Tag: unitarian universalism

Improvising a Life

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

It was my great privilege to be a guest speaker at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Southwest Michigan this morning. I am so thankful to be able to celebrate with this lovely faith community and make lots of new friends!

The meditation on which the sermon is based is the following video by Abigail and Sean Bengson.
I highly recommend watching it before listening to or reading the sermon.
It will lift your spirits and provide context for my message.

Here is a video recording of the message.
I apologize for the scruffy sound of the microphone on my shirt.
I didn’t realize that was happening during the talk.
If you would rather read than listen, the typed manuscript is posted below.

As I begin, I would like to express my sincere thanks to several people for the opportunity to join you in celebration on this beautiful Sunday morning. I would like to thank your minister, the Rev. Gy Ludvig-McCartney, for inviting me to join you and share my thoughts with you today. Our thoughts are with Gy and their spouse Patti this morning. I would also like to thank your Director of Religious Education, Miriam Epskamp, for her kind and helpful guidance in helping me navigate the technical challenges of online church during a global pandemic. Finally, I would like to thank all of you, the lovely people of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Southwest Michigan, for your warm welcome into this sacred space and time on this first Sunday of the year 2021. It is a great honor to participate in your worship service and I hope to make an inspiring and informative contribution this morning.

I love the video of the ‘Keep Going On Song’ for several reasons. First of all, it sends a message of hope and compassion in a year when we sorely need it. It comes from fellow travelers who were struggling through 2020 just like the rest of us. They used their powers of creativity to bring a little more light and goodness to a world that was (and still is) feeling like a very dark and lonely place.

But more than that: I love this video as a musician. The way that the singer improvises around the chord progression and returns to the chorus is magnificent. There is an orderliness in the structure of the song, and there is also chaos in the improvisation. This song could never be sung the same way twice.

I would like to talk with you today about this unfolding interaction. When order and chaos come together, they form something that is neither one nor the other. Nor do they reach a compromise between the two extremes. What they form is something new that includes and transcends both order and chaos in their fullness. The word I would like to use for this new thing is creativity. And creativity is what I would like to talk about with you today.

Creativity, understood as an emergent property of the interaction between order and chaos, is fully present in the natural world. I can see it happening particularly in the process of biological evolution, which has been happening on this planet for the last 4.5 billion years, and is still continuing today.

As many of you grownups will remember from your high school biology classes, there are two main components to the engine of evolution. The first component is genetic mutation. This the chaotic part. A mutation is a copy error that occurs in our DNA during the process of cellular division (mitosis). Something in the code unexpectedly changes, which alters the way the new cell functions when the code is read. Often, these errors are harmful to the new cell, but every now and then, a mutation happens that is actually helpful.

Now, the question arises: How do our cells decide which mutations are helpful and which ones are harmful? Well, that’s where the second component of the evolutionary engine comes in.

Genetic mutations cause changes that give either an advantage or a disadvantage to an organism’s chances for survival in its environment. A mutation, for example, that allows a cell to digest a certain kind of food in an environment where that food source is abundant will have a survival advantage. In other words, the new cell that can digest the food is more likely to survive than the cells that cannot digest that food. When this new cell later divides into daughter cells, it passes on its mutation to the next generation. The other cells, meanwhile, are more likely to die before they can reproduce. The name that biologists have given to this process is natural selection.

Natural selection is the orderly component of the evolutionary engine. It takes the errors provided by genetic mutation and determines which ones will provide a survival advantage for the organism. The process itself may be blind, but it is certainly not random.

Critics of evolutionary theory have sometimes used an imaginary example to explain why they think a blind process could not produce the immense diversity and complexity of life that we have on this planet today.

“Imagine,” they say, “a monkey in front of a computer, randomly pushing keys on the keyboard. What are the odds that this monkey could accidentally produce a Shakespearean sonnet? The odds are infinitesimally small.”

The purpose of this thought experiment is usually to demonstrate the idea that something as beautiful and complex as a Shakespearean sonnet can only be produced by a conscious entity with the intelligence of William Shakespeare. “So,” they say, “there must be some kind of intelligent designer at work, consciously directing the process of evolution in ways that are not random or chaotic.” Most proponents of this intelligent design hypothesis use this thought experiment as an argument in favor of the existence of God.

