Woody Allen writes, "I have no doubt that someday we'll get the lion to lie down with the lamb, but I don't think the lamb will ever get much sleep." As much as we wish otherwise, I suspect many of us feel closer to Woody Allen than to the Prophet Isaiah when it comes to the future prospects of the lion and the lamb. And I really think we wish it were otherwise.
There are some beliefs that we are happy to shed. Homosexuals are going to hell. Jesus Christ is the only way. Losing these beliefs came as a relief to many of us, bringing a feeling of freedom and fresh air. But the day we began to doubt the world's ability to get better was not a happy day for any of us. Far from the discovery of fresh air, most of us felt like we were living without it.
When I was a kid my Sunday School teachers would drill this well-known passage from Isaiah into our heads, especially around New Year's. You can count on it, they'd say. No doubt whatsoever. Some day, all this will be different. Not only will the lion lie down with the lamb, but little kids like you, all over the world, will have enough to eat. War will be no more. Diseases will have cures. There will be no more want, no more pain, no more tears. God promises it, they said. He guarantees it. All we have to do is trust that guarantee and keep working, knowing that-although we may not be able to see it--we are part of bringing this guaranteed new world into being.
As Cora Fisher, my favorite Sunday school teacher, put it: "Listen here, dear ones, the deck is stacked in favor of love and joy. We can never be sure when God will play them, but I want each of you to know that our team has all the aces in its back pocket."
Not only did I believe Ms. Fisher when she said this, but I loved being able to believe it. It gave me an incredible amount of hope and motivation. It's empowering beyond measure to walk around with the knowledge that there's an ace in your back pocket: knowing that although your efforts toward kindness and justice don't seem to matter, they do matter in unseen ways. Knowing that although the good guys don't seem to be winning now, someday, in some mysterious way, they surely will.
And it's interesting to me that this sense of an ace in my pocket stayed with me even after I left Christianity. Even when the Bible and the idea of a traditional God no longer played a central role in my spirituality, I found myself able to join Martin Luther King Jr. in saying boldly, "The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice." My faith in "the guarantee" remained; it had just shifted from being rooted in divine power to being etched into the nature of the universe. It enabled me to stand by others confidently singing, "We Shall Overcome," even when our protests had little effect.
But one day, after many such protests, after watching the efforts of good people get tripped up and trumped again and again, my back pocket felt empty. And when that day came, it most certainly felt as though someone had just stolen my breath.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, our great Unitarian philosopher, describes this feeling better than I ever could. He's writing here about the loss of his son, describing what happens to all of many of us when we learn that life comes with no guarantees.
"We wake and find ourselves on a stair," he writes. "There are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers about our eyes, as night hovers all day...Ghostlike we glide through nature...And though we have health and reason, we have no [excess] of spirit for new creation. We have just enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or invest. "
This passage gets at what I think of as "the stuckness" of doubting our progress toward a better world. It's not, as Emerson makes clear, that we don't want to keep moving up the stairs toward more justice and love. It's not even that we don't see which way to go. It's a matter of missing the energy, a matter of lacking, as he puts it, the "excess spirit for new creation."
This is especially true for Unitarian Universalists. It's the energy of the old beliefs we miss, not so much the old beliefs themselves. We are okay with there either being or not being a God that's secretly working for justice. We're even okay with the arc of the universe having no particular bend. But what we are not okay with is the terrible loss of energy and motivation that came along with the loss of those beliefs.
And let me stress that I don't mean to say all of us feel this way. There are many Unitarian Universalists for whom this energy and these beliefs remain firm and central. But it's nevertheless true that what makes our faith so important and vital is that we are one of the few spiritual houses where one can come and openly say, "I can't and don't want to believe in the guarantees, but I still want the hope; I still long for the energy that comes with the hope."
I'll never forget my first Martin Luther King Sunday at my church in Syracuse. On the Monday before, my friend Ed sat in my office and said, "I really need you not to have us all hold hands and sing We Shall Overcome this weekend." He went on, "I've got nothing against others who find the song meaningful, but personally, I just don't want to be told one more time that it will all mysteriously work out in the end. I don't want to be told that I don't have enough faith or that I'm somehow reading the signs of the times all wrong. I need you to know that I'm coming to church this week not to be convinced that a better world is really on its way, but for help finding hope even though I'm no longer convinced that a better world is on its way!"
And that's it, isn't it? The need so many of us have: how do we find hope in a world with no guarantees? Where do we find the energy to keep working for justice even when the arc of the universe no longer looks like it's bending our way?
I was helped with these questions early in my ministry training. But in sharing this story, I need you to know I'm about to take a giant risk. And just so there's no mistake, let me make it clear that by naming this a giant risk, I'm trying to ask you all, not so subtly, to be gentle and generous with me - and even forgiving if you need to be. And if you do find yourself needing to forgive me after the story I'm about to tell, then maybe that forgiveness will come more easily if you know that this occasion was also one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life.
