For the rest of this church year we look at the goals of faith. What’s it for? There are both individual spiritual goals (what my faith does for me), which is where we will start, and there are broader religious goals (what my faith tradition hopes for all people), which we will get to in spring.
Happy New Year everyone.
Has it ever felt more like we need a new year?
But let’s admit two things. Or at least I will, your experience might be different.
I admit, the old year wasn’t all bad. In fact, for me personally, it was a pretty good year. The small things that affect my life alone were all pretty good. I had the fun, and the love, and the friends, and the community, and a good job, and all that, that for most of us counts as a good life. Not too bad. It would be ungrateful not to notice how good I had it, once again, last year. And it’s probably not good spiritually for any of us to dismiss an entire year with a harsh “good riddance” when our few years of life are such a precious commodity.
And second we should all admit, as we step into the new year, that much of the old year is still with us. Not a lot has changed, honestly, between last week and today. What made us miserable last week is still causing misery today. We can’t get away from the past that easily. We have to work our way out of our problems, not merely escape from them. We have to do the work.
And so there is work to do this year. Obstacles already arranged before us. The calendar is new, but a lot of the landscape is already filled in. Furniture in a darkened room we have to walk around to get where we’re going. A mine car on a track that’s just going to keep going where it’s going unless we expend some purposeful effort. That’s how the new year looks to me.
More than ever the reading from Dag Hammarskjold, Michael gave us as our Opening Words this morning sounds right to me. A reading for this particular new year:
I am being driven forward into an unknown land.
The pass grows steeper the air colder and sharper
a wind from my unknown goal stirs the strings of expectation.
Still the question shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds a clear pure note in the silence.
Dag Hammarskjold was the UN Secretary General from 1953 to 1961. He died in a plane crash in Zambia while on official business, nearing the end of his second term as the UN head. The Opening Words come from a kind of spiritual diary he kept throughout his life: meditations and poetry on sacrifice and service and the purpose of life. The diary was published two years after his death under the title “Markings.”
In the Opening Words Hammarskjold describes the spiritual feeling of moving through life. He says he is “being driven forward into an unknown land.”
Entering this new year feels a little like this.
The way is hard and getting harder. The circumstances forbidding. He says, “The pass grows steeper the air colder and sharper.”
And yet there is a destination at the end of this path worth the struggle Hammarskjold says he is moving toward an unknown land. He says he feels “a wind from my unknown goal.”
But he also says something about “there” that implies he does have a sense of the goal he’s walking toward. “There where life resounds a clear pure note in the silence.”
The goal is “unknown” because the future is always unknown. He knows where he’s going, he just hasn’t been there yet. He calls it “my unknown goal.” It’s his goal. It just isn’t known to him yet, because it’s still an unrealized goal.
And despite its hardship and mystery, Hammarskjold’s trip is hopeful. He says, that though the goal is distant, “a wind from my unknown goal stirs the strings of expectation.”
So he’s excited. He’s eager. He knows where he’s going even without knowing exactly what he will find when he gets there.
The name of Hammarskjold’s book, by the way, is “Markings.” It’s the English translation of the Swedish word for the signs posted on mountain trails that help mountain climbers find their way.
So the trip will be difficult, steep and cold, but there are signposts along the way. Follow the pass, follow the markings, we will get there, together.
We spent the last several months talking about the doing part of religion. What are the actions that we take to explore and deepen our faith inwardly, and to express our faith outwardly? Those actions, called Spiritual Practices, are the doing part of religion. What do you do?
This morning, and through the rest of this church year, I want to turn to a different foundational issue of religion: what’s it for?
We’ve talked about what we do. Now I want to talk about why.
Why are we religious? What do we hope we will get out of this? There’s a significant sacrifice involved of time, and mental energy, not to mention the Stewardship Campaign coming up next month. Although I did just mention that, didn’t I?
But why? What’s it for? What’s the goal?
Before you start a journey, it’s good to know where you’re going.
Talking about goals seems like a good way to start a new year. Where are you going this year.? To what end? Where do you want to be by year’s end? Who do you want to be a year from now?
Tomorrow, January 6, is the Christian holiday of Epiphany. It celebrates several events in Jesus’ life: his Dedication at the Temple as an infant when he formally receives his name, his Baptism as an adult which starts him on his life’s work, and the Transfiguration when a few of Jesus’ followers see him revealed as a prophet equal to Moses and Elijah and a voice from the sky calls him “son.”
All of those stories are about claiming your identity. Not who you should be. Not who others think you are. Maybe not the person you have been until now. But stepping into the role of being the person you were born to be. Maybe this is the year you could begin to be who you are. That’s a good goal for a new year.
And maybe the church could help. Why do you come to church? What do you want from your spiritual community? Why are putting in the effort to commit to a spiritual practice? What do you hope to achieve?
Last week, our church’s Racial Justice Team asked me to join their monthly meeting. They wanted to talk with me about how our church could be more intentional in living out the line from our mission statement that names one of this church’s goals as, “To lead by creating a multi-cultural, anti-racist, anti-oppressive congregation and denomination.”
They wanted to ask me what I could do to help. They had some suggestions like I could preach a sermon, or we could invite guest speakers to preach on specific topics.
I told them that before I could help them strategize effectively that I needed to be more clear about the goal. Where is this journey going? How will we know when we got there? What is the clear note we will hear, what is the wind that draws us forward?
Here are a few of the responses from the Racial Justice Team, from my notes.
A goal of learning to “de-center whiteness” in our congregation, making room for stories of people of color. Not carrying around the false picture in our head that the generic UUCLB member has a white face and a white experience.
