This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Church, Unitarian, of Athol, Massachusetts. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2002 Daniel Harper.
Honestly, it’s not an especially good sermon. Don’t waste your time reading it.
Readings
The first reading this morning is by Cornell West, philosopher and African-American studies scholar, from his essay “Black Nihilism in America” from the book Race Matters:
“The initial black struggle against degradation and devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the New World was, in part, a struggle against nihilism. In fact, the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is… the nihilistic threat — that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alove. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that wihtout meaning there can be no struggle.
“The genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness. … In other words, traditions for black surviving and and thriving under usually adverse New World conditions were major barriers against the nihilistic threat. These traditions consist primarily of black religious and civic institutions that sustained familial and communal networks of support. If cultures are, in part, what human beings create… in order to convince themselves not to commit suicide, then black foremothers and forefathers are to be applauded. In fact, until the early seventies black Americans had the lowest suicide rate in the United States. But now young black people lead the nations in suicides.
“What has changed? What went wrong? The bitter irony of integration? The cumulative effects of a genocidal conspiracy? The virtual collapse of rising expectations after the optimistic sixties? None of us fully understands why the cultural structures that once sustained black life in America are no longer able to fend off the nihilistic threat.
The second short reading is from the Christian scriptures, Revelation chapter 21 verse 3:
See, the home of God is
among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
They will be his peoples,
And God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more:
mourning and crying and pain will be no more;
for the first things have passed away.
Sermon
Moving away from emptiness. In some sense, isn’t this the goal of all religions, all cultures? Our own religious tradition seeks to create meaning in a world of chance and chaos. In seeking meaning, we move away from that blank emptiness that leads to dismay, despair, even suicide.
But the real question is, how do we manage to do that? If we are moving away from emptiness, what are we moving towards?
In our broader culture, for many people the answer is clear-cut: when we move away from emptiness, when we move towards meaning, we are moving towards God. We are moving towards that final Judgement Day when “death will be no more: mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” and God is going to wipe the tears from our eyes. Or in the words of that lovely old gospel song, “Some bright morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away/ To a home on God’s celelestial shore, I’ll fly away// Just a few more weary days and then, I’ll fly away/ To a land where joys will never end, I’ll fly away.”
I love these powerful images: mourning and crying and pain will be no more, and one day, I’ll fly away to a land where joys will never end. I can’t accept these images literally — I don’t believe them — but I accept that they have a kind of beauty. Whether or not I believe in God, I can not believe in a God that is going to literally call me home one day — “hey Dan, c’mon home” — and wipe tears from my eyes.
Since you, too, are sitting here in a Unitarian Universalist church on a Sunday morning, my guess is that you are like me. You cannot accept the old notions of meaning. My guess is that you don’t believe that God is literally going to call you home to heaven, and that if you believe in heaven it is in a manner more like the story this morning about the Zen master. We cannot get the meaning for our lives from the image of a big white man in the sky who, when you finally get to heaven, is going to whip out a pocket handkerchief and dry your tears.
So what does give our lives meaning? Not that we can answer that question in the next 18 minutes! — but I want to explore some alternative images and ideas that I find as beautiful, and more compelling, than that old tear-wiping image. But to begin, I think we have to remind ourselves what the loss of meaning is like, and from there move on to what might keep us from emptiness, keep us from nihilism, keep us from the “loss of hope and absence of meaning.”
In the first reading, we heard about black nihilism in America today. We heard Cornell West’s thoughts about “the nihilistic threat — that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning.” I have a story to share with you that illustrates how deep that loss of hope is.
A few months ago, I read an article in one of the newspapers I read — I can’t remember which one. The article was about the breakdown of a black urban neighborhood. The reporter talked with an older African American woman who had lived in this neighborhood for a number of years, and recently had taken to keeping a loaded shotgun in her apartment.
