The First Smooth Stone: Revelation is not Sealed
A SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
The first of a series of five sermons on the fundamental principles of liberal religion.
In the US, you see lots of bumper stickers. Lots. For political races or opinions: Obama 2012, for example, is appearing on cars there now, or you’ll see the occasional Palin sticker. An old favourite is ‘Friends don’t let friends vote Republican’, a take off on a more serious one put out by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which read ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.’ Sometimes they exclaim clever slogans like ‘Midwives help people out.’ ‘My Karma ran over your Dogma’, to share one of the more religious sorts. ‘Honk if you love Jesus’ was popular for many years, but has fallen into disfavour.
I never much like those ‘Honk if you...’ stickers because I’d get so startled when the horn on the car next to me sounded. Even better than that, a colleague tells the story of being stopped at a red light behind someone with the Jesus version. Reflecting on it, he decided that he did love Jesus in his own way, and so honked his horn. The woman driving the car, turned back toward him, angry: ‘Can’t you see that there’s a red light!’
There’s a whole collection of the ‘I’d Rather Be ...’ stickers around: I’d rather be sailing or shopping or dancing. My favourite of those was, ‘I’d Rather Be Here Now.’ You could even create dialogues with them if you wanted: ‘In case of the rapture,’ one sticker reads, ‘this car will be driverless.’ I always wanted to see that one next to the one that reads, ‘When the rapture comes can I have your car?’
I have colleagues who have done whole sermons around the theology of bumper stickers, and I admit that these stickers and slogans are a bit like crisps. Once you’ve had one, it is difficult to stop nibbling on them. There’s only been one that has stopped me in my tracks every time: ‘The Bible Says It, I Believe It, That Settles It.’ It is so utterly opposed to my understanding of how religion works, and what belief means and how we are meant to be with one another that I cannot imagine why anyone would want to proclaim it.
Such a response marks me – and perhaps you, too – as, if you will, a liberal religionist. That is, I follow a liberal path in religion. You might well wonder what that means. If so, you’re in luck because today is the first in a series of sermons that are about a particular articulation of what it means to take the liberal way in religion. Referred to as the Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism, they were first described by an American Unitarian, James Luther Adams.
Adams was a theologian, a thinker and a Unitarian Universalist minister. Unless you have an interest in researching Unitarian Universalist thought, or unless you have a hankering to study the importance and meaning of voluntary associations, you'll not come across his name. He was a sweet and gentle professor who was deeply committed to liberal religion. He spent much of his adult life teaching at Harvard Divinity School and writing about the importance of giving ourselves to organisations and institutions that held out for us the best hope for carrying our important ideas and values on into the future.
His writing is thick and academic, but in wading through it, an editor of his, Max Stackhouse, found five strong themes, five principles that Adams held were necessary for liberal religion and in the article "Guiding Principles for a Free Faith" he arranges Adams work so that those principles are easily seen and explored. Stackhouse called these principles the five smooth stones of religious liberalism, an appropriate image for Jim Adams.
The five smooth stones hark back to the battle of David and Goliath. In the fight, David is sent out to fight the giant Philistine, Goliath. Goliath is clad in strong armour, a helmet on his head, a hefty spear slung over his shoulder ready for use in fighting his most worthy opponent. David, a simple shepherd, doesn't clad himself in armour, but goes to the field of battle carrying only a sling and five smooth stones that he has gathered at the edge of the battlefield. You may remember that David won that fight -- the first stone he flung whacked Goliath on the head and at least knocked him out, perhaps even killed him.
The principles that we'll be talking about really are like those five smooth stones that David took with him into battle. They are -- at least from this vantage point -- pretty ordinary, not demanding great leaps of faith or ascriptions to something beyond our seeing and touching and feeling. They are ordinary principles, ideas that will, I hope, give some contour to our liberal religious community. We so often have difficulty talking about what it is that this religious community stands for, what it is we honour and agree upon that I hope this series of five sermons will help.
Let me tell you those five principles now, then, we’ll come back to the first, our topic for today. Here goes:
1. Revelation is not sealed.
2. All relations between persons ought ideally to rest upon mutual, free consent and not coercion.
3. Religious liberalism affirms the moral obligation to direct one's efforts toward the establishment of a just and loving community.
4. We deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.
5. Liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.
Principles hold within them significant affirmations which are the distillation of experience and learning and aspiration all three. But I've learned that those distillations have to have some flesh put to them, some life breathed into them, or they are simply rote statements, recited like the alphabet and about as interesting.
Mary Oliver captures some of the deeper meaning:
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
This principle speaks directly to those who would tell us that the truth of the world is sealed in a collection of scriptures or ideas or affirmations. And it doesn’t matter if it is the Bible or scientific theory. What we recognise by making this affirmation is that it's all human creation: all of scripture, all of science, all of our assumptions of what we know about the world. This is what Adams has to say about that:
We cannot properly place our confidence in our own creations; we must depend upon a transforming reality that breaks through encrusted forms of life and thought to create new forms. We put our faith in a creative reality that is re-creative. Revelation is continuous.
There is so much more out there: we cannot -- if we see this truly -- put our faith into only our own little creations, our own small scribblings trying to encompass the stars and heavens, the microscopic and the persistent press of living things. No matter how elegant, or how well said, still this creation will, I trust, smash through our certainty. Especially if we can hold to this principle which calls us ever to watch for that which might break forth.
Alongside this big notion – this intellectual recognition of what must be a simple fact that there is more in this wide world than we will ever wholly understand even using the best of our abilities – there’s also that more personal recognition. Has it happened to you, I wonder, that in the midst of a difficult moment with a friend or a loved one, or in an unguarded moment, you are taken by surprise. A way is found that you hadn’t been seen before, and a conflict begins to ease. Someone known to you as that comfortable chair you like so well, shows a compassion that you’d not seen before, opens his heart, opens her heart and you are thrown into a kind of confusion. We forget too easily that we don’t know the true heart of another – perhaps not even our own – and we forget too easily that any of us can break out of old patterns, can find new ways, can have new insight into the world, our loved ones, insight into the still tender and open soul that abides in us.
Adams suggests that this is a central element of our liberal faith and I agree. The willingness – or more, the commitment – to being open to other voices and other views distinguishes our community in the family of religions. It is one of our strengths.
I’ve long thought that we should have the other part of the dialogue with that bumper sticker that stops me: ‘The Bible Says It, I Believe It, That Settles It.’, but this notion does not lend itself to simple strap lines or easy slogans. Perhaps we should just take that word from Mary Oliver: ‘Look!’
There is so much to see, so much to learn, so much to discover in this wide world. In our comings and goings, may we be open to all we may find.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
thou who are beyond our words,
beyond our understanding,
pry open our hardened minds,
pry open our hardened hearts.
Allow us an open view,
let us see – if only for a moment –
the world in its freshness,
wonder and beauty.
Not only this,
but may we see truly into all that surrounds us
the loss and trouble,
the power of floods,
the terror of the earth’s power,
heartbreaking descent of humanity
into violence and destruction.
Seeing it all,
may we strive to be open,
to hear the many voices,
to see another’s view,
and to never fear to be moved,
by a new truth breaking into our
already made up minds.
The world is more various and wild,
than any can imagine.
Spirit of love and life,
remind us of this,
gently and truly,
this day and every day.
Amen.