This page was updated 06/09/2008

OPENING READING – A reading from Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing is quite so uninteresting as a religious moralism that is always on the side of the angels but never fights any particular evil; which advocates brotherhood, but never in a specific situation; and which admonishes people to be just, but never hazards an opinion on problems of justice in current dispute. We must be willing to ‘take sides’ if we are to make concrete contribution to any moral issue. We must not, however, assume that all people of good will or of common religious convictions will arrive at common conclusions in regard to the strategy of achieving one’s goal. We must combine morals with wise strategy.

MEDITATION READING – A reading from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity…. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect…. We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be humankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community.

CLOSING READING – A reading from Helen Keller:

I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joy of sound. Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see. Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. ‘Nothing in particular,’ she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.

So there I was – it was last December, my second to last Religion and Culture class at IPFW. Since it’s the end of the semester, I usually play a game with the students, asking them to list in two columns, What’s Hot, and What’s Not, in the areas of fashion, entertainment, technology, living arrangements, shopping, etc., trying to get a feel for popular culture and where Religion fits in to it all. This was a large class of over 50, and as they were reporting to the class from their groups and I was writing their answers on the overhead, I had to keep asking them questions about certain fashion styles and clothing stores, I hadn’t heard of some of the rap artists they mentioned; I didn’t know what blue tooth was (perhaps some dental fungus?) – they informed me that it was a short-range wireless communication device. And that’s when it happened – when I showed my ignorance once too often, one of the students shouted, "Doc, you’re so pre-millennial." Pre-millennial – I thought, at least it wasn’t pre-historic.

So you won’t be surprised to find out that it’s only been in the last few months that I discovered Google Earth on my computer. It starts with a picture of the Earth from space; you type in any place or address and the screen automatically zooms closer and closer until there you are, with a rather close-up aerial view of the place you’ve chosen. I’ve wasted some very good time looking at some of my favorite places in the world – the Grand Canal in Venice, the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; I’ve checked out my boyhood home in south St. Louis, and I’ve even zoomed in on my driveway here in Fort Wayne. Recently Google Earth launched Google Sky, created by an engineer who calls it your own virtual telescope, your own personal planetarium, where you turn the camera in the opposite direction and explore distant galaxies and constellations, and see planets in motion.

I was thinking about this a few months ago when I was in Santa Barbara, CA, for a conference. I looked to one side and saw mountains; I looked to the other, and saw the ocean. And each evening as I took a long walk on the beach, and watched the sun set over the Pacific, I got to thinking:

    Each grain of sand between my toes, was one among hundreds of millions of grains of sand as far as the eye could see. If you shone a flashlight in the dark, you would surprise a whole universe of animal life ducking behind stones, some big and some small, each one formed over millions of years, and the few green weeds sticking up out of the sandy floor – species of bugs and spiders and lizards and other night life.

    And if you stepped back even further, like a camera receding to get more into its frame, you would see more bigger stones, towering up from the earth to form bluffs and mountains and cliffs…

    And the ocean, too, teeming with its own plant and animal life, the very place from which all life has come.  That’s how it works, no matter how big the picture gets, it’s the same story – there are little parts and big parts.

    Well, keep enlarging the picture now to Mother Earth, a green-blue fertile ball in space; and further, Mother Earth with her sister planets and stars and satellites and sun, all a part of our galaxy, millions of stars and planets, and so when our galaxy looks around she sees literally millions of other galaxies to make a cosmos. The picture gets bigger and bigger, as big as your mind can wrap around such an infinite mystery.

    And back to the beach, the picture also gets smaller and smaller, because each grain of sand, each form of animal and plant life contains within it microbes of microscopic size. These microbes live in bugs or in barks of trees or off other creatures; they may only have a lifespan of a few moments in the scheme of things, but they are necessary in the life cycles of all living things, even the planets. And they are made up of molecules, which in turn are made up of atoms, and the atoms themselves are made up of subatomic particles.

    And so it goes – and here’s the point – the picture gets bigger and bigger, and it gets smaller and smaller …all at the same time.

The Micro-View

What I want to say today is that the lesson from Google Earth can also apply to us here, Google Church. What would the Google Earth camera view as it zoomed in on us from above and spied on us with its omniscient lens? We live in a world gone crazy, in lives spun out of control. We rail against the darkness, but we’re afraid of the light. We’re mixed bags that give mixed messages with even more mixed-up priorities. And here we sit each week hoping that some word that’s spoken will somehow touch us and remind us of what life’s really all about, remind us that our lives do matter, that we’ve not lived in vain, that we’re here to "make a difference."

