 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
RENEWING REVERENCE | Acts 1.6-11 | May 12, 2002 |
There is a general agreement among some that the removal of religion from public life has resulted in the moral breakdown of society, and that the best medicine for broken families, communities, schools and governments is a strong dose of religious belief. But which religious belief? Whose religion? As the unengraved plaque so poignantly attests, there is only one real candidate. Those who do not stand in the Judeo-Christian tradition are blank slates, along with their beliefs.
I suppose that most of us would agree that there is room for improvement in our social structures. The economic gap that separates the haves from the have-nots is ever widening, breeding discontent and feeding our fear of one another. Confidence in our leaders is tentative at best. Elected government officials often betray our trust, and even more so men of the cloth have taken advantage of an unearned trust in them as clergy.
Rapid changes throughout the world have put a strain on our schools, our families, our politics, and our churches. The individual good has become the banner under which we justify our selfish grabbing all that our grubby hands can hold, and the bottom line has been the byline regardless of the havoc it wreaks in families and corporations. I heard just yesterday of a friend of mine who, after twenty-six years with the same company, went to work just last week and was told it was her last day. They walked her to her desk, she cleaned it out, and they escorted her to the door. That was it. No thank you. No recognition. No consideration.
Posting the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer on a courthouse wall is reverence for the wrong thing; it is reverence for the written word rather than the spirit that it expresses. It reinforces our notion today that data is our savior, that information is the messiah, and every problem can be solved and every issue settled if we have enough of the right information. If we collect enough data, we can master anything. It is a false messiah. Even Jesus’ disciples missed it when they stood gawking at him as he left them; this isn’t where it’s at, the angel said to them. Look around you; he is here in your every day living.
Paul Woodruff has written a book entitled Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. Here he suggests that feelings affect our lives far more deeply than beliefs do. “Moral rules and laws set standards for doing right,” he says, “but there is nothing about a rule that makes you feel like following it. In fact, there is something about many rules that makes most people feel like breaking them.”
Woodruff suggests convincingly that reverence is a lost virtue. Virtues supply people with the feelings that prompt them to behave well. Courage is not a rule; neither is wisdom or justice. Virtues are “habits of feelings.” They are imbedded deep within the soul, imprinted on the very character of a person. It takes time to develop virtues; they are hard to learn. But once learned they are hard to forget since they dwell not in the mind but in the character.
Reverence. A vanishing virtue in our culture. Though difficult to describe, Woodruff says that reverence begins “in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control–God, truth, justice, nature, even death.” We reverence That which is larger than life itself; That which is at the very core of our being, but beyond our comprehension and known only in the limitation of our unknowing.
We usually do not want to be improved by our limitations. We want to eliminate them. Reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like God. And the cost of our irreverence is high: domestic violence, environmental degradation, retaliation and evil spiritedness toward that which we don’t understand including other religions, sexual politics, and economics.
Reverence. Respect. Awe. The feelings cultivated by many religions tends toward certainty and superiority, which leads to the opposite of reverence and results in violence leveled against those who don’t believe as we do. “If you desire peace,” Woodruff says, “do not pray that everyone share your beliefs. Pray instead that all may be reverent.” I am proud that the logo of our youth group is the motto “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” And it is displayed in the texts of major religions of the world. If you haven’t seen the logo, check it out on the web site or at Chestnut House.
Truly reverent communities of faith–that is, those that are aware of their own limitations and therefore open to the gifts of others–will have more to talk about than those that secure their own high ground by overidentifying with God. Reverence requires a modest sense of the difference between the human and the divine, and thus respect for both.
Reverence transcends religion. A scientist–professional or novice–is reverent toward Truth. A keen observer of nature is as reverent as any who find it in church. A teacher worth her salt is more in admiration of the wonder of children than of the data that is taught. A gardener who is really a gardener is one who stands in awe of the unknown power of seed and soil, bonded in mutual reverence of life. People who truly love stand in reverence of Something larger than their individual selves, who cannot explain with words the feelings deep in their hearts.
As I witnessed the vows of two men in our congregation who stood before God yesterday at this altar to proclaim their love for each other, I stood in reverence of the power of love to transcend gender, or societies rules, or religious dogmas, or the government’s unwillingness to grant them legal status as a couple. And those who were here could not deny the reverence that their vows of love touched within our souls and the soul of the universe.
Members of a society do not all worship together, we are reminded, and some do not worship at all, so we need to look for reverence in surprising places. Learning to share bare reverence with people who do not share our faith or our value system may turn out to be the most important thing any of us can do, both for ourselves and for all that we revere, reminds Barbara Brown Taylor. Goethe sums it up this way:
The highest happiness of [human beings]...is to have probed with is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
(Taken from a book review by Barbara Brown Taylor in
The Christian Century April 24 - May 1, 2002)
PASTORAL PRAYER
Mother of all that is and all that will be, we come in reverence of all that inspires us to life and joy. So many things would want to weigh us down, and were we to give in to the ravages of war and hatred, the heinousness of prejudice and violence we would be undone. Often we do not know what motivates us to fight against the odds except that a holy and unknowable Love beats in our own hearts the passion for life that propels us forward.
This is a day to give thanks to mothers, and to remember all who have been mothers to us, male or female. Mothering in its larger sense transcends gender, and we are grateful to all who have nurtured us and believed in us and watched over our growing and been patient with our rebellion. Mothering even transcends humanity, for there are many times when we feel that Power of caring which comes to us from outside the human realm, perhaps through a pet or a thunderstorm or a flower or quietness or even unknowing.
Today is a day of earnest prayer for our world, so violent these days we cannot comprehend the significance of it all. Suicide bombings in Israel and pipe bombs in rural mailboxes in our own country; hatred bred by a rigid dogma that kills the very beings created by a god of love.
May we not become so paralyzed by the enormity of it all that we are unable to love and mother and care, if only in our small corner of life. Inspire us with a divine love that empowers us amid the devastation, a hope that doesn’t give up when it seems hopeless by human calculations, and a faith that loves unconditionally as a mother would love her children in spite of their deeds.
Be to us today all that we need to serve you and to serve one another and to serve our world. In the name of Love, we pray. Amen.
Bhagavad Gita 9.8-17
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)
The Blessed Lord said:
I permeate all the universe
in my unmanifest form.
All beings exist within me,
yet I am so inconceivably
vast, so beyond existence.
That though they are brought forth
and sustained by my limitless power,
I am not confined within them.
Just as the all-moving wind,
wherever it goes, always
remains in the vastness of space,
all beings remain within me.
They are gathered back into my womb
at the end of the cosmic cycle–
a hundred fifty thousand
billion of your earthly years–
and as a new cycle begins
I send them forth once again,
pouring from my abundance
the myriad forms of life.
These actions do not bind me...
I stand apart from them all,
indifferent to their outcome,
unattached, serene.
Under my guidance, Nature
brings forth all beings, all things
animate or inanimate,
and sets the whole universe in motion.
Foolish people despise me
In the human form that I take,
blind to my true nature
as the Lord of all life and death.
Their hopes and actions are vain,
their knowledge is sheer delusion;
turning from the light, they fall
into cruelty, selfishness, greed.
But the truly wise...
Who dive deep into themselves,
fearless, one-pointed, know me
as the inexhaustible source.
| Copyright © 2002 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |