You Loved Me Before You Knew Me
October 4, 2010—Foxborough Universalist Church
Katie A. Lawson, Minister
READING 1
1 Corinthians 12:13-26 (NRSV)
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing where would the sense of smell be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
READING 2
From Releasing the Imagination (p.3-4)
Maxine Greene
One of the reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through which we can assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called “other” over the years. If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears. That is because, of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions.
Recall that for generations people were unable to conceive of little children constructing meaningful worlds for themselves or, in fact, making meaning at all, even as they learned to speak. At best, children were thought of as incomplete adults foraging in a world that did not “make sense” to them. Today, we read children’s poems and journals; we listen to their stories; we find ourselves actually entering into their realities by means not solely of our reasoning power but of our imagination…One of the advances of our time is a (sometimes grudging) recognition on the part of many that those we have long categorized as other for whatever reason (ethnicity, gender, religion, education, culture, mores, geographic location, physical condition) share in the human condition…Aware then, on some level of the integrity and the coherence of what may seem to us to be a totally alien world in the person of another, we are called upon to use our imaginations to enter into that world, to discover how it looks and feels from the vantage point of the person whose world it is. That does not mean we approve it or even necessarily appreciate it. It does mean that we extend our experience sufficiently to grasp it as a human possibility
SERMON
Somewhere it is written that at the heart of the Universalist tradition is the faith that underneath it all are “everlasting arms.” This is the comfort of our faith, that at the root of everything is not the sinful nature of humanity or an angry and condemning God, but instead these arms that hold all and that, if we were to try to describe what they feel like, are loving, and no one is excluded from their embrace. We believe as Paul says in Romans, that the holiest of all law is written on ALL of our hearts. We need not look to authorities or follow particular rules to know how to be good. We all were given the keys.
However, it needs to be said that to many people this reads as a sort of namby-pamby theology… a theology of the privileged who don’t know deeply enough the nature of suffering and evil. It is easy to believe in the goodness of people when YOU are not hungry, when YOU have power, when YOU feel belonging and connection to your society. When you are on the outside though or when you have been the victim of human cruelty, believing in human goodness and love as the answer may feel a little hollow at times. Rosemary Bray McNatt, a Unitarian Universalist minister, describes having the opportunity some years ago of having a long conversation with Coretta Scott King. When McNatt told Ms. King that she was about to begin her preparation to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, Ms. King surprised her with her delighted response: "Oh, I went to Unitarian churches for years, even before I met Martin," she said, "And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches when we were in Boston."[1]
What is hard to hear is what she said next. The gist of which was, "We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian.” Despite having indicated from early on in his training as a minister his affinity for “liberal theologies” like ours, Martin Luther King took a decidedly different turn. In his essay, "Pilgrimage to Non-Violence" published in 1960, King writes:
The more I observed the tragedies of history, and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. . . . I came to feel that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. . . . Reason, devoid of purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.
We could argue that Unitarian Universalism is a different religion than it was in 1960. It is. We could further argue that Universalism added a dimension to our theology after the merger in 1961 that didn’t exist in the Unitarianism of Martin Luther King’s experience. However, the apparent optimism about humanity stands. Is this naïve? Probably, especially when it is devoid of the “purifying power of faith.” Faith in what though? Surely, King was talking about a faith in God, but to him and for many of us, God, as John says is love.
Love is what describes the actuality of our commonality, the fact and the feeling that we are not so separate from each other and from it all as the world may tell us we are. Love is our underlying knowledge that we are all bound to one another and to the earth. Love is how we experience and describe our understanding that we are a part of a larger weave, be that weave ecological or mystical. Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth lays it out pretty clearly. “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” When we say, “I love you,” we are saying I FEEL that connection between us. Through you, I remember that I am connected.
This world is relentless in its preaching the gospel of separation, and it is no wonder we come to believe in it more than the coherence, beauty, and goodness that is the greater worth and truth of life. We are more likely to focus on the places where there are rifts—“Aunt Trudie is so annoying”, etc.—and when we speak of evil, of racism, of poverty, of corrupt power and oppression, we really are speaking about those things that distort our ability to know and remember where real truth lies—those things that keep us watchful, worried and isolated. We often believe in these things more than we really believe in love. A belief in the core goodness of people that is pasteurized by a real belief in love—that they are not separate from us—will not only not impede an urgent movement towards justice that characterized King’s work, but will drive it. King himself said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech said, “Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.” Believing in love is the first step to not being blindly obedient to the pressure exerted by those things that deny the simple truth that we are bound to one another.