One day, she heard the sound of breaking glass, and she went to investigate. She found a young black man had broken into her ground floor apartment, and she confronted him in a passageway, carrying the loaded shotgun. Instead of turning and running, he just looked at her and said something to the effect of, go ahead and shoot, what have i got to lose?
For this African American woman, this young man epitomized what is happening in her neighborhood right now. That young man felt he had nothing to lose — he truly did not care if she shot him dead, for he had lost hope.
Talk about a loss of a sense of meaning!
I have my own brand of nihilism, not nearly as desparate as that young black man’s, but powerful in its own way. My nihilism, my sense of emptiness, started in my late teens when I became convinced that the world was going to end in nuclear holocaust. People who are a few years older than me remember atomic bomb drills at school, where you learned how to hide under your desk in case of atomic attack. By the time I had gotten into school, they didn’t bother any more. When I first started working in churches eight years ago, this was still a major concern of children. I remember talking with ten year olds who were convinced that there was a pretty good chance they wouldn’t make it to age twenty — although it seems to be far less of a concern with children now.
Well, as long as we are wallowing in despair, I’m sure you can find your own personal hopelessness and loss of meaning. the loss of hope that has arisen in the past couple of decades due to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, and the fact that that real wages have been in decline since about 1973. Oh, and more recently, instead of preventing terrorism, the leadership of this country appears bent on starting a war to support oil that many of us feel is going to increase the danger of terrorism. As I say, I’m sure you have your own candidates for things that cause a debilitating loss of hope. So now, I think we have a pretty good feeling for the loss of meaning.
Are you all depressed now? I know I’ve gotten myself all depressed. So let’s all remember that our goal is not to feel any more hopeless than we already may feel. No, our task this morning is to find a way out of hopelessness and nihilism. But if we can’t turn to the old comfortable pop notions of God, can we let other images have the same power for us?
If you were here two weeks ago to hear me preach, you’ll know that lately I’ve been reading a fair amount of Confucius, and works in the eastern tradition. The children’s story this morning is one pretty good example of an alternative image. The Zen master — the person of wisdom — confronts the samaurai with the image of heaven and hell as inside ourselves.
That’s from the Buddhist tradition. But I find the images of hope and meaning in the Confucian tradition to be more compelling. So let’s looki at two books from that tradition, the Analects, written by Confucius himself, and the I Ching, which Confucius allegedly edited, and from which he drew inspiration.
The “Analects” first. And the “Analects” present an inresting image for meaning — the bureaucracy. Yes, the bureaucracy. In his surviving works, Confucius comes across as a very pragmatic person. He is focussed on people, and their relationships with one another, and how we can make those relationships work smoothly and with justice. Ideally, this is what bureaucracies do.
To lead towards that ideal bureaucracy, Confucius asks us to be concerned with both leadership and with management. What’s the difference, you ask? In the workplace, a leader is someone who sees the big vision for the company and inspires people. A manager makes sure you get paid regularly. In order to make the relationships between people run smoothly and well, you need both inspiration and a paycheck.
So in the “Analects,” Confucius writes about management: “In preparing the governmental notifications, P’i Shan first made the rough draft; Shi Shu examined and discussed its contents; Tsze-yü, the manager of Foreigh intercourse, then polished the style….” (14.9). This is management. We have to get something done, and the best way to get it done is to work on it together, each doing a part of the task.
Then Confucius also writes about the most abstract, inspirational, big vison stuff: “The Master standing by a stream, said, ‘It passes on just like this, not ceasing day or night!’” (9.16) This relates more to leadership, to the big vision stuff. Things are always changing, and someone has to make the bureaucracy change, too.
Confucius tells us in quite specific terms how to work cooperatively together on a project, and at the same time he introduces a big philosophical picture: life is like a constantly changing stream, and the only way we can effectively deal with the web of human relationships is to accept that change is the only constant. Both these passages lead to the same ultimate goal: making the web of human relationships work, and work well. This is the image of the bureaucracy.
