The Fourth Smooth Stone: What We Do
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
(This is the fourth sermon in a series about James Luther Adam’s Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism. It relates to the fourth principle: "We deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.")
A friend and I were out to dinner and somehow wound up talking about our experiences at university. It hadn’t been all that long since we’d been studying. I commented that I would forever remember one sentence from my course on the psychology of learning. The professor, Dr. Collyer, whose speciality was learning, drilled it into our heads week on week. It was this:
Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience.
Thirty and some years since I sat in his class, and I can still tell you what the definition was.
My friend, who I knew to be the sort of contentious fellow who would contradict you just for the fun of winding you up, immediately disagreed. Whatever else we might have discussed that evening faded away.
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ he started.
‘What don’t you agree with?’ I asked even knowing that I would have been better off keeping quiet.
‘I don’t think you need to change your behaviour in order to have learnt something,’ he replied.
You know those moments when you should just say, ‘oh,’ and change the subject. This was one of those. I didn’t.
'What’s your definition of learning then?’ I tried to push him to do something other than just disagree.
‘I don’t think I could say,’ he retorted straightaway. ‘I don’t need to give a different definition to disagree. I simply think that learning can take place without changing a behaviour.’
‘What then,’ I asked, ‘does it mean to have learnt something?’ It wasn’t an idle question. I was truly wondering how you could claim that someone had learnt something without it having any impact on how they were in the world. What meaning would the learning have if it didn’t manifest itself?
It’s like this source statement that we’re considering today, too. What does it mean to believe something if it doesn’t have some sort of impact upon your life? What does it mean to believe something if it doesn’t shape your days?
James Luther Adams said it provocatively: ‘We deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.’
In the early years of my ministry, when I offered groups in which we explored Unitarianism, and especially when we asked people to speak about their reasons for coming to a Unitarian church, it was usual that several people in every group would talk about their frustration with people in churches who behaved hypocritically. To sing and speak of love on a Sunday, but to not manifest it in your daily work life, or even at home offended lots of people, and perhaps rightly so. In the US, where churchgoing is a more ingrained behaviour, people who found the hypocrisy too much sought a church where they found a religious community that seemed to have more integrity.
I think it is a version of this that operates today. It seems to me that in the popular imagination religious life is believed to be a pious assent to unbelievable propositions that don’t relate to life as it is lived.
Spirituality as a broad concept doesn’t get much better understanding in popular culture where it is far too often portrayed as relating solely to personal practices. It is concerned with the state of one’s own soul, with seeking personal peace and a life of evenness, a means, if you will, of avoiding the tempests and troubles of life.
I don’t think I need to tell all of you that religion or spirituality is at its best a much different matter. Karen Armstrong offers this reminder:
Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.
Religion and spirituality are about the life you live, not about the ideas in your head. If it doesn’t show in your life, then you haven’t learned it. If it doesn’t show in your life, then it isn’t your religion.
This is only part though of what James Luther Adams is trying to communicate with us when he suggests that virtue must have a social incarnation. One of the features of the liberal approach to religion is a recognition that our values cannot be simply extended to our friends and trusted within our own community but it is part of our religious journey to seek to make these manifest in history. Adam's words:
The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions -- social, economic and political -- of the common life.
There are two messages in this. Firstly, it is a reaffirmation of the notion that whatever we believe it must be lived. Secondly, though, he is pointing us toward the importance not only of our personal activities and actions, but the essential work of creating and sustaining those social structures that will enable what we hold dear to live into the future. If we do not find the ways to ensure the endurance of our most deeply held beliefs, then they die with us.
You see, the point of our religious life – the religious life of the liberal as Adams understands it – isn’t only to seek to live a life of integrity. That is, he asks us to not only live our values, but to live for our values. He suggests that we need to do something more than make a beautiful life for ourselves. The arena of our spiritual life is not only our daily interactions but is also the wider play of movements and meaning in the world. ‘We deny the immaculate conception of virtue. We affirm the necessity of social incarnation.’
Now, I know that for many of us getting on with the daily round takes about everything we have. I know that for many of us – all of us? – the commitment of living out our faith in the small moments and movements of our lives is about all we can get to in a good week. I know that when we are asked to change the world, and indeed to change it not only for our lifetime, but for the future beyond where our vision reaches, I know in those moments I for one simply want to lie down, to take a nap, the very idea is exhausting and beyond what I can do in my small, complicated life.
I want to suggest, though, that this need not, should not be taken as yet another condemnation that we haven’t done enough or been enough in our lives. Rather this needs to be one of those ideas, beliefs that we are asked to live into. Any one of us can only do what we can do. Even so, to be asked to raise our eyes to new possibilities and other opportunities, to be asked again and again to discern what is calling to us from the wide world is as much a part of the meaning of religion as is personal practice.
So let us take this as nudge, as a reminder that we do not live for ourselves alone, and that if we find that what we believe, what inspires us in our lives is worthy, then it is some part of what we are called to do and be in this world and look to see how we might make a difference.
I take a bit of comfort from that definition from so long ago. Learning, I was told, is a relatively permanent change in behaviour due to experience. Religion, too, has that relative quality to it. For we affirm here that we are always on our way, always in the process of creation, always seeking for the way we need to go. And while we see a goal, we know at our best moments there is no ‘there’ where we’ll arrive someday, but only this day and moment, and what we can bring into our lives and into the world, small step upon small step.
Prayer
Spirit of love and breath of life,
we pause in these moments
to remember.
We remember what we hold to be true.
Though in our gatherings, we may name
differing truths,
we may embody differing loves,
still we come together this day
to remember that
no matter the details,
we are joined
in our shared intention
to live well and deeply.
In the quiet as we name
the holy,
the most high,
that which we love,
and which inspires us in our living
may we each rededicate ourselves:
that the holy lives within our days,
that our loves show plainly in our actions.
May we know, too,
when we fail,
when forget,
when days conspire to thwart our best intentions,
that each day is a rededication,
each day is an opportunity
to begin again in love and hope.
Amen.