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) 2003 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The reading this morning is from the first page of the book Returning: A Spiritual Journey, by Dan Wakefield.

One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again. This was not, in other words, one of those waking nightmares left over from sleep that is dispelled by the comforting light of day. It was, rather, a response to the reality that another morning had broken in a life I could only deal with sedated by wine, loud noises, moving images, and wired to electronic games that further distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being, my most essential self. It was the beginning of a year in which I would have scored in the upper percentile of those popular magazine tests that list the greatest stresses of life: I left the house I owned, the city I was living in, the work I was doing, the woman I had lived with for seven years and had hoped to remain with the rest of my life, ran out of money, discovered I had endangered my health, and attended the funeral of my father in May and my mother in November.

The day I woke up screaming I grabbed from among my books an old Bible I hadn’t opened for nearly a quarter of a century. With a desperate instinct I turned to the Twenty-third Psalm and read it over, several times, the words and the King James cadence bringing a sense of relief and comfort, a kind of emotional balm. In the coming chaotic days and months I sometimes recited that psalm over in my mind, and it always had that calming effect, but it did not give me any sense that I believed in God again. The psalm simply seemed an isolated source of solace and calm, such as any great poem might be. [p. 1 ff.]

Sermon

Some of you may remember having read Dan Wakefield’s words from this morning’s reading. As I said, the reading is from a book called Returning, which was quite popular after it was published back in 1988. And the book was based in part on articles Dan Wakefield wrote for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and GQ magazine back in 1984 and 1985. Dan Wakefield’s articles and books made quite an impression on quite a number of people back then. Which was remarkable, because what Dan Wakefield was saying was, in essence, that religion and spirituality turned out to be central to his life.

If Dan Wakefield had been an evangelical Christian, no one would have cared if religion had been at the center of his life; no one would have cared about his spirituality. But Wakefield was a tough, skeptical journalist and novelist. He was tough: his first book was about the year he spent living in Spanish Harlem. He was no angel: his best-selling novel, written in the 1960’s, was called Going All the Way — and the novel was not the story of someone going all the way to heaven, it was the story of a couple of guys who were trying to lose their virginity. He had worked as a sports reporter, he hung out in bars, he wrote scripts for network TV, he was typical in many ways of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking (male) writer of the middle twentieth century.

Writers of that type tended not to have religious feelings; or if they did, they kept them to themselves. When Dan Wakefield rediscovered the spiritual dimension of his life, that was important to him. But then he published articles about it, and they were published in respectable mainstream secular newspapers and magazines. He wrote a book that sold well enough that Penguin Books picked it up and published it in paperback. Bill Moyers called the book “one of the most important memoirs of the spirit that I’ve ever read.”

All this was enough to make people begin to sit up and take notice — maybe something was going on here. Maybe our spiritual lives are something that we really can’t separate off from the rest of our lives; we can’t just keep them to ourselves. And Dan seemed to be going farther than that: he seemed to be saying that it was, in fact, important that we talk about our spiritual lives with other people; that we share our spiritual stories with those around us.

Dan said this about his book Returning: “This book originated in the living room of the King’s Chapel parish house in Boston, where a group of ten people sat around a table sharing their life experiences in a course in ‘religious autobiography’ taught by the minister [Rev. Carl Scovel].” Carl Scovel (who, by the way, is a Unitarian Universalist minister), over a period of some years had developed a series of exercises to help people remember the story of their lives. A key part of Carl Scovel’s course in “religious autobiography” was that you did your remembering in a group with other people. Everybody did the exercises together, and then they wrote about their memories, and then they read what they had written, out loud, to the others taking the course. A good part of the power in that original course that Dan Wakefield took lay in the sharing of stories with the other nine people sitting around that table in King’s Chapel parish house.

After he had written his own religious autobiography, Dan Wakefield began to lead religious autobiography courses himself. He wanted to expand the idea beyond the King’s Chapel community. He began leading what he called spiritual autobiography courses through the Boston Center for Adult Education; he chose the term because the word “spiritual” felt more inclusive than “religious.” Those courses went so well that he began offering them in other venues. He led spiritual autobiography courses at yoga centers, in a gym at the Rancho La Puerta health spa in New Mexico, at the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, at University Unitarian Church in Seattle; he even incorporated some of the exercises into a graduate course in writing that he taught at Emerson College. He found that there was great power in this idea of spiritual autobiography; that here was something that touched people’s lives deeply, with immediacy.

