, with some heat of my own. I asked:

"Are we really beyond Christianity? Do we want to be?

Are we finished with what it has to teach us?"

Love God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength and your neighbor as yourself.

Been there, done that?

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream.

Check that one off our "to do" list.

Welcome the homeless, feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned.

Last years news?

Consider the lilies of the field.
They toil not neither do they spin.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

No time for that, theres a sale on at Nordstroms.

Today, in celebration of the Baltimore Sermon, preached in this pulpit by William Ellery Channing, I want to remind you that there is a Christian path open to us in Unitarian Universalism that is worth remembering and following.

Unitarian Universalism emerged from a set of struggles within Christianity that confronted the limits of Christian theology and brought into being a different kind of Christianity.

I do not believe this struggle is over in the American context.

Many of us find it easy to vilify the Christian right. We are not comfortable with what often appears, especially in the media, to be an authoritarian, obedience-centered religion, intent upon preserving a social order that keeps men as the heads of their households, relegates women to submission, outlaws sexual expression outside a divinely sanctioned heterosexual norm, and maintains control through Bible-pounding literalism and the rejection of intellectual inquiry as a religious path.

Most of all, we cringe at the image of the cross as a sign that God saves the world through a violent act of child sacrifice that expiates our sin, and for which we should be grateful.

Those of us who encountered these forms of Christianity and rebelled from them take refuge in a religious identity that is decidedly non-Christian, that has just said No to Jesus as personal Lord and savior. But Christianity cannot be dismissed solely on the basis of the forms it has taken in our experience, or that are grabbing the media attention in our time.

From its beginnings, 2000 years ago, Christianity has spoken in multiple voices. It is perhaps more appropriate to speak of Christianties than of Christianity. The Unitarians and the Universalists who are our 19th century forbears forged a different kind of Christianity than the Christianity that currently dominates the scene.They forged a kind of Christianity that I believe is worth remembering and amplifying.

Let me expand on three things from our past that can provide us with bread for the journey as we seek a more abundant future for ourselves and for our world.

How Unitarian Universalist Christianity

  • views human beings,
  • views Jesus, and
  • views salvation.
First, human beings.

In the early 19th century, William Ellery Channing articulated it this way: Every human being is born with a rich array of capacities. These include the power of the senses to reveal the world through sight sound taste and touch, the power of the emotions, to feel bonds of affection and connection, or to be outraged at injustice, and joyful in the presence of grace. The power of the mind to reason, the power of conscience to discern what is good, the power of imagination to create the power of memory, of action, the power to enjoy beauty, to aspire to abundant life.

These powers, Channing said, in their entirety reflect the way we are created in the image of God. The divine in us is not to be identified with some isolated faculty of the soul ¾ such as our reason or our moral conscience. The divine is in every fiber of our being, every aspect of who we are. Its as if our being were a box of crayons, one of those with 64 colors. All 64 colors are the image of God in us, and we get to color with them all.

Channings view is in sharp contrast to the Calvinst idea that we are born sinners. It also counters the common idea that our inner being is a war between that which is good in us (such as our reason and our moral conscience) and that which is bad in us (such as our desires and sensual pleasures).

No, Channing said, our whole being is good, our whole array of capacities is good, and the purpose of life is to unfold all our powers.

Channing wrote,

What is the end and essence of life?
It is to expand all our faculties and affections.
It is to grow, to gain by exercise new energy,
new intellect, new love
It is to hope, to strive, to bring out what is within us ...
It is to be free."

In the unfolding and full expression of all our powers, Channing said, we grow in likeness to God; we become the unfolding of divine presence in the world. Every person, then, is an incarnation of the divine. And every life gives glory to God by the full exercise of its creativity and power.

Ireneaus, Christian theologian, said it in the second century: The glory of God is a human being fully alive. And Universalist, Ken Patton, in the 20th century: Let us worship with our eyes and ears and fingertips, with the full outstretching of our spirits.

The Unitarian Universalist way of being Christian baptizes every human being in the waters of divine presence, with the words of blessing:

You are good, you are sacred, you are holy. Every particle of your being, every aspect of yourself reflects the presence of the infinite in you. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you"

We are called to unfold this power.

To be who we are: beings of infinite worth, fearfully and wonderfully made.

Two: Jesus.

The Unitarian Universalist way of being Christian does not look to Jesus as a being different from all the rest of us. Emerson said it best:

Jesus Christ belongs to the true race of prophets.
He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul.
Drawn by its severe harmony,
ravished with its beauty,
he lived in it,
and had his being there.
Alone in all history, he estimated
the greatness of [human beings]...
One man was true to what is in you and me."

One person was true to what is in all of us ¾ the capacity to be fully alive, all our powers engaged, and in this full aliveness to incarnate the presence of the divine.

