Healthy spiritual people learn to be ever vigilant in resisting the habit to make divisions. We divide people by race and sex and country. We separate the future from the present. We divide our minds from our bodies, our reason from our emotions. We isolate our faith life from the rest of our life. Or we don’t. That is, healthy people, don’t.
Click here to watch a video of this sermon
We come today, to the final Sunday of a long arc of Sundays that began in September.
I’ve spent all year, with you, looking at the concept of faith, and presenting the idea that a complete definition of faith includes three components.
Not just what we believe, which is sometimes what people think of as the entirety of faith. But also what we value. “What’s important to us?” is as central to our faith as are our answers to questions about God, or Jesus, or the afterlife. What are the principles that we follow? Principles that express our values, derived from our beliefs.
Because the world is the way that it is, some principles are important to lift up and further, others are to be avoided. Human societies and our personal lives work better if we’re kind, if we’re truthful, if we’re fair, and so on. That’s what I’ve observed. That’s my worldview. That is, from what we think we know to be true about reality, which are our beliefs, we are then led to lift up some ways of being as important, healthful, advantageous to ourselves personally and to each other and to the world we share.
It’s values, not beliefs, that form the center of our Unitarian Universalist faith communities. We love alike, in the words of Frances David, although we don’t all think alike.
And then, from our faith values, we are led to the third component of a complete faith: the actions that we take in our personal lives and in the world around us. “What do we do with our faith?” is the final component of a complete faith.
Actions are derived from values, the way that values are derived from beliefs.
So we can talk about a faith line. Our observations about the world create our beliefs. From our beliefs about material and immaterial existence and the world we live in and our human nature, we derive a set of values. From our values we then act in the world to make our lives and the world around us come more into line with what our values tell us is the ideal form of existence.
Because our beliefs are formed from our observations of reality, we should be careful to notice and acknowledge that reality is constantly changing. Certainly the world is not what it was two thousand or five thousand years ago, or the earth what it was a million years ago, or the universe what it was 13 billion years ago. Indeed, moment by moment, there’s an entirely new state of the world being brought into existence, created by natural processes and the collective choices of all conscious individuals.
Our actions, change the world. After we have acted, which is the final component of faith, reality is different than it was before we acted.
So the end of the faith line: actions, loops back to the beginning again: beliefs. Now that the world is the way it has now become, perhaps your previous beliefs need to be re-examined and possibly changed in light of this new reality.
Surely, you’ve had this experience yourself. You thought the world was one way, then you discovered you were wrong, or at least the truth is more complicated than you thought. Perhaps you learned a new scientific fact about the age of the universe, or the origins of the human species. Perhaps you thought people were essentially good, and then you read a news report about a horrible crime and you begin to wonder. Are people capable of that much evil?
Or you test a belief by taking action in the world. You wonder, “If I’m kind will people be kind back to me?” “If I trust that person, will he take advantage of me or treat me fairly?” “Are people capable of responding to a crisis like COVID or climate change, communally, selflessly, or will we only do what’s best for us individually?” Perhaps we’re not as smart as I thought, or as strong, or as good. Or perhaps you read an inspiring story about generosity and you’re prompted to think humanity might be a little better than you thought, after all.
As we learn new truths about reality, we should change our beliefs. Even if you knew reality perfectly and had all the right beliefs based on your perfect understanding, well, the world is different today. Your previously perfect beliefs aren’t a perfect fit any more for this new day, for this new reality.
The idea that documents like the U.S. Constitution or the Bible contain eternal truths, unchanging for all time, belies this obvious truth of constant change.
Hopefully, then, we can be flexible enough in our faith to go back to the beginning and adjust our worldview, which is our beliefs, to accommodate the new truth about the new reality the way it really is today.
The faith line becomes a faith circle, or a faith loop: the actions end feeding back in to the beliefs end. Or maybe not even a faith loop, but simply one thing, after all: beliefs, values, and actions swirling around and interacting, and expressing themselves as a single thing called faith.
I give this round-about summary of my thoughts about faith for two reasons: one, to give a little wrap-up to a year that we’ve spent following that outline, and two, to give a little introduction to my subject for today.
I want to think with you, today, about the quality of non-duality, which is the spiritual concept central to Hinduism but belonging to many faith traditions, that points to the error of dividing up existence into pieces, when reality is actually one. For instance, faith doesn’t really divide into three parts, although it might be helpful to analyze it that way. But ultimately, beliefs, values, and actions, are entirely interdependent, forming a single whole.
I call my sermon for today, “Get it Together.”
We’ve also been talking, during this last third of the year as we’ve been looking at the actions component of faith, about how to make effective social change. And here again, the advice of non-duality, “Get it Together” is helpful.
