The traditional worldview is preferable to the one that now encloses us because it allows for the fulfillment of the basic longing that lies in the depths of the human heart. . . .

         There is within us-in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us-a fundamental dis-ease. It acts like an unquenchable fire that renders the vast majority of us incapable in this life of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies in the marrow of our bones and the deep regions of our souls. All great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion try to name and analyze this longing. We are seldom in direct touch with it, and indeed the modern world seems set on preventing us from getting in touch with it by covering it with an unending phantasmagoria of entertainment, obsessions, addictions, and distractions of every sort. The longing is there, built into us like a jack-in-the-box that presses for release. Two great paintings suggest this longing in their titles-Gauguin's Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going? and de Chirico's Nostalgia for the Infinite… Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality.

         Release from those walls calls for space outside them, and the traditional world provides that space in abundance. It has about it the feel of long, open distances and limitless vistas for the human spirit to explore. . .

Sermon

         Long ago, when I was searching for a church to belong to, I saw in the newspaper that the Sunday topic at the California Laguna Beach UU Fellowship was "Extra-Sensory Perception Experiences." The speaker, a native of Germany, was eighty year old Heinz Wrede. He told a story of when he was employed as a policemen by the British in Shanghai, China before World War II. One evening, he was alone in the police station all night. It was an uneventful night and in the morning, he decided he'd stop by to see the widow of a friend who had been killed a few weeks earlier just to see how she was. When he arrived, she greeted him and said she was so very grateful that he'd come by last night for she was sure she would have killed herself. Heinz was puzzled and said he hadn't seen her since last week. The woman looked hurt but saw he was serious. She told him that she had been contemplating suicide all day but he came by at 10 pm last night and sat with her and had tea and they talked into the night. Heinz insisted he had been at the police station all night. This was an intelligent woman that he greatly admired. Finally, he recognized that something unexplainable had occurred. He had somehow been at the Station and at the house of his friend in her hour of need. The congregation had been transfixed by Heinz's story. He said, "So that's my experience. What about you?" Three people in that Fellowship stood up and related such stories as a baby crying in a bedroom but the child had died a year before. I thought, "Okay! This is the congregation for me!"

         Heinz and his wife became good friends of mine. I came to know that Heinz was a gentle atheist and this was the first time he had told the story in public. He was a self-educated, well-educated and thoughtful man. I was soon teaching in the Fellowship Sunday School. A few months later, Heinz said to me, "Are you teaching those children about God? If we didn't fill their minds with such myths, they'd never know such nonsense!" I didn't like to disagree with Heinz for I actually find that children are naturally religious, accepting and full of wonder, quite the opposite of Heinz's experience. Like Huston Smith in our reading, I believe that most people have a notion or longing for the object of what we call "enlightenment" in eastern religions and "salvation" in western ones, or more broadly, the Infinite or God.

         Huston Smith is one of the world's leading experts on World Religions and is certainly the most famous Unitarian Universalist of our day. He is an active member of our Berkeley, California church. He wrote the book Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief because he is very worried that the western world in particular has become lost in scientism and materialism and technology. He says that educated people in universities are afraid to talk about faith for fear of losing their academic reputations, even though they might be in the field of religion or philosophy. His book argues that the worldview of science can talk only about the physical universe and the questions that the traditional worldview addresses regarding only the physical universe. He says, "This worldview, which I consider the winnowed wisdom of the human race, is found distilled in the world's great, enduring religions." Huston draws a diagram of the two worldviews. The small, inner circle has a dotted line around it and is labeled "Science: The Physical Universe" and the outer circle with a solid line is labeled "Religion: All There Is." Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Science gives us major answers to minor questions, while religion gives us minor answers to major questions."

