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.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at Unitarian Church of Norfolk, Virginia (Unitarian Universalist). 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 Christian scriptures, a story from the travels of the wandering rabbi and teacher named Jesus:

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept these commandments since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Sermon

Just before the offertory, I read a story from the Christian scriptures. A wealthy man comes to the rabbi Jesus and tells Jesus all the good things he has done with his life. He has led an exemplary life, and Jesus praises him, but says, “There’s just one more thing you have to do — give away all your money.” You noticed, of course, that reading came just before the offertory, and not long after an eloquent statement about the pledge drive. I promise, this was a coincidence, and not a ploy to increase your pledge or the amount of money you dropped in the plate this morning. Although if you did drop more money in the plate, more power to you.

In any case, Jesus tells the rich man to give away all his money. The man is shocked, and he goes away grieving. Of course he is shocked! All his life, people have been telling him how fortunate he is to be wealthy. He has kept all the commandments, he has led an exemplary life, but then Jesus tells him it’s not enough. All his meritorious conduct, the fact that he has honored his father and mother, refrained from committing adultery, neither lied nor cheated — this is not enough, he must give up all his money besides.

Isn’t adulthood like that? We try to do everything we’re supposed to do. We try to stay more or less honest, we take care of family as best we can, we put money in the collection plate most Sundays, we do all those things that we’re supposed to do. And it seems to me that every time I get to the point of feeling a little bit comfortable, something comes along that that causes me to question what I’ve learned: one of your parents dies, you get laid off, much to your surprise you find yourself separated from your spouse or partner, — a war begins.

The children’s story this morning told a similar kind of story. The scholar from the university at Kyoto is writing a treatise on evil. But he gets stuck at a certain point, travels to visit with the Zen Master. He wants to ask her what she thinks about evil, but being a good academic first he has to rehash all the authorities he has consulted, he has to tell about all the research he has done. And what does the Zen Master do? She pours hot tea all over his hands and into his lap.

Haven’t I been in that situation myself? I’m living my happy little life, chattering on about this, that, and the other thing, when suddenly reality painfully intrudes. I get into hot water, either literally or figuratively. And like the Scholar, every time this happens I am surprised by it. You’d think I would have learned by now.

It was so easy when we were little kids! I remember when I was about seven years old, my older sister was learning long division. I had no idea what long division was, but I knew that once I learned it, I would be a big kid, too. It seemed like there was such a clear progression through life: you learn your multiplication tables, then you learn fractions, then long division, and algebra, and next thing you know, you’re a grownup and you’re done.

By the time I was a teenager, it was starting to seem less clear-cut. I got my driver’s license, and then I found out that I had to pay for the insurance and the gas myself — that was a shock! And by the time I reached adulthood, nothing seemed simple any more.

Psychologist Robert Kegan tells us that the kind of learning we do in adulthood is indeed different than the kind of learning we do in childhood. In childhood, we pretty much know where we’re going: we are on the way to becoming adults. Kegan writes we have learned that the minds of children are indeed different than the minds of adults. When we see a child expected to handle something beyond his or her capacity, like working 12 hours a day in a factory at the age of ten, something inside says, “That’s just too much to ask!” We feel protective, we feel outraged, we feel sympathy.

But, Kegan contends, once we get to adulthood, we aren’t yet finished. Adulthood is not a finished state of being — we keep on growing and changing as adults. Nor is there any one correct way to grow as an adult; we adults face many possibilities. Kegan calls these many possibilities “a vast evolutionary expanse.”

As Danny told you, I am the interim religious educator for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, also known by its initials “CLF.” CLF is a Unitarian Universalist congregation that serves isolated religious liberals around the world, both through our print publications and through Internet services. And what I see in our members is a real hunger for adult religious education of all kinds. Our ministerial intern offered an online “New UU” course this winter, and it filled up almost immediately. Parents who are doing Sunday school at home tell me that they want religious education material that’s for their children, but that they can learn from, too. We have online discussion groups going on. There’s this real hunger for adult religious education out there, and we just can’t meet the need.

Religious education for children is a lot simpler than religious education for adults. We know what the basic goal for children is: we want them to grow up knowing to be moral, ethical, and religious persons. But we adults are already grown up. We’re already supposed to know how to be moral, ethical, and religious beings, and I don’t know about you, but as I ease into my forties there are times when I feel less sure of myself rather than more sure of myself. Children grow up, constantly increasing in competence, heading towards adulthood. It’s not that straightforward for adults.

This is what I see in the story about the rich man who comes to talk with Jesus. Even though the rich man has kept all the commandments, Jesus tells him to give away all his wealth and focus instead on the Kingdom of God. You can interpret Kingdom of God in any way you want, but in essence Jesus is saying that there is something more important than acquiring and keeping wealth; there is something more important than doing what the rich man thought he was supposed to do; there’s another whole set of rules out there.