The goal of social justice work, so often, is to raise the individual to the communal, the piece to the whole.
Injustice usually stems from the mistaken perception that we are not all one, that some part of existence can be labeled as a piece separate from the rest, not worthy of consideration or inclusion in the greater movement of the whole.
We do this with people, for instance, when we say that different skin colors justify treating people differently. That black men and women for instance are not fully human, and therefore justify slavery. Or when we say that native peoples in the Americas, or elsewhere around the world, are appropriately conquered and that assuming their lands and wealth is justified because we make a division between conquerors and colonists, and the people already in the land.
We make divisions when we say that it isn’t necessary to include gay and lesbian couples when we write marriage laws. We make divisions when we say that men should have autonomy over their bodies, but women, at least when they’re pregnant, don’t have the same right. We make divisions when we say that American citizens have human rights to housing, jobs, healthcare, personal safety, and economic opportunity, but immigrants can be treated differently.
We make divisions when we say that human beings have a certain place and privilege in the environment and the lives of animals and plants, and the natural systems of water and earth and air can be considered separately from human lives, or ignored all together when we make our human plans.
We make divisions in other ways, too. In the debate over climate change we divide the future from the present. Present day needs for cheap gas, and economic structures embedded in present-day jobs like coal-mining, and global shipping, can be neatly divided from future consequences like rising sea levels and dangerously wild weather.
We divide our minds from our bodies, our rationality from our feelings. We forget that the mind is associated with the brain, and that the brain is a physical part of our bodies. We forget that our rationality is dependent on our feelings and that very often our cool reasoning is merely an after-the-fact justification for doing what we wanted to do anyway.
In terms of faith, too often, people think of religion as something they do on Sunday, and that the moral principles of their faith have no bearing on the work they do during the week, or the way they treat their family or their neighbors. Or, even more extremely, I see in the American Evangelical church that we let our political goals completely cannibalize our churches, and divide off the actual person and teachings of Jesus, as something esoteric and inconsequential.
If this division-making is the cause of so much pain and injustice in our lives, then the solution is to get it together. The solution is to bring together what we have separated. The solution is to see the falsity in our dual thinking. Instead of dividing up the world and our communities and our own persons into this and that, to strive as we are able to see a simple, “one.”
A Powell Davies, the Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C. from 1944 to 1957, wrote these words we used for our Call to Worship this morning:
“What are we, any of us, but strangers and sojourners
Forlornly wandering through the nighttime until we draw together
And find the meaning of our lives in one another,
Dissolving our fears in each other’s courage, making music together
And lighting torches to guide us through the dark? We belong together.”
We belong together: gay and straight, men and women, all races, all delightful human differences untied in a single humanity.
We belong together: human life, and animals, birds, and fish, and insects. Plant life. All living things united by the single spirit of life.
We belong together: one earth system, the water cycle, and the winds that blow, the slow movement of continents, the mountains built-up by volcano and earthquake and slowly eroding.
We belong together: a past that lives in our bones, a present that sings in our heart, a future of joy or struggle created by our present choices.
We belong together. Thinking and feeling, moral principles, political ideals, calls to compassion and justice, and accountability, and responsibility.
One integrated personality. One united humanity. One interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. More than a part, we are the whole. We are it.
In the words of the poet James Broughton:
“This is it
And I am it
And you are it
And so is that
And he is it
And she is it
And it is it
And that is that.”
If our duality thinking is the cause of our social problems, then non-duality thinking should be a tool of our social change work.
We must be careful, then, in doing our work for social change, that we don’t regress to strategies and policies that continue to divide us.
We can’t refuse to meet. We can’t refuse to talk. We can’t shun. We can’t ignore. We can’t disinvite or leave out. We can’t name any piece as unworthy of participation in the whole.
In the words of this morning’s chalice lighting:
May the light of this chalice give light and warmth to our community,
When we are joyful and when we despair.
And may we feel the warmth spread from our circle
To wider and wider circles,
Until all know they belong
To the one circle of life.
And so we come at last to Unitarian Universalism, a fitting place to end this year long examination of our faith.
From the Unitarian truth that every individual is a person of worth and dignity, who arrives bearing invaluable, unrepeatable gifts, that we must seek out, gather in, and grow from…
Our little circle spreads out to embrace wider and wider circles…
Until we come to the Universalist truth that we are all in this together, all of us united in a common destiny…
A final definition of community which holds us all, and all we are, and all we were, and all we will be, and all we have of justice and ever have had of beauty and ever will have of joy, every experience, every lesson, all truth, all faith.
“we of all ages, women, children, men,
infants and sages, sharing what we can.
Sing now together this, our hearts’ own song.”
Together.