Evening Star

I went down all alone, to the black pond.
Slow summer day.
No one around.
Not even a bird singing, not a wind awake, nothing.

Yet nothing could ever convince me
that I was alone.

If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck-
he isn’t just the summer day the red rose,

he’s the snake he’s the mouse,
he’s the hole in the ground,

for which thoroughness, if anything, I would adore him,
if I could adore him.

Adore him.

   Mary Oliver
   from "Evening Star"
   "The Leaf and the Cloud"

Psalm 5

G ive ear to my words, O LORD; give heed to my sighing.
2  Listen to the sound of my cry, my God, for to you I pray.
3  O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I plead with you, and watch.
4  For you are not a God who tolerates wickedness; evil will not stay with you.
5  Those who boast will not stand before you;  you turn away all those who hate.
6  You do not listen to lies; and abhor the violent and dishonest.
7  But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, am permitted to enter your house, and can bow down toward your holy temple to worship you.
8  Lead me, O LORD, in your righteousness; make your way straight before me.
11 Let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy. Spread your protection over them, so that those who love you may exult in you.
12  For you bless the righteous, O LORD; you cover them with favor as with a shield.
 

My sermon this morning is inspired by our Responsive Reading from Deuteronomy 6, perhaps one of the central Biblical passages of the whole Western religious tradition.  "Thou shall love the Lord Thy God, with all of your heart, your soul, your might."  Although the words are attributed to Moses by the author of Deuteronomy, we, now knowing the history of the Bible, understand that these words were written nearly a 1000 years after Moses lived, which is a matter of some dispute anyway.  The book of Deuteronomy was written around the time of the exile to Babylon in the 6th Century Before the Current Era.  And Deuteronomy shows a process in which the ancient Israelites were bringing their religion inward, making it personal, concerning themselves less with public worship and public ceremony, but more with personal religion.  And so, here in this crucial statement of the requirements of the faith, Moses is shown saying that people must LOVE the Lord, must LOVE God.  Notice what it does not say:  It does not say "obey" God; doesn't say "believe in" God.  It's Not "be loyal" to God.  Not even is it " worship" God, but it's "Love God".  In other words, Make your religion personal and make it emotional.

When I look for the heritage of our mission and values statement:  where we say that "We are committed to moving closer to truth, to reality, to God".   this is what I think of as our root in the Western tradition, this injunction in Deuteronomy, which as you probably know is quoted by Jesus, according to the gospel of Luke.

This notion of us "loving" God is one, however, which seems to never quite take hold in the religious consciousness.  We talk about people who are "god-fearing" souls, and we talk about, rather endlessly in some quarters, about God and/or Jesus loves us, and we talk about Believing in God, and occasionally trusting God, but rarely on the positive injunction to us that we, you and I, should love God.

I offer up as evidence here the UUA by-laws which in section C-2.1 explains the six sources of the Unitarian Universalist tradition, one of which is, and I quote:  "Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves."  Which is almost right, but misses the point, doesn't it.

My point this morning is that loving God is not the same as believing in God, which is not an easy task in this modern age.  Nor is it the same as understanding God, which they tell us is impossible.  And it is not even the same as approving of what we can see about God's morality.  In a world in which we see earthquakes, like that in India, or mass murder, and, as we have seen right around us, young and good people suddenly taken from life into death without warning and without any logical reason, in such a world, we will inevitably be questioning the ethics of God's actions.

All that said, I do want to suggest that perhaps we ought to take seriously this most ancient voice of our tradition which instructs us to try to love God. In other words, that we consider what the Hindus call the Bhakti path, the path of love and devotion.  There is a story about one of the earliest proponents of the Bhakti path, a 16th century poet Tulsidas:  I read the story in Huston Smith's book -- The World's Religions.  During his early married life, Tulsidas was inordinately fond of his wife, so attached to her that he couldn't stand for her to be away for even one day.  So one day, she went to visit her parents and who should show up right after lunch, but Tulsidas.  His wife exclaimed, "How passionately attached to me you are!  If you could only shift your attachment to God, you would reach in him no time."  Tulsidas agreed, and he is given credit for discovering the Bhakti path, although when you look at it, it was actually his wife who had the idea.

The principle is that all the deep love and devotion that lies within the human heart should be ultimately directed to God, and that is the way to draw closer to God, to the truth, to the ultimate reality.

I take very seriously the equation that we make in the mission statement and I have recalled in the title of this sermon.  God equals Truth equals Reality.  I believe that there is a place where all three of this concepts describe the same reality -- the fundamental way that things are.  So, I do not separate things of this world from the things of God.  I am with Vincent VanGogh on this one -- the way to love God is to love many things.  The way to love God is to open yourself to love the world, the fullness of reality.

So to help us along the Bhakti path, the path in which we learn to love God, I offer you a small list of things to contemplate.  I call this list:  Ten Things you gotta love about God.  They are in no particular order, but any one of them, I guarantee you, will, with enough contemplation, bring you closer to God, to the truth and to the ultimate reality.