Now where did this power come from? You sit around with some other people and write the story of your life — what makes that so powerful? Dan Wakefield has offered some reasons why, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his reasons; partly because I think ultimately he wants to give most of the credit to God.

I’m not sure I can agree that God necessarily provides the power behind the course. I’ve been leading spiritual autobiography courses myself since I experienced some of Dan’s exercises in a course I took with him at Emerson College in 1991, and I’ve helped lay people lead the course as well. I’ve watched liberal Christians and bedrock atheists take the course, and both believers and non-believers have felt some kind of power in writing spiritual autobiographies as a part of a group. I’m neither an atheist nor a believer. I’m not going to argue for or against the power of God as it may or may not affect your life. So it is that I find myself searching for another explanation.

Over the past couple of months, a group of five people from this church have been meeting with me on Sunday evenings, and we have pursued together this course in spiritual autobiography. As always, the stories that the participants read to each other, the memories that they shared in the course, moved me to the depths of my soul. And I kept asking myself, can I explain a little of the power that I felt from hearing these spiritual autobiographies?

I shared an idea with the group of why I thought this course could be so powerful. It can be so powerful because it gets right to the heart of one of the fundamental religious questions: who am I? I know that for myself I haven’t often come to church to find out what I believe about God. And speaking just for myself, I know that I have never come to church to listen to creeds and doctrines. What I believe in has become less and less important to me over the years.

I don’t want to ask what I believe in. I want to ask what I feel is the most fundamental religious question: Who am I? I want to learn who I am in relation to other people, and I want to know that others can accept me for who I am. I want to learn what it is that I hold most dear so that I can begin to know what it is that I should do. I want to know something about the core of my being, what it is about me that is most permanent, that has survived through hard times. Who am I? What is the core of my being?

The last meeting of our spiritual autobiography class this spring took place last Sunday, and at the end of the meeting, after we had listened to two people read their spiritual autobiographies, I took a few minutes and asked the members of the group if they could sum up their spiritual autobiographies in one sentence. The three people who were present that evening gave me permission to share their answers with you. Lyn Kimmel said, “I’m a person who doesn’t have the answers, but I enjoy searching for the questions.” Peg Robinson wondered if she had made the right choices at times, and then said, “I’m still searching and changing.” Bob Coyle managed to sum up his life in three words: “I’m still seeking.”

Bob added a story that he has given me permission to share with you. As a young man, Bob worked at a meat counter, selling cuts of meat. Bob says that at that time he really knew nothing about meat, a fact that was probably obvious to everyone who knew him. But as soon as he put on that white apron and stepped behind the meat counter, people assumed that he was a meat expert, and they would ask him meat questions: What cut would be best for such and such a recipe? Will this cut serve two people? (To which question a co-worker once responded, “Yes, if one of you doesn’t like meat.”) Bob’s point was that we have to take on roles in our lives, and these can shape who we are, and how others see us.

As I thought about Bob’s story of the meat counter, it began to occur to me wherein lies part of the power of the spiritual autobiography course. Church is one place where we don’t have to take on roles with quite the deadly seriousness required of us in most of the rest of the world. Yes, Sally is the chair of the Board of Managers, so yes, she does have a role that she plays here at church. But that is different than putting on that white apron and stepping behind the meat counter. I think the difference lies in the fact that here at church we can see more of who someone is. When you put on that white apron and step behind the meat counter, people tend to see the white apron and not the person wearing the white apron. When you come to church, there’s more of a chance that people will see you as you, not as one of the roles you have to play.

And when you participate in a spiritual autobiography group, there is even more of a chance that the others in the group can see you as yourself. The course starts off by asking you to remember who you were as a child. When you read your childhood memories to the group, you strip away the roles you have accumulated over the years: as a child, you were not a parent, or a lover, or an employee, or a Board chair, or someone who worked at a meat counter. Who are you when your roles don’t get in the way?

And there is something in the process of remembering. When I talk to the woman at the meat counter at Crosby’s supermarket where I shop, I don’t know where she has come from, nor who she once was. Even when I got to Vanderhoof’s hardware and talk to Scott Vanderhoof, even though I remember when he was just a young man and his father ran the store, Scott is still defined for me by his role as a hardware man. That can happen at church, too, but when I sit down with someone and hear their memories, hear how they have grown and changed over the years, then I begin to understand them as the complex, changing, spiritual beings that they truly are. We have a core, a kernel somewhere, a part of us that is not some role we fill in day-to-day life.