"I came that they might have life and life in abundance," Jesus said.

This view sees Jesus as one whose life shows us what our life can be. His uniqueness ends there.

We can see that many human beings have shown us the face of God in their faces, the love of God in their love, the mercy of God in their mercy, the creativity of God in their imaginativeness and boldness.

Rita Nakashima Brock captures this broader embrace in an image for Jesus in her book Journeys by Heart. She writes:

The power that gives and sustains life does not flow from
a dead and resurrected savior to his followers...
No one person or groups exclusively reveals it or incarnates it.
In thinking that a single person, a savior,
or even one group can save us,
we mistake the crest of a wave for the vast sea churning beneath it.
Jesus is like the whitecap on a wave.
The whitecap is momentarily set off from the swell
that is pushing it up, making us notice it.
But the visibility of the whitecap, which draws our attention ,
rests on the enormous pushing power of the sea.

This enormous pushing power of the sea is the power of life that is in all of us, buoying us up, pushing us like a mother in labor to bring to birth the power that is in us ¾ to live to the full. What can suppress the power of the moving sea flowing in our lives, the river of blessing coursing through all the faculties of our soul?

The answer to this question is plenty.

There is plenty that can oppress and suppress the full outstretching of human spirits, and the full unfolding of that which is within us. And this brings us to the question of salvation.

Three: Salvation.

Religion cannot end with celebrative affirmations of our goodness. We have to face the violence of the world and recognize the forces, social and personal, that deny the goodness of life and have the power to sever human beings from knowledge of our sacred worth ¾ or the power to destroy the fragile ecosystems that support life on earth.

Experiences of violence, such as rape, or physical battering, economic exploitation, or emotional neglect, can break our hearts and our spirit. Loss and grief can numb us with sorrow that dams the flow of life with bitterness and anger. The press of our materialistic culture, where the marketplace operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, can drain our souls of sensitivity and joy: The repeated message ¾ implicit in our economic system ¾ that to be a human being is to be a self-interested consumer, or a cog in the machinery of production, can alienate us from a fuller knowledge of ourselves.

Channing saw this even in the 19th century, when he wrote:

I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work and then to fall to pieces at death; ... a [human being] cannot without infinite wrong be converted into a mere instrument of others gratifications. He is necessarily an end, not a means.

Much of our daily life does not embody a sacred regard for ourselves or for others. In addition, we live in a culture that has justified the use and abuse of human beings through social systems that privilege some and require others to be of service. Racism and sexism continue to be embodied in social patterns of economic inequality, and our materialism is distressing earths ecosystems, putting the unfolding of all life at risk.

How can life be renewed, restored ¾saved ¾ given these realities?

Christianity is concerned with just this question ¾and this is one of the reasons we cannot blithely dismiss Christianity. The classic answer in Christian theology is that salvation comes through the death of Christ on the cross. The doctrine of the atonement theology says that by dying on the cross, Jesus saved the world. His violent crucifixion served as an expiation for human sin, setting us all free from the punishment of God. This theology says that there is no greater love than the willingness to bear the punishment that someone else deserves. Sadly, it has often been used to justify or sanction violence ¾such as the physical battering of children or slavery. But not all of Christian theology has taken this path. Not every Christian has believed that salvation comes through the death of Jesus on the cross. The Universalists moved away from the notion of Jesus death as a saving sacrifice. As early as 1805 Universalist Hosea Ballou wrote:

The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than ... the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries. The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world. All those principles which are to be dreaded by men, have been believed to exist in God, and professors have been moulded into the image of their Diety, and become more cruel than them..."

There is an alternate doctrine of salvation. It does not say we are saved by Jesus death on the cross ¾ It says we are saved by the actions of love and mercy through which the consequences of human violence and sin can be healed and transformed, and by which violence itself can be confronted and resisted. This vision of Christianity is needed now more than ever. Contemporary scholarship on the historical Jesus makes this path visible as an alternative Christian way:

Jesus lived in a situation of violence. The Roman Empire occupied Palestine, and its strategies of economic exploitation were designed to extract as much as possible out of the peasants, without completely destroying them. Heavy taxation led to indebtedness that led to the loss of ownership of the land. A new class of poor and dispossessed emerged. Military occupation presented a constant reminder that movements of resistance and protest would be violently suppressed. During Jesus childhood, a non-violent protest by Jews who opposed the incursions of Roman Empire into the operations of the Jerusalem temple resulted in a mass crucifixion of Jewish religious leaders by the Romans. It was in this context that Jesus lived and worked: His life and ministry were directed to a people sore oppressed, for whom abundant life was not in easy reach.

He counseled people to care for one another.

