Transforming Flashes of Insight into Abiding Light
a sermon by Cricket Potter
given on Sunday, February 26, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“The human opportunity, the religions tell us,
is to transform our flashes of insight into abiding light.
— Huston Smith
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from Huston Smith’s classic book The World’s Religions. The first chapter begins with this story:
I write these opening lines on a day widely celebrated throughout Christendom a World-Wide Communion Sunday. The sermon in the service I attended this morning dwelt on Christianity as a world phenomenon. From mud huts in Africa to the Canadian tundra, Christians are kneeling today to receive the elements of the Holy Eucharist. It is an impressive picture.
Still, as I listened with half my mind, the other half wandered to the wider company of God-seekers. I thought of the Yemenite Jews I watched six months ago in their synagogue in Jerusalem: dark-skinned men sitting shoeless and cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in the prayer shawls their ancestors wore in the desert. They are there today, at least a quorum of ten, morning and evening, swaying backwards and forwards like camel riders as they recite their Torah, following a form they inherit unconsciously from the centuries when their fathers were forbidden to ride the desert horse and developed this pretense in compensation. Yalcin, the Muslim architect who guided me through the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, has completed his months’ Ramadan fast, which was beginning while we were together; but he too is praying today, five times as he prostrates himself toward Mecca. Swami Ramakrishna, in his tiny house by the Ganges at the foot of the Himalayas, will not speak today. He will continue his devotional silence that, with the exception of three days each year, he has kept for five years. . . . Dai Jo and Lai San, Zen monks in Kyoto. . . have been up since three this morning, and until eleven tonight will spend most of the day sitting immovable in the lotus position as they seek with intense absorption to plumb the Buddha-nature that lies at the center of their being.
What a strange fellowship this is, the God-seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange, ethereal harmony?
2. Our second reading is from the Jewish mystical writings of the Kabbalah. These words address the life religion calls us to.
Imitate your Creator. Then you will enter the mystery of the supernal form, the Divine image in which you were created. If you resemble the divine in body but not in action, you distort the form. . . . For the essence of divine image is action. Let your neighbor’s honor be as precious to you as your own, for you and your fellow are one and the same. That is why we are commanded: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” You should desire what is right for your fellow; never denigrate him or wish for his disgrace. . . . You should feel as bad for such suffering as if it were your own.
Today’s sermon has been percolating in my head for quite a while.
It began with our Question Box Sunday back in January.
One question that we didn’t have time to answer caught my eye and got me thinking.
That question was:
“In your opinion, is there an underlying message in the world’s religions?”
Then two weeks ago, on a blizzardy and truly magical Sunday here,
Roger gave a sermon about what it takes to be an excellent church.
His sermon and the talk-back afterward got me thinking about the larger topic of religion.
What is this endeavor we all do together that we call religion?
Why do we gather as we do,
getting up early on Sunday mornings and staying late for weeknight meetings
when there are so many other things vying for our time and attention?
Now, these are all huge questions with entire sections of seminary libraries devoted to these topics.
Perhaps ignorance is bliss,
but the vast territory of these questions hasn’t stopped me from wanting to tackle them myself.
Particularly now, at this point in our church life.
As we contemplate growing some of our programs,
bringing an assistant minister on-board,
and possibly reconfiguring some of our space here at First Parish,
we are asking what it is we do well and what it is we want to do better.
So, I invite you to take a few big steps back with me,
to look at religion and religions,
to see what we are called to and why.
My hope is that in taking this broad-stroke view,
we will find greater clarity for our own faith journeys
and for our work as a community of faith.
Paraphrasing a motivational statement I remember hearing often in my early career life,
“How can you get there, if you don’t know where there is?”
I know no better place to start in this endeavor than with the word “religion.”
At its core, religion is about binding together that which has been set asunder.
At least, that is what its Latin root religio means: to rebind or tie together again.
Looking back some 70,000 years,
long before religion became “organized,”
people were doing religion
as they came together to grapple with the mysteries of life and the world around them.
People came together to tell stories that helped them make sense of the mysteries –
of birth and death, joy and suffering, sunlight and darkness,
of the seasons and the years and all the fluctuations of creation itself.
People also came together to practice rituals
that helped them to embrace and celebrate the sacred mystery that they felt pervaded all of life.
But eventually, as often happens with human endeavors, trouble started brewing.
And here I share an illustration from Huston Smith:
There is a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success -- that he had seized hold of the Truth – Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.”
Sadly, a good number of us can speak to how the institution of religion has hurt us
or at least stifled our own valuable questioning and wondering.
And on a larger scale, all one has to do is read the newspapers or turn on the TV news
to learn of religion’s less than admirable legacy in the world around us.