I noticed, as I’m sure you did, that Peg and Lyn and Bob all summed up their lives by talking about changing, and seeking, and searching for the questions. Sometimes I sum up my life by saying that I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up; and while I mean it partially as a joke, it is also the truth. What am I going to be when I grow up? I still don’t know; I still keep changing. It’s a little frightening at times: in my forties, and I still don’t know what I’m doing, or who I really am, or why I’m here.

Maybe we never figure out who we’re going to be when we grow up. In that case, I feel that what lies at the core is the remembering. I may not know who I’m going to be. I may not even be able to say who I am now. But I can remember a little bit of who I was; I can remember what I have done with my life (both for good and ill); I can remember the people around me who have shaped me, and in some cases whom I have helped to shape.

Dan Wakefield wrote, “One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again” (– a not-uncommon reaction to life, by the way, although we New Englanders are culturally less likely to actually scream out loud).

He screamed because something was wrong with his life. He didn’t know who he was any more. As he tells the story, there remained something in him that wanted to survive, and so he began to change his life. He stopped drinking, he started exercising, he did all those things that you are supposed to do. All that he did certainly helped; his health improved; he stopped screaming when he awakened in the morning. But the turning point for Dan Wakefield was going back to church, taking the spiritual autobiography class with Carl Scovel, and remembering who he was at his core. And in so doing, in becoming a part of a community where experienced him not as some role he filled, but a person, he became more whole. This connection of us and the past; both our own past, and the greater past. Towards the end of his book, Dan writes that he interviewed Carl Scovel on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the founding of King’s Chapel. Carl Scovel said:

I think our parishioners are people who like to feel they are a part of a ‘flow,’ of a stream of events. We have a very strong sense of history, and I think it’s important for people who do not feel ‘isolated in time’ — who do not feel this year is totally different from all other years, but want to know they are part of what’s happened and will be part of what happens.”

So said Carl Scovel.

The memories are not just our own. Some are memories that come from parents or ancestors, from the community, from humanity. In the act of remembering, we dip our toes into the river of humanity, which is also the river of all life. To ask, “Who am I?” is to invite the answer that while I am a person, I am connected to all humanity, I am a part of the greater life of the universe. I am not alone, nor are you. We are not alone because there are those who have gone before us; and there are those who will succeed us, and remember us in their turn. The immortality flows through us in memories, as we become a part of that flow when we are remembered; we are connected through the river that flows through all: that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Church of Athol [Massachusetts], Unitarian. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.

The children’s story told about Palm Sunday: link.

Sermon

We sit here this morning in a historically Unitarian church. Some of you here this morning went to Sunday school in what was historically a Unitarian church — perhaps in this very church. I, too, grew up in a historically Unitarian church, and the story of Easter I heard as a child was the Unitarian story of Easter.

I love our Unitarian version of the Easter story, and I’m glad the children are with us this morning to hear this story. Why is our version of the story different? When we retell that story, we don’t assume that Jesus was God. And that leads to all kinds of little changes that add up in the end…. Tell you what, let’s just listen to the Unitarian story of Easter and find out what it all adds up to in the end.

We left Jesus as he was entering the city of Jerusalem, being wlecomed by people carrying flowers and waving palm fronds.

On that first day in Jerusalem, Jesus did little more than look around in the great Temple of Jerusalem — the Temple that was the holiest place for Jesus and for all other Jews. Jesus noticed that there were a number of people selling things in the Temple (for example, there were people selling pigeons), and besides that there were all kinds of comings and goings through the Temple, people carrying all kinds of gear, taking shortcuts by going through the Temple.

The next day, Jesus returned to the Temple. He walked in, chased out the people selling things, and upset the tables of the moneychangers. Needless to say, he created quite a commotion! and I imagine that a crowd gathered around to see what this stranger, this traveling rabbi, was up to. Once the dust had settled, Jesus turned to the gathered crowd, and quoted from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Isaiah where God says, “My Temple shall be known as a place of prayer for all nations.” Jesus said it was time that the Temple went back to being a place of prayer — how could you pray when there were people buying and selling things right next to you? How could you pray with all those pigeons cooing?