This last concept is in fact essential to what Confucius is trying to teach us: Nothing stays the same, ever; everything’s changing. And if you think back to the stereotyped traditional image of God, this is radically different. The traditional God never changes; and I feel this is the biggest problem we Unitarian Universalists should have with the traditional God. We can learn a lot about change from Confucius and his image of the bureaucracy.
Traditionally, Confucius is supposed to have had a hand in editing or putting together one of the ancient classic books of Chinese culture, the “I Ching” or Book of Changes. This classic Chinese book underlies everything Confucius says and thinks. Just from its title, you can guess what the book is about: change is the only constant, and to understand the world you have to understand change.
I particularly like the “I Ching” because it presents vivid images to describe change, and how change operates. Let me give you one such image: an open mouth, with an obstruction of some kind between the teeth. Because of this obstruction, “the lips cannot meet” — unless you bite through. This image of biting through, says the “I Ching,” “indicates how obstacles are forcibly removed in nature”; and this concept can be applied to creating harmonious social relationships. Take, for example, the image of biting through tough, dried meat and biting into something poisonous. This, says the I Ching, is a metaphor for administering justice to someone who is resistant to justice, and the poison is a metaphor for their hatred and anger.
Biting through is a vivid image of acting when action is required. But here’s another image from the I Ching:
Mountains linked one to another: this constitutes the image of Restraint. In the same way, the noble man is mindful of how he should not go out of his position.
Things cannot be kept in a state of movement forever but eventually are brought to a stop….
Restraint means ‘stop.’ When it is time to stop, one should stop, when it is a time to act, one should act.
Changed circumstances require a new approach. Rather than vigorously biting through an obstruction, sometimes you have to be still, like one mountain in a chain of mountains. One commentary on the I Ching says “Whether to act or to remain passive, whether to draw in or extend oneself, there is only change to indicate what is appropriate.”
It would be nice if there were one simple easy answer for what to do in all situations, but there isn’t. The genius of the I Ching is in its recognition that there is no ideal, no utopian final answer.
And so the I Ching presents us with a bigger image: the image of change as constant. We’re not always going to be able to correctly judge the situation, and even when we can judge the situation correctly we’re not always going to be able to do anything about it — and in these cases, there’s no blame. But ultimately, we have to take responsibility for staying engaged with change. We have to keep trying.
Turning back to the problem of hopelessness and nihilism: the hopelessness felt by many black Americans today; the hopelessness you or I might feel when confronted with the still very real possibility of nuclear holocaust.
Confucius writes about how to lead and manage human insitutions. For Confucius, the human institutions of family and government are what keep us going, what keep us from hopelessness. Of course, as Confucius knew all too well, families and governments are not always just. In our first reading, Cornell West told us about how black Americans found hope in the face of an actively hostile white government. He writes about how his black foremothers and forefathers worked to “equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness,” and that cultural armor consisted of “black religious and civic institutions that sustained familial and communal networks of support.” So it’s also our cultural institutions, including churches, that keep us going, that keep us from despair — maybe even more than any other institution, we create meaning for ourselves within these voluntary cultural institutions.
Whether or not you believe in God, it’s clear from Cornell West that we have to find new ways for creating meaning within human institutions. We have to rely on each other, we have to rely on the web of human relationships. I believe we have to be responsible for each other. As Cornell West implies, the breakdown of the old black American culutral institutions has led to an great increase in suicide rates within the black community. Without the human cultural institutions, hopelessness sets in.
It is right here, in places like this very church, where we come together and create meaning together. Meaning has to be recreated in each generation, it has to be recreated constantly, that is the work we are engaged in together, right here and right now. Not that I can give you a firm and final answer as to what that meaning is — it changes, grows, evolves — that’s why we have to come back every week
Ultimately, because we come together to recreate meaning for ourselves, there is hope. I can’t literally believe that God is going to wipe the tears away from my eyes, but I believe in the metaphorical truth of that image. We come together in a changing world, and just by that coming together, there is hope.