In the name of God, Allah, or a particular brand of religion,
people fight, kill, scorn, segregate, abuse, and torture.
Yet, here I am and here you are – doing religion.
We gather, we worship, we sing, we do small groups, we take classes,
we go out into the community and serve others,
and we even commit to being on committees all under the rubric of religion.
Why?
Why do we gather here and do what we do when we have other interests and pursuits
which are communal and rewarding in varying degrees?
My own personal answer –
and I can say this as one who spent many years seeking and wandering outside of religion –
is that we do it because we need it,
desperately.
Our being together and doing religion gives us something and calls us to something
that no other organized activity in life can.
This time together, this common journey we share,
brings a unity and a wholeness to our lives
that I for one haven’t been able to find elsewhere.
No sports activity or special interest group or social outlet can give me that sense of connection,
that sense of upholding and being upheld,
that being in a religious community can give.
It’s that binding together thing I mentioned earlier.
And that brings me back to Huston Smith’s story from our first reading.
From the men swaying like camel riders as they recite the Torah,
to the Muslim honoring the Ramadan fast,
and the Buddhist monks up since three in the morning,
sitting immovable in the lotus position as they meditate for hours on end,
and the Christians across the globe
sharing in Communion on World-Wide Communion Sunday --
we are all seeking that something more in our own way.
We are all seeking meaning, hope, and connection.
And while it may seem like a cacophony to a casual observer,
I am struck by the degree of agreement across the world’s religions.
All religions seek to provide unity and meaning –
to get at the substance of life and death
and to describe as best they can that which is ultimately indescribable.
The starting point is the life force or spirit that we feel underlies and pervades all of creation.
This spirit simply gets named and described differently be each religious tradition.
God, Goddess, Great Spirit, Tao, Brahman,
breath of life, source of all being, the light within --
these are just a few of our oh-so-human attempts to name the mystery that is beyond naming.
None of this seems particularly earth shattering so far.
There is a mystery,
and different people have tried to name that mystery and live it out in different ways.
I think that where religion gets exciting
is in its universal call to an alternative way of life,
its call to see and live life differently from the common culture.
Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed --
they all tried to break down barriers and connect people
to their own inner power,
to one another,
and to the larger sacredness of life.
And how did these barriers come down and the connections take shape?
By people coming together as community and then going out into the larger world,
by people reaching out with love and compassion
and uniting for service and justice.
As the Dalai Lama writes:
We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion. This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith. . . . Our own heart, our own mind is the temple. The doctrine is compassion.
And, as we heard proclaimed in our second reading from the Kabbalah,
Imitate your Creator. Then you will enter the mystery of the supernal form, the Divine image in which you were created. If you resemble the divine in body but not in action, you distort the form. . . . For the essence of divine image is action.
That action is one of breaking down walls,
lifting up our humanity,
and living out the oneness that ultimately sustains us all.
That brings me back to us here at First Parish.
What does all this say about how we do religion –
about who we are already as a church and what we hope to become?
Huston Smith suggests that our religion can help us “transform our flashes of insight into abiding light.”
What we do here gives us an opportunity
to transform our own flashes of insight into a greater abiding light.
We listen and dialogue;
we reach in deep and reach out far;
we build connections and strengthen community here at First Parish
with the hope that we can then do so in the larger world.
All that we do on a regular basis –
from worship and church school and the daily business of the church;
to what we do on a yearly basis such as our upcoming stewardship campaign;
to this important time in the church’s life when we are broadening our vision
to include the work of an assistant minister
and the possible revision of our space.
This is all a reflection of our individual insights and the greater abiding light we hope to live out.
And if I may piggyback on Roger’s comments in his sermon two weeks ago,
“I’d say that as a church, we’re good – and we could be excellent.”
We’re good and we could be excellent – or at least we could do better.
Having been part of this community only half a year now,
I know how much good stuff we have to share.
The big-heartedness and generosity of spirit here are palpable.
Our light shines brightly.
And, I would add, we could help it to shine even more –
more intentionally and broadly.
We could help it to reflect more truly the calling I hear many of us talk about,
the calling to dig a little deeper, stretch ourselves a little farther,
and reach more effectively beyond this sanctuary and the sanctuary of Lincoln.
So, let’s take a risk.
Let’s expand our vision,
and share our light even more so that it can grow into a truly abiding light.
Let us remember how we are all bound together,
Lincoln and beyond,
by something more and in need of something more.
Going back to Huston Smith’s portrayal of the many and varied God-seekers,
I believe that there is a “strange, ethereal harmony” that rises above all the strains of the earth.
I also believe that it can only be heard if we all add our voices and do our part.
May it be so.