I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus did the right thing in chasing the pigeon-dealers, the moneylenders, and the other salespeople out of the Temple. But the way he did managed to annoy the powerful people who ran the Temple. It made them look bad. They didn’t like that.

In the next few days, Jesus taught and preached all through Jerusalem. We know he quoted the book of Leviticus, where it says, “You are to love your neighbor as yourself.” He encouraged people to be genuinely religious, to help the weak and the poor. Jesus also got into fairly heated discussions with some of Jerusalem’s religious leaders, and he was so good at arguing that once again, he made those powerful people look bad. Once again, they didn’t like that.

Meanwhile, other things were brewing in Jerusalem. The Romans governed Jerusalem at that time. The Romans were also concerned about Jesus. When Jesus rode into the city, he was welcomed by a crowd of people who treated him as if he were one of the long-lost kings of Israel. That made the Romans worry. Was Jesus planning some kind of secret religious rebellion? How many followers did he have? What was he really up to, anyway?

Jesus continued his teaching and preaching from Sunday until Thursday evening, when Passover began. Since Jesus and his disciples were all good observant Jews, after sundown on Thursday they celebrated a Passover Seder together. They had the wine, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, all the standard things you have at a Seder. (By the way, if you’ve ever heard of “Maundy Thursday,” which is always the Thursday before Easter Sunday, that’s the commemoration of that last meal; and while not all Bible scholars agree that least meal was in fact a Seder, many scholars do think it was a Seder.)

After the Seder, Jesus was restless and depressed. He had a strong sense that the Romans or the powerful religious leaders were going to try to arrest him for stirring up trouble, for agitating the people of Jerusalem. He didn’t know how or when it would happen, but he was pretty sure he would be arrested sometime.

As it happened, Jesus was arrested just a few hours after the Seder. He was given a trial the same night he was arrested, and he was executed the next day. The Romans put him to death using a common but very unpleasant type of execution known as crucifixion. (And the day of Jesus’ execution, the Friday before Easter, is called “Good Friday,” a day when many Christians commemorate Jesus’ death.)

Because the Jewish sabbath started right at sundown, and Jewish law of the time did not allow you to bury anyone on the Sabbath day, Jesus’ friends couldn’t bury him right away. There were no funeral homes back in those days, so Jesus’ friends put his body in a tomb, a sort of cave cut into the side of a hill, where the body would be safe until after the Sabbath was over.

First thing Sunday morning, some of Jesus’ friends went to the tomb to get the body ready for burial. But to their great surprise, the body was gone, and there was a man there in white robes who talked to them about Jesus!

When I was a child, my Unitarian mother or my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teachers would tell me that what had probably happened is that some of Jesus’ other friends had come along, and had already buried the body. You see, there must have been a fair amount of confusion that first Easter morning. Jesus’ friends were upset that he was dead, and they were worried that one or more of them might be arrested, too, or even executed. The burial must have taken place in secret, and probably not everybody got told when and where the burial was. Thus, by the time some of Jesus’ followers had gotten to the tomb, others had already buried his body.

Some of Jesus’ followers began saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, and following that several people even claimed to have spoken with him. My mother always said that we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe that Jesus actually arose from the dead. It’s just that his friends were so sad, and missed him so much, that they wanted to believe that he was alive again.

That’s our Unitarian version of the Easter story. It’s a good story, but it doesn’t really have a very snappy ending. The standard ending of the Easter story has a lot more pizzazz, doesn’t it? In a literal, orthodox Christian story of Easter, Jesus gets to rise from the dead — not just in some metaphorical sense, but really rise from the dead! Jesus comes back to life and talks to various people, angels in dazzling robes appear, Jesus even shares a meal of grilled fish with some of the disciples. Now that’s what I call an ending!

Yet while the orthdox version of the Easter story has a better ending, I don’t find that version of the story satisfying at all. Because by emphasizing the allegedly miraculous aspects of Jesus’ death, I feel you cover over what is truly important about Jesus. What is truly important about Jesus is his life and his teaching. He taught one of the great truths of the ages: That if you want to be a good person, you are to love your neighbor as you love yourself. He taught another great truth of the ages: that you should love God with all your heart and all your mind (and for the word “God” you can feel free to substitute something like “truth” or “that which is highest and best”).