There comes a time, my friends [I’ve been more and more learning simple lessons], there comes a time for all of us – perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, if we’re honest, in most moments, when we simply are in a posture of need, no matter how strong or wealthy or talented or powerful we are as the world measures these things. When that happens will there be someone to tell us that we’re beautiful, and that we will never be in want? I tell my students on the last day each semester that they deserve – they deserve – to surround themselves with people who will love them. Is this a place where my students could find such people as that?

The Macro-View

And when I say that our Google Church picture gets bigger and bigger, the Macro-View, what I’m saying is that the church must be a servant church in this community. If I stood at a stoplight just over on Fairfield, and asked drivers to tell me the first thing that came to their minds when I said, "Unitarian Universalist Congregation," I wonder what they would tell me. What do you think it would be? Or if I stood outside the mall? Or somewhere else? The stakes are high, my friends. We’re talking not only about people’s lives here, but we’re talking about the direction of our country, the future of our children’s education, and human rights and civil rights and our country’s policies here and abroad. People come here – you come here – to be fed with food you can’t get anywhere else. Or can you? Maybe we ought to ask the question: "What can people get here that they can’t get anywhere else?" What’s the case you – this Meeting House - can make? What’s the case you are making – publicly, visibly – in our community?

I know how much this congregation, how much you all relish being – shall we say – eclectic! And yet we can so relish our differences so much that we stop asking, then, how to build bridges to people who aren’t already here. Sometimes our loving being different can mask our not reaching out into the community, easier to blame "them" for not being here than ourselves for not making the effort to reach out to "them."

We must be clear, very clear, as clear as a bell, as clear and articulate as we can be because the world needs churches more than ever before who are going to tell the truth in Love and not in arrogance and not in spite – because if "Love really is the spirit of this church" then this Love, if it really is to be a transformative Love, takes sides against the powers of darkness.

There is no way to speak the message of life in the world without upsetting the powers that profit from

death.  We offer a powerful message of life here. All lives, every life is precious, with the fullness of human dignity.

There is no way to speak the message of healing in the world without upsetting the powers that profit

from the sicknesses of our age, those forces in the culture that destroy families and communities, that profit in seeing the stranger as a danger and dividing Americans from each other and America from the rest of the global community. We offer a powerful healing here. We embrace a wholistic view of the human person.

There is no way to speak the message of peace in the world without upsetting the powers that benefit

from holding the world hostage to fear – will we have the courage to take on the purveyors of both the politics and theologies of fear.  Enough already!  We will not shrink from confronting fear! We offer a powerful peace in this place. No more fear from our politicians, from our leaders, from clergy, no more fear in religion.

There is no way to speak the message of truth in the world without upsetting the powers that benefit

from keeping us in the dark, that undermine civil discourse, that reinforce our deepest fears with mechanisms of denial, that manipulate, that us keep from taking responsibility for our lives, our country, our planet, and that lie to us for their own purposes of greed and power. We offer a powerful truth in this place that could turn the world upside down if we’d just speak it. No more lies. No more lies.

There is no way to speak the message of freedom in a world without upsetting the powers that profit

from keeping you in chains. We offer freedom here, free spirits, and free minds.

Google Earth – Google Church, they both teach us the same thing. We all depend on each other – all life, from planet to proton, from moon to molecule, from cosmos to microbe – all that is is interconnected, a web of life. We all need each other. Bigger and bigger and smaller and smaller – all at the same time.

Do you realize how exciting it is to be a Unitarian in our day and in this town (I’ve always believed this) – a Unitarian, creative and free, in this crazy world that increasingly looks to outside authorities for truth; how exciting it is to be a member here, how exciting it is to work here? "Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law," you say each week. I know of your loyalty for this place, and your deep commitment to this place. And I say the following, my friends, because you know how much I love you here: You owe this kind of love, this kind of support, to your minister, too … if you mean what you say.

I get around to a lot of churches not just in this community, but increasingly all around the country, and I remain convinced – I know this, my friends, I know it for certain that – and I said this all the time when I was here, that we have in this place the right message for this community. And it is the right time, it is your time – it is this congregation’s time again, today not tomorrow; you, not someone else; it’s our time again –

because it’s always the right time for the message of freedom of the mind, the evolution for good of the

    human species and the unfolding of the mysteries of human consciousness,

it's always time to embrace each other, especially the least of these, in a community of caring

it’s always time to embrace the world in all its suffering and tragedy, as well as all its beauty and

    promise, and

it’s always the right time for a message of open hearts and open arms and open minds – open minds.

The clock is ticking, the waiting is over! Today is the day for a new beginning.

Enough talking already, you’ve done plenty of planning, meeting after meeting. At some point, you gotta do what you talk about, or else there’s a reverse momentum, a negative momentum, a turning backward, a retardation of one’s energy.

If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you always got.

My friends, you have the message and you have the means. Do you have the will?

Let’s roll up our sleeves. There’s work to be done.

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