         Now, for those of you who haven't come across these ideas before, I would like to outline for you a few things that theologians and sociologists and historians of religion talk about. The thousands of years before the fifteenth century is the time all the great religious traditions arose. We call the beliefs of this time, a traditional worldview. The beliefs after the sixteenth century, the period of the so-called Enlightment when scientific knowledge accelerated, is called the modern worldview. As the centuries wore on, the ideas about God and religion began to erode. By the middle of the twentieth century, we began to call this the postmodern worldview, which is highly secular and where religious ideas are relegated to the churches and nowhere else. There they are, the three worldviews: the traditional worldview relating to before the fifteenth century; the modern worldview relating to from after the Enlightenment of the 16th century; and the postmodern worldview relating to the mid-twentieth century to today. Postmodern is also the period of questioning whether life has meaning at all, whether the material world is all there is, and the loss of values that make a moral life worth while. But on the positive side, we have seen a surge of interest in human rights and social justice that the world has not witnessed in all of its history. In the coming months, will talk more about our postmodern world and its meaning to us.

         What Huston Smith is worried about is that the rigid separation of ordinary life from religious ideas will lead us to be even more materialistic than today and caring primarily for only ourselves as a nation and not see our interdependence. Personally, I believe we see precisely this in our current Administration's foreign policy under the guise of a twisted religious vision of being God's instrument. This use of religious ideas to justify a country's policy just makes more secular states highly wary of us. Our foreign policy and actions across the world might best be informed through interfaith dialog with groups of philosophers, clergy, historians, politicians and others. The WCRP, which stands for the World Council for Religion and Peace, is a major group in which we Unitarian Universalists are heavily involved and this group would be a good with which nation states could consult.

         Though our country, along with western Europe, has been highly secularized (even anti-religious) for almost a hundred years, Huston Smith is encouraged that in the last decade no less than ten institutes have been established as places of dialog for scientists and religionists. Science is about expressing its understanding of the physical world. Religions are about expressing ideas of the Infinite (or metaphysical).

         Huston Smith would probably appreciate the cartoon by Johnny Hart. A caveman opens up business on a rock that is labeled "Answers." Another caveman approaches and asks, "What could a dead atheist, a dead agnostic, and a dead saint possibly have in common? The answer is, "They all know there is a God."

         Those of you who are new to our church might be surprised to know that we have under our roof people of different beliefs. Many believe in a Divine Principle that can be expressed in the Universe in the traditional sense, or in the processes of the Universe, or in all things in nature and the physical world and beyond, or in the arts, or in the call to social justice. There are those also who are agnostic, which means not certain of a Divine Principle but hold out the possibility. And there are those who are a-theist. And there are many of us whose religious ideas cannot be described with one label. As Unitarian Universalists, we are encouraged to struggle with religious questions and discover the answers for ourselves. We can each create our own worldview.

         The important thing to know is that we are also expected to listen respectfully to one another in our diversity. This may sound wonderful, but the truth is that as a denomination, we have until very recently avoided discussing what we believe very likely because we fear that we may offend one another. Fortunately, we are now beginning to discuss what we believe with one another. At our annual church conference in June this year, which we call General Assembly, I attended a workshop where we had to split up into small groups to discuss what we believed about the finite and the Infinite. When it was time for the small groups to share with the larger one, over and over again, people said how marvelous it was to hear people who were humanist and others who were atheist express their beliefs and people who were theists express theirs and really hear one another. There is something deeply compelling about hearing the heart-felt truth of another person.

         If we are so diverse theologically, what is it that holds us together? The full answer to this is the topic of another sermon. But the initial answer is that religion matters. We have a place, this magnificent structure, where we can come and just be together for an hour and sing and hear our wonderful choir, and meditate or pray, and hear religious ideas, and develop confidence that we can create a personal reality with depth. We have religious education for children and adults and small groups for more intimate discussion. We have community and caring. We have social justice that we can do together. Here we can have a sense of history, roots, values, truth, and beauty. We can have a sense of our pluralistic religious worldview with a sense of security and comfort. Here we can savor the place of growth and change and caring for family, self and others. Here we can explore and experience the Holy, by whatever name you call it. Here we can enrich our lives with a dimension that is missing without the religious or beloved community. There is no place else but here where we can enjoy this precious dimension of life-affirming experience.

         My friend, Heinz Wrede and I had very different religious beliefs but we both clearly believed in the interdependence, the oneness, of the world. May we use this place to explore the richer dimension of ourselves. And may we find a way to share our ideas with others and listen to theirs, for these simple things will bring us ever closer together.

References

         The following has informed and inspired this sermon:

         Smith, Huston. Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, San Francisco, California: HarperCollins Publishers 2001.