He performed healings and exorcisms in which human beings were restored to wholeness.

He called people to recognize who their neighbors were and to not let top-down violence erupt in lateral violence.

He embodied a practice of radical solidarity resisting the divisions that come in human relations because of the force of exploitive systems.

He went to Jerusalem to confront the Roman occupiers.

The powers that be arrested him and publicly executed him ¾ with a form of torture reserved for enemies of the state and runaway slaves: crucifixion.

The community of disciples grieved but they did not forget him. They remembered his teaching, and experienced the power of presence that even violence cannot sever.

How is it that abundant life can be claimed and unfolded in a world that crushes souls?

Jesus ministry was not fulfilled by becoming a sacrifice to appease the wrath of God. Jesus was killed by those who said, "We have no God but Caesar." But he did not die a passive victim.

He was advocating a different way, a warrior of the spirit for another path.

This path is still before us. It does not counter violence with violence, but seeks instead to stop violence by counteracting it with soul-force, with the power of our faithful presence to one another, with our refusal to have our ties of community be severed, and with our refusal to let the forces of oppression and violence finally define us.

Here is a story that speaks to the alternative ¾ that life is restored, not by sacrificial offerings, but by the acts of love that in quietness and strength, renew and reconnect us to the sacred wellsprings of being. We can learn to feel the sacred presence of one another again and know the sacred worth of ourselves even when violence has severed our ties to each other or silenced and fractured our own beings.

At the end of World War II, Lyle Grunkenmeir came home to Iowa. In the small town he'd left to go to the Western front, his mother and sisters waited for his return. The day he came home ¾the only veteran to return alive to that town ¾everyone came out to meet him. As the train pulled into the station, the band played. The mayor was there to greet him. But, as his sister later told me, the man who climbed off the train was not the lively,and cheerful boy who left for war. The man who climbed off was a ghost. He didn't register recognition of any one mother, sister, or friend. In response to the crowd's rousing welcome, he stared mutely. Blank.

His family took him home to the farm. He sat in the old rocking chair in the parlor. He did not speak, or move, and would barely eat. He continued in this state for days that spilled into weeks that went on into months. No one in this town knew about traumatic shock. They only knew that Lyle's soul was lost somewhere. His sister, Maxine, decided to stay by him.Whenever she could, she would come and sit with him. And she would talk. She'd tell him about the church potluck, who was there, what they ate, what each young woman wore. She'd tell him about the conversation she'd overheard at the store in town, and how high the crops were. She told him how the wind, that day, had blown the clean laundry into the tomatoes. When she ran out of things to say, she would just sit with him, snapping beans, mending socks.

And he sat there, silent, like a stone. Rocking.

Then one night, while Maxine was sitting quietly with him, knitting, the eyes in Lyle's stone face filled with tears, and the tears spilled over, and ran down his frozen face.

Maxine saw. She went to her brother and put her arms around him. He began to cry full force ¾great sobs of anguish and a bellowing from deep inside him. Then he began to talk, and he would not stop. He talked of the cold, the fear, the noise, the deaths of his buddies, the long marches, and then, of the human beings in the camps, the mass graves, the smell.

He talked all night, until the dawn began to creep across the fields. Maxine listened to everything Lyle had to say. Then she went to the kitchen, and she cooked him breakfast, and he went out, and did the morning chores.

This is the power of love, the power that Jesus witnessed and called others to. While violence threatened to destroy them, Jesus broke bread with his friends, and said, "Love one another as I have loved you."

Life is saved by the power of faithful presence that will not let violence have the last word. This is the power manifest in a young woman who has taken the name "Butterfly." Four years ago, she was an economics major at Stanford. Tired and stressed by school, she took a weekend break and went to northern California. For the first time in her life, she came into the redwood forest.

Standing in the presence of the primordial forest, endangered and nearly extinct, she says she felt herself flooded with a love, stronger than any she had ever known.

She became determined that she would not allow this love to be severed by the logging of the trees. She left the economics program at Stanford and climbed into the branches of one of the redwoods slated to be cut down. For two years, Butterfly lived in the tree, so they couldnt cut it down. Now Butterfly has climbed down and is traveling around speaking. Her message is simple. It is the same as Jesus message: "Love as I have loved."
Her witness, like countless others, is that the world can be saved by only one means: passionate, abiding, fierce, active, love.

Here is my prayer:

On our journey, may we be nourished by the bread of abiding love; and may we offer this bread to others. May we remember that we are part of a living tradition that includes an alternate Christian path, that emphasizes the sacred worth of every person and all life; that teaches we are saved by acts of faithful love, that calls us to a ministry of resistance and healing in the presence of violence, and that connects us to a tide of soul force that flows beyond the bounds of any one heritage, into a communion of all life.

Amen.