1. When I cut my finger, it heals. There is a healing power that courses through all of the living world, that causes our cuts and nicks of our fingers to close and heal. Flesh knits itself back together, bones mend, antibodies grow in the bloodstream to fight off infection.  What mysterious power is this?   All of our medicines and surgical procedures are successful only to the extent that this inherent God-given healing power comes into play.

2. Because there is a healing power that courses through all the human world that allows us to recover from our  grievous losses.  Our parents, our spouses, our friends and colleagues, our teachers, even the children and the grandchildren we love are carted away into the land of death.  And we suffer Grief and loss so devastating that we cannot stand, nor sit, nor throw ourselves on the ground.  We cannot breath without weeping.   But yet somehow, somehow, over the long passage of time, pain melts into memory and memory into song, and those who mourn today will, in their own time and in their own way, someday live again, someday live with some measure of joy.   I have to love God because betrayed, broken battered hearts keep on beating.

3. And then there is the natural world itself, the planet we live on, teeming with life and bursting with beauty. Don't just look at the world, but look along the world to what must surely lies behind it. If you can imagine the process of its creation, surely what you see there is worthy of your praise. Listen again to the poem from Mary Oliver: If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck-he isn’t just the summer day the red rose, he’s the snake he’s the mouse, he’s the hole in the ground, for which thoroughness, if anything, I would adore him, if I could adore him.  And then she tells US to Adore Him. We should love God because she knows that it doesn't matter what you believe -- what matters is what you love. You have to love a God, I have concluded, if for no other reason than all the kinds of birds that live in Florida.  Such infinite variety and each one more beautiful than it needs to be.  And yet this is only what is spectacular and visible; there are tiny mites that live in your eyelashes that are as eloquent testimony to the teeming abundance of life on this planet, as cunningly made and intricately designed.

4. Not only do I feel compelled to love God when I consider the intricate beauty of the natural world, I have to marvel at the fact that we have been given the ability to appreciate beauty at all.  We are moved by music; we can lose ourselves when we dance together; external objects release a flood of associations and memories that can carry us away. Do cows have an aesthetic sense and find pleasure and joy in beauty?  I don't think so; this is a special gift given to us, for which we must be grateful.

5. Reason number 5:  Because wherever people have caused others to suffer, wherever there is cruelty, wherever there is injustice, there is a spark of rebellion and resistance that seems never to  be extinguished in the human breast.  It is why Martin Luther King, Jr. can say that " the arc of the Universe is long but it does bend toward justice."  Meaning this:  that there is something true and real and of God in the imperfect and stumbling steps toward human solidarity and empathy.

6. You gotta love God because wherever there is disaster and suffering -- whenever earthquake, or flood or tornadoes or church fires occur, you can count on the fact that people will come together to help each other.  I do not love God because God told one guy, Noah, to build an ark before a flood.  I love God, the truth and all of reality because whenever there is a flood, lots of people go out in fishing boats and rowboats and canoes and kayaks and rescue other people off of the roofs of their houses.  It's in the way that we are made.

7. And I love God because people can change their lives and start over.  When I was a chaplain in a public hospital, I would talk to people who were very sick because they drank too much.  I would listen to them tell me from their sickbed that now they knew that they had to stop drinking and that this time, they really would. And, of course, the temptation is to be very cynical about such promises.  And I usually was.   But then I noticed that I also met patients who would tell me that 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, they had been very ill and they realized what was happening, and they had stopped drinking back then, or they had stopped smoking back then, or doing other drugs.  Praise be to God's holy Name, but some of earnest sickbed promises and resolutions do come true!  And for everyone here who has screwed up and needed a do-over at least once in their life, let us be grateful.

8. The feelings of warmth, compassion, and community that exist among all people, even when there is no good reason for it, no underlying principle of self-preservation that would explain it.  This church community is a testament to that feeling. These feelings are in the way that we are made, part of the creation that surrounds us and supports us. Yes, that feeling is limited, and each one of us cares more for the people we know than the ones that we don't know.  But what is also clear is that each one of has the capacity for expanding the circle of our love and compassion to those who are not near us, nor like us, nor live as we do, and whose ways seem strange.  Our capacity for compassion is in the way that we are made, glory be to that which made us.

9. Further, we have implanted in us a moral sensibility, the ability to discern a difference between right and wrong, to reflect on the consequences of our actions and even our thoughts.  Our bible class constantly comes back to the writing of Paul that the ways of God is written on every human heart.  We have been blessed with the ability to imagine ourselves as better than we are.  And yes, sometimes that brings us pain and regret, but who among us would have it any other way?

10. And finally, I have to love God because I woke up this morning in my right mind, and not everybody did.

It is the gift of life,
this body,
these ten fingers and ten toes and face wet with tears,
this broken and battered heart,
these people
this church
this glorious sunny/rainy/cloudy/storming day
all of this
all of this
all of this

So how shall we grow closer to God?
By loving the Lord God with all our hearts, by loving the world God made with all our souls, by loving the truth with all our minds, by glorying in the reality of all of this,--  all of this --  all of this  --
Lead us, O lord,
make your ways known to us,
and let all who love you rejoice,
and let us ever sing for joy.