As I hinted before, we express our faith in love as a faith in each other. If we have a job here it is to love one another deeply and to cradle each other in those everlasting arms. However, it is much easier to generally agree to love our neighbor and much harder to love him in his specificity. It’s hard to believe that we are all connected and to believe in each of our inherent goodness when so many of us are just so irritating…or mean…or destructive. AND it’s even harder to love in specificity people and beings we may never encounter, but loving people sort of generically will not bring justice the way that loving them specifically.
This is where imagination is key. In fact, as I told the kids, I think this is imagination’s primary purpose. As I have been carrying this baby around with me everywhere I go, I have been more and more convinced elemental to our loving well is imagination. Imagination is perhaps the biggest tool we humans have to combat all the evil that we bring upon the world. Exercising imagination, we can love people we have never met and try to imagine what it is they need to feel the everlasting arms wrapped around them.
Maxine Greene the great educator says, “…we are called upon to use our imaginations to enter into [another’s] world, to discover how it looks and feels from the vantage point of the person whose world it is. That does not mean we approve it or even necessarily appreciate it. It does mean that we extend our experience sufficiently to grasp it as a human possibility.” I’ve been carrying this baby around, this person whose gender, personality, specific needs or talents, dreams, and fears are all unknown to me. Still I find myself loving it in the most mundane of ways. I hung a mobile above its changing area and put my head down where its head will be to see if the animals hanging above looked threatening in any way (they actually did look a little scary, like the looming Macy’s Day parade balloons that used to freak me out when I was a kid). I found instead that one of the overhead spotlights, meant to illuminate art work would be shining in the baby’s eyes and so I dragged out a stool and got up there to swivel light in a different direction. I am reading about the harmful chemicals that are leached from certain plastic baby bottles and making sure that I buy glass ones. I am trying to play more music in the house and less news. All these things out of real love for this person I have yet to meet. Granted this is my BABY, but I think with discipline and imagination, we can love all sorts of people, BEINGS, we haven’t met.
This summer at the General Assembly of UU Congregations, Rebecca Parker, a Unitarian Universalist theologian described returning to a congregation that she had led over twenty years before. She had been instrumental in that congregation’s effort to be what the Methodists call a “reconciling congregation”—that is a congregation who stands firmly in the belief that supporting gay, lesbian and transgender folks is a part of living out Jesus’ message of universal love. That standing with these and other marginalized communities is a part of their job as Christians. Anyway, this church, which had declined to fifty some members and seemed to have lost its way when my colleague assumed the pulpit there was now thriving and was holding a celebration of their landmark decision to open their hearts, their minds, and their doors to all. They had invited Rebecca to come up for the celebration.
After the service and the reception that followed, a young woman who was maybe 20 caught Rebecca by the arm and said, “I just wanted to thank you for helping to create this place that saved my life.” The young woman described the depression and desperation that had been a part of her realization that she was gay and how finding this church had given her different eyes with which to look at herself. She was no longer condemned, no longer less than everyone else, but a child of God held in “everlasting arms.”
She said to Rebecca, “Before I even existed, you imagined me. Before you even knew me, you loved me.” Like me with my head down on the changing table, Rebecca straight and married at the time and her church, was able to imagine being gay and scared and vulnerable in a society that was just at the threshold of being able to more commonly accept homosexuality. They imagined they might need a church, she imagined the language that might make that person feel safe, she imagined what they might need to feel held. They loved a whole parade of people they had never even met.
Martin Luther King, again in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said:
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all [people]. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of [humanity]. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response which is little more than emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
This is our job. To love well not just those those around us, but those who are strangers to us. To imagine them, to wonder about them, to reach out our arms to hold them. Those who live across the ocean, those from different species, those who may live very near but whose lives will never directly intersect ours. The poet John Donne wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Here the bell of love ringing, calling for your arms and also signaling to you that they are there for you. That sound that you hear when your dog rests his chin on your leg, when you sit with an old friend in quiet, when you hold your child, when the wind pushes through falling leaves and into your loneliness, when someone holds your hand at the right moment…that sound is the bell of love and do not ever doubt that it tolls for thee. Hear it, believe in it, answer its call. This is the work that will save us.
[1] McNatt, Rosemary Bray. “To Pray Without Apology” UU World, Nov/Dec 2002. Accessed on-line on September 28, 2010 http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/2527.shtml
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