Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County - Sermon: Moments of Truth... and Meaning

Many Wells, One Source

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

November 8, 2009

READING

1 Samuel 3:1-10 ~ Samuel's Calling and Prophetic Activity

Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, 'Samuel! Samuel!' and he said, 'Here I am!' and ran to Eli, and said, 'Here I am, for you called me.' But he said, 'I did not call; lie down again.' So he went and lay down. The Lord called again, 'Samuel!' Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, 'Here I am, for you called me.' But he said, 'I did not call, my son; lie down again.' Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, 'Here I am, for you called me.' Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, 'Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." ' So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, 'Samuel! Samuel!' And Samuel said, 'Speak, for your servant is listening.'

SERMON

How are you called? Are you like Samuel, lying in bed at night, hearing a voice calling your name? Confused, you believe the voice to be coming from someone familiar, a friend or relative asking for your help. Over and over again you make the same mistake, until you realize that it's something else, something greater calling out to you, asking something more of you. Or perhaps you're like another of the great Hebrew prophets, Elijah, who flees from his calling and hides out in the hills. But even there, he finds that he cannot escape from it. In the book 1 Kings, we are told that Elijah huddled in the cave where he sought refuge, and that "the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake; And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice." Or are you like Kimberly Byer-Nelson, awake "in the hours before the birds stream airborne with chiming voice," awakening to the realization that you are called to uphold the peace of the world, "even when the sirens begin, even when sorrow cries out, old and gnarled, even when words grow fangs and rend."?^[1]

Perhaps this whole idea of calling is foreign to you. Perhaps you've waited your whole life to hear that still, small voice, or that loud and booming one. Or maybe you're uncomfortable with the idea that something greater, something "out there" is drawing you toward an unknown future. So, let me see if I can come at this a different way. How would you answer if I asked you this: When have been inspired, and how and by whom? What are your sources of insight? What moves you to tears or to action? When have you been touched deeply at your core, to the point that the thing you must do next or your place in the order of the universe became crystal-clear?

One of the great joys of Unitarian Universalism is the freedom it gives us to explore, the freedom to conduct, as it says in our Principles, our own free and responsible search for truth and meaning. In fact, we're not just allowed to do that, we are compelled. As Unitarian Universalists we do not merely grant each other permission to explore our concepts of spirituality. This faith of ours requires us to actively pursue a path to growth and transformation. This is not imposed on us as some kind of onerous burden, but rather granted to us as a gift, to be joyfully received. This is the good news of our faith!

Another bit of good news is that we are not left simply to our own devices, wandering in the wilderness, as it were. As we pursue our spiritual growth, we are told that there are almost limitless ways to encounter the holy. Truth, we are told, is not bound to one particular experience or captured in one particular book. Revelation is not sealed. God is still speaking. As our Principles proclaim, we are part of a living tradition, a tradition that breathes and moves, that expands and encompasses our ever-widening knowledge of ourselves and our surroundings. Our tradition draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including wisdom from the world's religions, the words and deeds of prophetic women and men, and our own personal experiences of mystery, awe and wonder. And so, we read the Bible. And we read the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching. And we examine the lives of Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. And we read the bark on the trees and the stars in the night sky, all in search of our place in this world.

The 121st Psalm is familiar to many of you:

I lift up my eyes to the hills -
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and for evermore.

And perhaps so is this poem by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

As Unitarian Universalists, we are free to find the poetry in Scripture and to claim the poem as scripture. Both serve equally well as potential sources of enlightenment, depending on who you are and where you are on your spiritual journey. No one, ancient or living, has sole claim on "Truth." And so we may choose. We may choose the peace of wild things and day-blind stars, or the peace of the Lord who watches and protects over us.

To borrow a phrase from Garrison Keillor, the answers to "life's persistent questions" are to be found in sources as wide and varied as the world itself. Are you called to live each day in gratitude and joy? Does that joy come from the living itself, or from some deeper connection. This reading from the Hindu tradition urges us to look beyond the temporal, beyond that which we can taste and touch:

When totally free from outer contacts a man finds happiness in himself, he is fully trained in God's discipline and reaches unending bliss. The experiences we owe to our sense of touch are only sources of unpleasantness. They have a beginning and an end. A wise man takes no pleasure in them. That man is disciplined and happy who can prevail over the turmoil that springs from desire and anger, here on earth, before he leaves his body.^[2]

And in this poem by Anne Sexton, we are urged to find joy and to be grateful for the everyday pleasures we experience, for, she tells us, these things are holy:

There is joy in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning,
in the spoon and the chair that cry 'hello there, Anne' each morning,
in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning.

All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning
and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table to a prayer of rejoicing,
as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds.

So, while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter in the morning, lest it go unspoken.
The joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.