The first Unitarian Universalist sermon my parents ever heard was delivered by Don Wheat, my mentor and ministerial supervisor. Don is fearless from the pulpit. It's one of the reasons I love and respect him so much. But his fearlessness has both an up side and a down side. To some, Don speaks his truths with boldness, to others he speaks his truths uncensored. So I asked Don - pleaded with him - not to say anything that might offend my parents and their faith. "I know there are serious differences between my parents' faith and ours," I said. "But if this first experience could be a positive one, then it will be much easier to navigate those differences in the future."
Don said he understood and he promised not to say anything that would "religiously offend." I was so relieved that I didn't pay much attention to that qualifier, "religiously" offend,...and I really should have. Because the next thing I knew, I was sitting in between my parents, next to my sweet, sweet, innocent mother, as Don told the following story to start off his sermon.
"You all know the famous words of Neil Armstrong: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' But those of you who are older will remember that Neil also sent another message to earth, not from the moon but from the ship on his way back down. At the end of one of his communications, Armstrong said he had a special message for a friend back home: "You're welcome, Mr. Gorsky!"
"No one understood what it meant, and despite repeated attempts over the years by reporters to get Armstrong to explain, he refused. Finally, many years later, Armstrong broke his silence. He started by saying he felt free to share now only because both Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky were dead. He explained that Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky were his neighbors when he was growing up. Neil, his brothers and the neighbor kids often played stickball in Neil's backyard. At least once a game, someone would whack the ball over the fence into the Gorskys's yard. Neil was the youngest so everyone made him go fetch it.
"On one of those retrieval missions, Neil found himself picking up a ball right underneath Mr. and Mrs. Gorskys's bedroom window. And it was then that he heard, Mrs. Gorsky say, 'Oral sex? You want oral sex? I'll tell you what, you'll get oral sex the day that neighbor kid walks on the moon!!' "
You see, I warned you it was terrible! Painful and terrible! I don't think I've ever been more uncomfortable in my life! Right there, in front of my poor, sweet mother - and worse, with me sitting right beside her - right there, my spiritual mentor, my mom and dad's first representation of our noble Unitarian Universalist faith, told an oral sex joke from the pulpit!!
It was shocking, startling, completely unexpected and completely unpredictable...And that was exactly the point.
"Surprise," Don said, as he looked us all in the eye. And he said it again to reinforce it: "Surprise. That, my friends, is the source of Unitarian hope - surprise."
With a cadence slow and careful, he continued, "Life is not something you can make predictions about. Nothing about history is certain - not our personal histories, nor the histories of the world. Even when something seems sure, there are never guarantees. NEVER. And that is precisely," he said, "what makes life so hopeful: nothing is guaranteed, not the good, but also not the bad!"
It may seem like that little twerpy neighbor boy won't ever amount to much, but you never know, Don said. He may surprise you!
Likewise, it may have seemed certain that that massive German army marching across Europe at will would never be stopped, but history showed us you never know. History says, be careful - what seems certain is never guaranteed.
Surprises abound, he said.
Apartheid suddenly collapsing.
Women suddenly getting the right to vote after decades of seemingly getting nowhere.
The turning point and spark ignited by Rosa Parks' act of resistance, an act not that different from many other equally strategic but ineffectual efforts.
"You just never know," Don said. He ended by adding, "And if that isn't good news, I don't know what is!!"
On the way out of church, my mother couldn't look me in the eye, but she was able to speak. "That Reverend Wheat," she said. "He's okay. He's okay." And I swear I saw a smile on the corner of her lips.
Howard Zinn, the great progressive historian writes,
"What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
"...[Because of this amazing amount of control over life,] there is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. [But again,] we forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by quick collapses of systems of power that seemed invincible.
"...Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars."
Despite my telling a humorous story this morning to make my point, I hope you understand that I see this topic as deadly serious. Our ability to stay energized, hopeful and committed to justice even when the game looks like it is being lost is a matter of life and death for so many people. I look at my three children and am terrified to think what might be if we good-hearted folk give up or withdraw because we can't find the hope to carry on.
I know that "an awareness of surprises" is not the most stable source of hope. I wish I could offer more. I wish I could stand up like my Sunday school teacher or Martin Luther King and say with confidence that God or life is holding all the aces and intends to play them on behalf of our team. But I can't. All I and our faith have to offer is the possibility that a better world can happen, not a guarantee.
All I can say is that this could be the decade we eliminate hunger.
All I can say is that this could be the year the legality of gay marriage sweeps our country, or that this next election could be the one our first female president makes her run.
This war could be the one that finally transforms our national budget into an engine primarily devoted not to the creation of guns and bombs, but to the creation of schools, homes and healthcare for us and the entire world.
Separate funding for city versus suburban schools.
Ridiculous executive pay.
The more ridiculous and devastating gap between the rich and poor.
The idea of the nation-state.
The idea of race.
All of it could go away.
Yes, we don't know for sure, but at the same time we don't know for sure that it won't!
And just knowing that, just knowing that these amazing things are possible makes the prospect of being a part of it exciting enough for me.
And I hope for you too.
So with a tip of the hat to both Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky, I say let's play the game and may the surprises come our way.
So be it. Amen.
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