The goal of creating a loving community where, with love, we can “call-in” people who have stepped out of our covenant, and also, non-defensively reflect on our own behavior when we fall short of our ideals.
The goal of reminding ourselves of the long history of attention this congregation has paid to the issue of racial justice. Newer folks in the congregation might not be aware.
A goal of “doing, not just saying” our anti-racist values. Of addressing the dissonance between how we perceive ourselves and how we actually act. The goal of a church where we are always talking about ways we can be more “multi-cultural, anti-racist and anti-oppressive” where ideas of how to engage more deeply in this work are “always coming up.”
Hearing those goals I realized that the Team was describing a cultural change in the church. That’s not the kind of goal that’s met through an interim minister preaching an occasional pointed sermon about race, not inviting a guest preacher. Instead we discussed strategies that might provoke cultural change, owned by every member of the congregation. Strategies of inviting many members of the congregation to give testimonials during worship sharing their stories about how they’ve approached anti-racist work, successes, mis-steps, learnings. We talked about ways we might make people of color more visible in our congregation. We talked about a pervasive shift in liturgical language, where anti-racist ideas and goals are constantly present in worship, in responses, and prayers, and in the sermon, even when the sermon isn’t about race issues.
You might see some of that coming up in the next few weeks. But we’re still working on how we will do this work. The conversation will continue. But we felt even today it was appropriate for me to lay out something like what I just did. An invitation for the new year from me and the Racial Justice Team “Here’s what we’re trying to do…”
We’re going to move through this pass. The goal is Beloved Community. We’re going to look for the signposts. We’re going to climb and we’re going to slip. It’s a journey. Eventually we’ll get to that place where a clear pure note resounds.
So we’re going to be talking about religious goals for the next several months.
Particular goals. And more universal goals.
I’m going to start with several personal goals, that is, religious goals that an individual might be seeking for themselves. What do I want my religion to do for me?
And then, after Easter we will switch to communal goals, that is, goals that various religions have for all of humanity, or all existence. What does my faith hope for all people?
We’ll start with personal goals next week.
For today, I want to end with a short reflection on the nature of goals themselves.
Thinking about goals I started thinking about sports and games, where goals are very important. What’s the goal of this game? We ask. How do you know when you’ve won?
Some games have very specific goals. For a jigsaw puzzle the goal is to complete the puzzle.
Some sports have goals that are actually called goals. There are goalies and goalkeepers. To score a point in soccer you have to get the ball into the goal. And then the crowd screams, “Goal!” In American football, everybody yells, “Touchdown!” but it’s still a goal. And there are field goals and goal posts.
Goals in many team sports are very clear and discrete. The game ends when the time runs out. Who got the most goals? There’s a winner and a loser.
The highest score wins but notice that it doesn’t usually matter what the score actually is, just that it be higher than the other team. And it doesn’t matter how much higher; winning by a point is the same as winning by a hundred points.
In a footrace or a horserace, the winner is the one who first crosses the finish line. But the winner is still the winner even if, in the next race, all the other horses come in faster. And the slowest runner is still the loser, even if that runner’s time would have been a world record 10 years ago.
A lot of individual sports are more about judges scores and personal bests, rather than objective goals like putting a basket through a hoop the most times in 4, 12 minute periods (I had to look that up). What’s the goal? Well, sometimes, the goal is just do better than last time.
Consider games like most arcade games. These games have goals like kill aliens, and keep killing aliens, until eventually the aliens kill you. These games always end in failure. Keep stacking the bricks and every time you completely fill a line the line disappears but there’s always more bricks coming. You don’t “win” these games. The goal is to keep playing as long as you can.
That sense of incompleteness makes video games addictive so you keep playing, watching advertisements, or putting more quarters in the machine.
Completion brings a sense of satisfaction. Look what I did as you put the final piece into the jigsaw. But where there is no final end, one has to think where the sense of satisfaction comes in.
Like sports, some life goals are very discrete. I’m going to marry the prince. I’m going to be elected President. I’m going to retire by age 55. You know exactly what you want. You achieve your goal or you don’t. You know when you’re done.
Other goals are more open-ended. They are more like personal best goals. I’m going to write a good sermon. I’m going to call my mother. I’m going to host more dinner parties this year.
For these kinds of goals, the “goal” is not to come to the end and earn a prize, the goal is to have an experience throughout the game. It has to be fun stacking those video game bricks because that’s really all the game is.
So people say things like, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”
And I agree.
Even a game like basketball that has a clear ending and a winner or loser needs to be fun to watch or play throughout the game or otherwise why do it? For some games the question isn’t, “Did we win?” but “Are we having fun?” Not, “Are we done?” but, “How are we doing?”
Winning isn’t everything.
But winning is something. The game wouldn’t make any sense if there wasn’t some way to measure success. It’s the destination, the end, the goal (fastest time, most points, fewest strokes in golf) that define the game. The goal sets the rules. The destination directs the journey.
If I gave you a jumbled deck of cards and told you to put them in order by suits and numbers that would sound like work and you’d get bored pretty fast. But if I gave you a jumbled deck of cards and told you to put them in order but only by following a specific set of rules, then suddenly it’s a game called Solitaire and people will spend hours playing.
So we need to enjoy the journey, because that’s called living our life. But we need goals to order our lives, to give our lives a direction, a purpose. We need to be clear about that goal, and to keep the goal before us, to guide our days:
Forward through the ages, in unbroken line,
Wider grows the vision, realm of love and light;
for it we must labor, till our faith is sight.
Bound by God’s far purpose in one living whole,
move we on together to the shining goal.