The gift of our faith is that both perspectives are held in equal esteem. The challenge of our faith is that we are called to choose which source inspires us and calls us to our best selves.

Let me ask you another of those "persistent questions:" Where do you find hope? What is it that gets you through the dark days, the endless nights of crisis and confusion? Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is "the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul." Poet Lisel Mueller tells us:

It hovers in dark corners before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

Perhaps these words don't resonate with you. Perhaps you are called out from despair by the words of the 23rd Psalm, by believing that the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. But these words may not give you the hope that you need either. Instead you might turn to the Tao Te Ching, which teaches:

The Way is an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from without ever needing to be filled.
It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world.
In it all sharpness is blunted, all tangles untied, all glare tempered, all dust smoothed.
It is like a deep pool that never dries (Tao Te Ching 4)

There are so many poems and so many scriptures, sacred texts all, that I would love to share with you. About love, about grief, about the mundane drudgery and miraculous wonder of our daily lives. About God him-, her-, it-self. Here's just a piece of what Mary Oliver has to say about God in her poem, "At the River Clarion:"

If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck.
He's also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke…
If God exists he isn't just churches and mathematics.
He's the forest, He's the desert.
He's the ice caps, that are dying.
He's the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
He's van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He's the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He's every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn't it something very important?^[3]

This passage, I believe, reveals to us as much about the nature of the Divine as does any ancient sacred scripture.

How privileged we are to be on this journey of exploration and discovery! And moreover, how wonderful to be on this journey together! But let us not forget that with great freedom comes great responsibility. In the words of the immortal Bruce Springsteen, "the door's open, but the ride ain't free."^[4] As Unitarian Universalists we are granted the freedom to build our own theology. To take a piece from Buddhism and attach it to something from our Christian roots that still speaks to us. Then to glue that on to a personal spiritual practice that helps keeps us grounded. And so forth. But this freedom requires three things of us: First, it requires us to actively participate in the quest. To take charge of our own spiritual development, to explore unknown paths, and to piece it all together for ourselves. No one will tell you what you have to believe, no one will give you the answers or spoon-feed you here. But we are called to figure out what it is that we do believe. And we all know that it's easy to just glide along with the crowd, skimming the spiritual surface of a lake that is very wide and very deep. So it is up to each of us to plunge in and plumb the depths of our souls. As spiritual seekers, we are called to embark on the quest.

The second thing that this shared journey requires of us is to take the risk of engaging others who are on the trip. Of daring to tell someone else what it is that you think you might be coming to almost believe. Of offering up a book or a poem or a practice that you have discovered that resonates with your soul and that has moved you forward on the path. Of accepting such a gift without judgment when it is offered up by one of our fellow travelers and trusting that they have our best interests at heart. It is said that polite company does not converse about sex, politics, or religion, and I fear that at church we are much more willing to talk about the first two than we are the third. And if we can't talk about our faith here - as uncertain, as tentative, as unformed as it may be - then how are we more than just a social club for liberal activists?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, with our freedom of religious exploration comes the responsibility to live out our values in the world. To walk the talk. You knew I was going to get to this one, didn't you? Regardless of how clear or muddy our beliefs might be, it is up to each of us to express and manifest the core principles of Unitarian Universalism in our lives and in our communities. Values like equality, compassion, dignity, and trust. The journey of religious exploration will last a lifetime, and we cannot wait until we've got it all figured out before we take our faith out into the streets. To work for justice, to heal brokenness, to free the enslaved. As it says in our hymn, "all life is a gift which we are called to use, to build the common good and to make our own days glad."

And so, I ask again the question I posed at the outset: How are you called? Where do you find your inspiration? What touches and moves you? There are so many ways of naming and knowing the holy, so many wells, all drawing from the same Source. I invite you to drink deeply from as many as you can, until the dry, cracked lips of your soul become soft and supple again, and your spiritual thirst is quenched. And then, drink some more.

Closing Words:

Just Now (W.S. Merwin)

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away, the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe.

Simpler than I could have begun to find words for.

Not patient, not even waiting.

No more hidden than the air itself that became part of me for a while, with every breath, and remained with me unnoticed.

Something that was here unnamed, unknown; in the days and nights, not separate from them; not separate from them as they came and were gone.

It must have been here neither early nor late.

Then by what name can I address it now, holding out my thanks?

^[1] "This is How We Are Called" by Kimberly Beyer-Nelson, in How We Are Called, A Meditation Anthology, p 1.
^[2] Bhagavad Gita 5.21-23.
^[3] Mary Oliver, "At the River Clarion" from Evidence, pp 51-52 (excerpted).
^[4] Bruce Springsteen, "Thunder Road" on Born to Run, 1975

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Did this sermon bring forth any special feelings, thoughts or concerns that you would like to share? Consider this link as providing you with an opportunity to talk back.