Everything else, as Jesus himself says, is commentary on these two great truths. Thus, to me — to many, if not most, Unitarian Universalists — the story of Easter is far less important than the great truths that Jesus taught in the days leading up to Easter. The story of Easter is less important than the example Jesus sets for us when, like Socrates before him, and like many others since, Jesus gave his life in service of those great truths.

With our ending for the Easter story, we lose the whole notion that Jesus is somehow God. We lose some of the poetry of the story. Yet what we gain is a sense of a life lived for the sake of truth. For us Unitarian Universalists, Jesus doesn’t need miracles to be great. For us, Jesus doesn’t need to literally rise up from the dead for his truth to live on in us. What we gain is the example of a life lived for the sake of truth.

Truth will shine forth, in spite of human wrongs and human injustices. Jesus was arrested by small-minded men; as Bible scholar Carole Fontaine puts it, he was “an innocent man executed on trumped-up political charges” — yet the truths that Jesus taught during his life live on in spite of all efforts to silence him. This is all the resurrection I will ever need to believe in: the constant and ongoing resurrection of the wisdom of the ages; the resurrection of truth, as in each age truth shines forth in the lives and deeds of great women and men.

We live in a troubled age, with wars and rumors of wars; an age when we are too ready to stoop to violence; an age where sometimes we are required to use violence. We remain in need of the truths Jesus taught, truths that were grounded in love. It is up to us to resurrect the truths of Jesus once again:

To love God (or, to love what is highest in best in the world) — with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with your whole might.

And, — To love your neighbor as yourself.

May we live out our lives in the spirit of these two truths. And that will be all the resurrection that we ever need.

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) 2003 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning is by Dana MacLean Greeley, a minister, and president of the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1961 to 1969. It’s an excerpt from a sermon he wrote in November of 1978:

The greatest need in the world today is the need for a belief in peace. I have never believed in violence; and I think that I have not used it in any general sense; yet I have yielded to it in a few instances in the past, I am sorry to say. I have felt the urge for it countless times, and sometimes in serious fashion; but I have never believed in violence….

I believe that there is an instinct for violence within us. And anger and self-defense, if not aggression, are normal for human beings. But we have to control ourselves or discipline ourselves and overcome that anger. The Buddha said that “he who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins.”

Impulsive anger, impulsive words, impulsive violence, and even impulsive killing, have to be understood, and perhaps forgiven, in the context of the anger that prompted them. War is planned, more than it is impulsive. And therefore it can be avoided. Of course it is as human to overcome anger as it is to commit violence. All the religions have taught that violence is wrong….

I suppose that it was once asked by a few idealistic cannibals, “Can we get rid of cannibalism?” and most of their fellow cannibals thought not. And it was asked by some minority moralists, “Can we get rid of dueling?” but most people did not think so, until Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. We need to outlaw war, and put it behind us, like cannibalism and dueling.

We can have peace; but it is a very precarious situation today.

The second reading is a poem by E. E. Cummings….

(Copyright law does not allow entire poems to be reproduced. The reading was the poem that begins:

plato told
him:he couldn’t
believe it(jesus

Sermon

I’ve been trying to make sense out of the possibility of war in Iraq. That is to say, I’ve been trying to make religious sense out of the possibility of this war in Iraq. And I realized that what worries me most — from a religious point of view — about the war in Iraq is that so many people seem so certain about the rightness, and justice, and even holiness of this war. As for me, I find I lack certainty.

Remember — I am talking to you from a religious point of view. I’m not approaching this problem as a political liberal or a political conservative. Besides, if I were to speak in political terms, I’d be more certain what I am supposed to say. Political centrists and moderate conservatives generally support the war in Iraq; the political liberals and the far right seem to be opposing the war in Iraq. But when I speak as a religious liberal, certainty disappears.

We just sent the children off to Sunday school. I went to Unitarian Universalist Sunday school myself. People often ask what UU children learn in Sunday school, besides juice and cookies. Well, our children are also learning how to argue effectively and be critical of everything, important skills for the day when they wind up serving on a UU committee. But perhaps the best answer is something like this: in a UU Sunday school, children learn to distrust certainty. The children’s story today ends with a moral that could be the motto of any UU Sunday school: it’s better to ask the right questions than it is to know all the answers.

