Is This Your Religion
Sermon by Rev. Victor Carpenter, Oct. 07, 2007
First Religious Society, Carlisle, Massachusetts
Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood
For I had wandered off from the straight path.
How hard it is to tell what it was like,
This wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
A bitter place, death could not be bitterer.
Do you recognize those words? They were written some seven hundred plus years ago by the poet Dante Aligheri who was born in the city of Florence Italy in 1265.
The words begin the Prologue to the Divine Comedy, in which the poet identifies himself as a man who, at mid-point in his life, feels that he has lost his path in a dark wood.
It’s a haunting passage. People who have never read another word of Dante can identify it. It captures, perfectly in so few words the exact nature of the mid-life crisis that so many experience : standing alone in the place of no place. An anxious , directionless time of self-examination and re-assessment.
Some years ago, at just such a moment in my own life, I boarded a Greyhound Bus at the Boston terminal and rode, virtually non-stop across the United States. My companions were strangers; my meals were pick-up affairs at bus terminals along the way, my head was awhirl of confusion.
I needed to discover something ; I didn’t know what it was. I needed balance, perspective; I needed to know where I stood in relation to my own life.
So, after days and nights on the bus I found myself NOT in a dark wood but on the rim of the Grand Canyon.
At that moment, standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, I knew in my heart that I had come to the right place - at the right time - and for the right reason.
If you have ever been there, you know that the Grand Canyon stops you cold. It is a perspective , guaranteed to turn off your engine.
You look across that vermilion abyss; you look down and down and down, and you are pushed to acknowledge deeper rhythms within your life of which you had previously been but dimly aware.
I’m a minister of religion; recognizing those deeper rhythms, working with them, understanding them - that’s my stock in trade.
But, for some reason, I had lost (or at least, I felt as though I had lost) a grasp of those rhythms and their importance both in my own life and in the life of the congregation that I was then serving
Because I am a minister of religion – and because my crisis of spirit had a good deal to do with my vocation, my mind moved to religious analogy: the depths of the canyon resembling the long progression of the religious spirit of humanity - from it’s dimmest, feeblest beginnings up to the present.
Looking down into the dim recesses I could imagine our humanoid ancestors squatting around their smoky fires.
Then, as the light moved up the canyon walls – revealing the different shades of color in each new rock layer – I thought of the multi-form expressions of faith by which the multi-plicity of religions declare themselves today.
And so I stood looking at time’s progress to the point of the present, the “now”, our “now”, the “now” in which we are the consummation of all those thousand ages, those millennia of religious striving for understanding and for truth.
We are the product of those centuries in which our forebears worked (and suffered) in their attempts to strip away religious superstition and religious tyranny; turning religion itself away from being just another form of human oppression to being a prime source of liberation for all life itself…
What a great joy to see the children of this congregation carry in the banner proclaiming the congregation’s 250th anniversary. The banner salutes the past; the children’s presence proclaims the future. Without them the banner is a mere historic artifact and this building an antiquity.
Nor does this congregation’s future end here. That we have arrived at the ripe age of 250 is a fact worthy of celebration, but lest you get carried away with the achievement, I should tell you that two years ago, the church I was serving celebrated its 375th anniversary
The First Parish in Dorchester, gathered in 1630, is one month older than the City of Boston!
In one corner of the Dorchester sanctuary (the fifth sanctuary to house that congregation), housed in a glass case, is a ship model. The ship on display bears a striking resemble to the Mayflower, which is, nor surprising since they are both of the same era.
The ship that is modeled carried a congregation of Puritans. The whole non-conformist congregation (including their two ministers) elected to stay together in coming to the “new world”.
I can barely imagine the courage of those folks to undertake such a trip. I can only compare it to my asking you if you are prepared to go to the moon – literally, to the moon – to gain the freedom to practice your religion!
Don’t worry, I’m not asking for a show of hands (and, if I did, I confess you wouldn’t see mine); but that doesn’t mean we can’t admire our gutsy forebears!
They wanted “religious freedom” - wanted it so badly that they would risk everything including their lives to gain it!!!
The gift of their passion is not limited to the single congregation in Dorchester, it is ours as well and to every UU congregation - extending from Dorchester to the most recently gathered UU fellowship anywhere in the world - that values a religion that says “freedom - freedom from ignorance, from spurious claims of authority, from bitter prejudice.
The circumstances of our Puritan ancestors seeking their freedom might seem quaint to us today. Yesterday’s liberation struggle often seems of little account after the struggle has passed. BUT
But freedom is a constant struggle - and the struggle goes on … only the context changes.
Last Sunday I spoke about the struggle leading up to law proclaiming marriage equality and how it seemed as if it would never happen - until it did.
Several years before it happened (night time when the marriage of two gay men had no legal standing) two men, Paul and Richard wanted to be joined and, at the same time, wanted to recognize their feelings of kinship with other peoples whose love had been denied and whose marriages had no legal standing.
So, at one point in the middle of their “service of union” Paul and Richard joined hands and “jumped the broom”.
“Jumping the broom” is the custom practiced by slave couples as public recognition of their marriage in the long years before “emancipation” made it legal for black people to marry.
In my wedding homily I spoke of how gay marriage will, one day, be as accepted as heterosexual marriage and inter- racial marriage- BUT – until that day dawns, its up to us to speak out for the freedom to love whom you are moved to love! That is our religion.
So it comes down to this:
Our religion says that human beings are not divided – except by ignorance, bigotry, fear and hate.
Our religion sees humanity as naturally ONE and waiting to be spiritually united.
Our religion proclaims an end to all exclusions; a community of all humanity, unbounded.
Our religion knows that we shall never find the fullness, the wonder, and the glory of life UNTIL we are ready to share it.
And we shall never have hearts big enough for the love of God UNTIL we have made our hearts big enough for the worldwide love of one another.
That is our religion. If that is your religion, you’re in the right pew. Amen