Not that money is necessarily bad. Jesus doesn’t say that. I know have been in moderately precarious financial situations, and I’m here to tell you that it’s just fine to have enough money to buy food and keep a roof over your head. I believe Jesus is trying to tell us not to get obsessed with money — or not to get obsessed with anything, for that matter. Life is bigger than that.

Life is big enough to contain both good and evil. Jesus certainly knew about evil, just as he knew about goodness. But we can be distracted by trivial things, like lots of money, and try to ignore the big things, like good and evil. One of the things we have to do as adults is to confront evil.

Evil is out there in the world, there’s no doubt about it. We are at war right now in order to confront evil — of course, some of us disagree with war as an appropriate method for combating this particular evil, and we may disagree if this is the evil we should be confronting first.

But I don’t want to look at evil from the point of view of politics, I want to look at evil from the point of view of religion. We are religious liberals, and we have never found evil to be simple or straight-forward. We do not see simple black-and-white outlines; we see shades of gray. More importantly, evil for us is not simply something that is “out there” somewhere — evil for us can be found anywhere, in families, in institutions, even within ourselves. We know that evil can be right here next to us, or right here inside us, and this knowledge tends to make religious liberals cautious: we want to be sure of our ground before we actually go and do something. We would rather argue and discuss and take classes for an extended period of time before we actually go out and do something. I’m sure you all know the old joke: a Unitarian Universalist is on the road to heaven. After she gets over her surprise that heaven actually exists, and that there is a road to it, she comes to a fork in the road. She reads the sign there: to the left, heaven; to the right, a discussion group about heaven. And of course she turns right.

As a religious educator, I hear a call for more classes, and for more discussion groups. They have their place, no doubt about it. But we can’t always step aside from the main path to talk and argue. At some point, we have to get ourselves back on the road to heaven — assuming heaven exists. Learning, being, and doing must coexist all at once.

Right now, the force of daily events requires immediate action from some of us. If you are in the military, your course of action is clear: your vocation requires you to put aside any ambivalence and act. If you are a peace activist, your course of action is clear: your convictions require you to put aside any ambivalence and act. Such people don’t have time to take a course or go to a discussion group before getting started. This may be true of all of us: we soon may all be swept up in the events of this time.

What Jesus is telling the rich man applies equally to us, however different our circumstances might be. The danger for the rich man is that he will be swept up by his wealth, so much so that he ignores what is truly important. The danger for us — in these confusing, overwhelming times — is that we will be swept up in the events of this time, so much so that we ignore what is truly important. Jesus has a name for what is truly important — he calls it “the Kingdom of Heaven.” We don’t have to call it that, but we can mean approximately the same thing if we say that what is truly important is a world where peace reigns supreme, and where all persons live in dignity and without fear.

We must hold on to this vision; in the words of the civil rights song, we have to “keep our eyes on the prize,” and hold on. I know of at least one way to hold on to that vision, and that is to do what we are doing right now: to gather together as a congregation of loving and caring people. Edward Frost, minister of the UU Congregation of Atlanta, Georgia, recently wrote: “We [must] hold each other in love and respect, regardless of our disagreements, regardless of how deeply at odds we may find ourselves with the convictions of others. This is the meaning of community. In time of crisis, our religious task is to be united in our desire for peace but united also in our fervent prayers for all who grieve, for all who suffer, and for all whose conviction of duty has placed them in harm’s way.”

I want to go back to the story of the rich man and Jesus one last time. Most of the time, when you hear this story, whoever retells it assures us that the rich man has failed; he is not going to give up his money, he is not going to follow Jesus, and he is not going to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. But I understand the story differently.

At the end of the story, we hear that the rich man was shocked by the words of Jesus, and that he “went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” I believe he is grieving because he knows that he is going to go and give up his wealth and his many possessions — he is grieving the loss of his wealth. He knows he is going to find it hard to make this change, but he is going to do it. In my telling of the story, after he goes and gives up all his possessions, he returns to Jesus, and joins the little community of people that has gathered around Jesus. He misses all his money, all his fine possessions, but he also knows that by finding a community that will support and nurture him and love him, he has found something infinitely more valuable.

In my telling, this becomes a story of hope — the hope that when confronted with a difficult choice, we can sometimes make the right decision. It is a story of courage — the courage of someone who accepts the hard lesson life has to teach him, the courage of someone who gives up precious possessions in order to gain even more precious community. And of course, it is a story of love — the love that we human beings are capable of giving to each other in blessed community.

May it be so with us. At the best of times, it is not easy to learn how to be an adult. At the best of times, we need one another, we need this blessed community. Today we live in times of trouble, times of gathering uncertainty. We know the way to overcome evil is to build goodness, to reach for heaven and bring it down here to earth. In times of trouble, we need each other even more, we need this blessed community even more, we need to build up the goodness in our lives. So it is we set aside time each week to come together, to remind ourselves of our vision of a world filled with goodness; we hold on to that vision together:

Our small, blue planet spins through the infinite void, headed towards a destiny that we are determined shall be ruled by peace.