As a Unitarian Universalist to my marrow, I find I am extremely suspicious of certainty. If someone says to me that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, I immediately get suspicious. I ask: How do you know that is so? If someone says to me that meditation is the only way to achieve enlightenment, I get suspicious and ask: Are you sure? Are you sure there’s no other way to reach enlightenment? I extend my suspicion and lack of certainty to Unitarian Universalism. We UUs have a tendency to get a little smug and self-satisfied, a little too certain that we have all the answers — or at least all the questions! — and that makes me immediately suspicious of us. Are we sure that we all agree with the so-called seven principles? Are we sure that the flaming chalice is an appropriate symbol for our faith?

In the first reading this morning, Dana Greeley said, “All religions have taught that violence is wrong.” Anger, aggression, self-defense — these, he says, are normal for human beings. The religious question to ask is: how far can we let anger and aggression go?

When we think we have an answer to that question, then the world changes. One day we are cannibals, questioning ourselves as to whether we can end cannibalism. I can see myself at that committee meeting — a whole tribe of us cannibals sitting around the stew pot, deciding whether or not we should cook up the missionaries we captured and serve them in a stew. Perhaps we are cannibals who believe in democracy and we vote on the matter.

We decide to free the missionaries, and the next thing you know they have converted us from our cannibal religion to Christianity. We are given a new form of certainty, a religion that tells us how to get to heaven and how to avoid hell. And two hundred years later, we begin to rule our own country at last. Instead of a stew pot for missionaries, we have guns and tanks, and finally weapons of mass destruction. Rapid communication — planes, highways, trains — bring our neighbors even closer to us. We enter the world community of nations, our neighborhood is the world, and the rules of the game change again.

The rules of the game changed radically fifty-odd years ago, after the atomic bomb was developed. All of a sudden war was not just a matter between two armies, or two nations. All of a sudden, war turned into something that was going to involve everyone in the world. There have always been innocent bystanders who are killed in wars — but now the whole world became innocent bystanders. It was to this change in reality that Dana Greeley was responding — he was writing in 1978, at the height of the Cold War, when it seemed that nuclear war between two nations could involve the whole world in disaster and annihilation.

We haven’t had to worry about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union for the last decade. Now we have to worry about terrorism. We know how to fight a Cold War — we spent fifty years learning how to fight the Cold War. We knew it was between us, the United States, and them, the Soviet Union. We came to know the rules of the game.

No war might be with a well-defined country, or it might be with that ill-defined entity, the terrorists. With the war on terrorism, the rules of the game have changed once again, and the certainty we held on to throughout the Cold War has eroded away under our grasp.

In the religious liberal world view, one of our fundamental presuppositions is that things do change. Traditional religion, has a kind of certainty we lack. We don’t know that we will get to heaven, or even that heaven exists. During the course of our lives, we know in our bones that our whole viewpoint can, and probably will, change.

An example: Most of you are probably familiar with our principles and purposes, a series of religious statements that most Unitarian Universalists can affirm. You may also know about the most important part of the principles and purposes, the clause that says that we have to re-examine these principles and purposes at least every fifteen years. Every fifteen years, the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly has to revisit the principles and purposes and make sure we can still affirm them. I call this “the incompleteness clause.” With the incompleteness clause, we affirm that certainty changes as time goes by. The incompleteness clause recognizes that there can never be a final statement of what we affirm.

Although I’m not talking about Unitarian Universalism as a whole, I am not talking about individual religious liberals. If you want to go on for the rest of your life believing exactly what you believe now, you are welcome to do so, and I for one am not going to try to stop you. But as a whole, as an organization, we religious liberals know we have to be open to change, however uncomfortable and painful that change may be.

Our religious attitudes towards war have been changing throughout the twentieth century. In the past, war had been an acceptable means for resolving disputes. Early Unitarians and Universalists were active in the War for American Independence — Caleb Rich, an early Universalist minister, fought in the Battle of bunker Hill.

But our attitudes towards war have begun to change, perhaps beginning with the horrors of the trench warfare of World War I. Thirty years later, the development of atomic weapons had entirely changed what it means to go to war. The ongoing development of chemical and biological weapons, the rise of terrorism, have changed the religious value of war even more. it can be hard to tell who is an innocent bystander; and it is too easy to kill truly innocent bystanders. We are fast coming to the point where it is no longer morally, ethically, or religiously possible to have a just war. Or perhaps we have already come to that point.

In my teens and early twenties, I was ready for nuclear annihilation. I remember wondering whether I should worry about finding a good job, when nuclear annihilation seemed so close. We are no longer fighting a Cold War with the Soviet Union. One thing is certain, a nuclear war can never be a just war.

But surely the impending war in Iraq is a different matter. It is quite clear that Iraq doesn’t have nuclear weapons (yet, anyway). And while Iraq could launch a frightening chemical or biological attack on the United States, it seems very unlikely that they could annihilate our entire country, or even that many innocent bystanders from other countries. Yet I think from a moral and ethical standpoint, from a religious standpoint, this cannot be a just war. We lack certainty. We are all so close to each other now. Any war is likely to have massive repercussions far beyond the original intent. Not that the impending war with Iraq is unjust — but it is not just. It is in a kind of limbo, it is neither an unalloyed goodness nor a complete evil. It is a moral vacuum.

It used to be so easy: we knew who we were, we knew what the threats were, and we knew how to fight back. A hundred years ago, we could still think of ourselves solely in terms of being citizens of the United States. A thousand years ago, we could have thought of ourselves as being under the protection of a feudal lord. In the time of Moses, we would have thought of ourselves as a part of a tribe.

And in the time of Moses, when we thought of ourselves as a part of the tribe of Israel, we would have known — known it in our bones — that God was on our side. Our God was going to help us defeat those other tribes, the Canaanites and the Egyptians. Our God would also help us defeat the Canaanite and Egyptian gods and goddesses. A thousand years ago, God still would have been on our side. Before our feudal lord went off to war, he would have been blessed by the local priest. But as World War One began, America lacked that simple certainty.

We can no longer think that God is on our side. Of course that’s easy enough for those of us who don’t believe in God — but then, this really isn’t about God at all. More precisely, we no longer believe that our people, our little group, has all the answers. Thus we no longer believe in the white man’s burden. We no longer believe that it is up to men to make all the big decisions for women. We no longer believe that cannibalism is a necessary part of human society! Things have changed again, and in the midst of the uncertainty of change, we have to find new ways of looking at the world.

More easily said than done. It is hard to leave certainty behind. I know for certain that I am a citizen of the United Sates, and when I was a child I know that every morning in school I said the pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America; and to the country for which it stands, one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.”

We have begun to learn what it means to be citizens of the world. When I was a child growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school, I recall seeing two flags in our church — the United States flag, and the flag of the United Nations — and I recall hearing excerpts from the United Nations charter. These words could serve as yet another pledge of allegiance, as we begin to think of ourselves as world citizens:

“We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small; to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom … have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.” In fact, you’ll find this excerpt from the United Nations charter in our hymnal.

As religious people, we find that we have at least two levels of allegiance — at least two levels of patriotism. We support our country, recognize our allegiance to the land that has given us so much. We also recognize our allegiance to all of humanity, we find that we must support the world.

Of course, this is precisely what Jesus and Socrates and Buddha and many others have been telling us down through the ages. They have been telling us right along that we have to be able to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. That’s what we heard in the second reading this morning, in the poem by e. e. cummings. Jesus told us, we wouldn’t believe it; Lao-tsze certainly told us, but we still didn’t believe it. Sometimes you just have to get hit on the head in order to believe something.

The presence in this world of weapons of mass destruction is as good as getting hit on the head is in the poem. In centuries past, you could easily ignore the teachings of Lao-tsze, Jesus, Buddha. But now all our fates have intertwined. Like it or not, we have to be able to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. The Golden Rule, present in one form or another in all the great world religions, tells us to treat our neighbors as we would like to be treated. Not only can we no longer ignore the Golden Rule, but now the whole world is our neighbor. In religious terms, it has become very hard to justify war any more. Like it or not, we are not just American citizens any more — we have all become world citizens. Now we must ask the questions that follow on this change: What does it mean to be a world citizen? How have our moral and ethical and religious responsibilities changed now that we are world citizens?

So I don’t have any answers for you this morning, all I have is questions. It looks like a war in Iraq is inevitable, and all I have for you is questions. But as the Scotty dog in the story learned, sometimes it’s better to ask the right questions than it is to have all the answers. Here is where we religious liberals can make a distinctive contribution: we are good at asking tough questions. In the weeks ahead — in the years ahead — let us continue to ask ourselves, to ask our country, what it means to be world citizens.