But there is a key piece that intelligent design proponents leave out, and that key piece is natural selection. If we were to adapt the monkey/computer thought experiment to account for natural selection, we would have to add something like the following:

Imagine that there was some kind of system in place that rewarded the monkey with a banana each time it pressed the correct key in the correct order. Over time, the monkey would be able to realize and remember that pressing certain keys in a certain way gave that monkey an advantage. And now, imagine that there was some way to keep each correct letter on the computer screen while erasing the incorrect letters. Finally, imagine further that there were millions of monkeys working on this project at the same time, and each time a monkey anywhere pressed the correct key, the letter on the screen would be kept. Suddenly, it is not at all inconceivable that the monkeys might be able to produce a Shakespearean sonnet in a very short amount of time! And all this would happen without any of the monkeys being aware of the literary masterpiece they were creating. (See Endnote 1)

This is how the creative process of evolution works. It uses the interaction between chaos and order to improvise increasingly diverse and complex forms of life, up to and including you wonderful homo sapiens who have gathered together online to reflect on the meaning of life this Sunday morning.

Music and evolution are not the only places in the universe where chaos and order come together to improvise bonds of creativity. We humans, individually and collectively, have an opportunity to make our own unique contribution to the ongoing creativity of the universe.

You and I experience the interaction of chaos and order in our lives on a daily basis. The chaos has been particularly evident over the course of the year 2020. We are currently living through a global pandemic that has claimed nearly 2 million lives, so far. We have endured quarantine, lockdowns, and violent reactions against those lockdowns. Frontline medical workers, such as myself, have put our lives on the line to care for those who have contracted and sometimes died from COVID-19. We have all witnessed (and some of us have participated in) protests against acts of police brutality that disproportionately impact people of color in the United States. Many of our fellow citizens (including my wife) have been tear-gassed, beaten, and shot by the very officers we commission to keep us safe from unlawful acts of violence. We Americans have endured the spectacle of a particularly contentious presidential election and watched in horror as the legitimacy of that electoral process was called into question by those who have sworn to uphold it. The collective chaos in 2020 has indeed been particularly evident.

In the midst of chaos such as this, it is not uncommon for humans to grasp at straws for meaning. We say things like, “Everything happens for a reason.” The more religiously inclined among us might say, “God has a plan.” In the midst of chaos, many of us might ask, “Why is this happening,” or, “What is the meaning of life, anyway?”

I think we humans tend to ask these questions because we are afraid that the alternative to an orderly plan is a universe that is entirely chaotic and meaningless. We have already observed, however, that life is not entirely chaotic or orderly, but the product of a process that includes and transcends both chaos and order: the universe is a creative process. (See Endnote 2)

I would like to propose a new question this morning: What if the meaning of life is not something we find, but something we make?

The making of meaning is how we humans participate in the process of creativity. Things happen to us that seem chaotic: The lost job, the failed relationship, the missed opportunity, the unforeseen disaster, or the chance encounter. What is ultimately important about these events is not the events themselves, but the story we tell ourselves about them.

When a relationship ends, we can say to ourselves, “That’s just proof that I will never be loved in the way that I want to be,” or we can say, “I have made many mistakes in this relationship, but I will work on myself, learn from my mistakes, and act differently the next time I am in another relationship.” When a baby unexpectedly dies, we can say, “This is evidence that I am just not ready to be a parent,” or we can say, “I will join a support group to help other parents, who are enduring this inestimable loss, and make a way through the darkness of grief.” We cannot control what happens to us in life, but we can decide how we will respond to our chaotic circumstances.

When the unexpected happens, will I choose respond with faith or fear? Will that which does not kill me make me more cynical or more sensitive? Will I use my experience of pain to hurt or to help? The choice is up to us.

May the powers of creativity, compassion, and courage, which are already within you, be your guide, your strength, and your hope as you go out into the world. May each of you become meaning-makers in the midst of chaos, today and every day.

So say we all.

Endnotes

1. I adapted the extended metaphor of the monkeys at the computer from Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett.

2. I am indebted to Karl E. Peters for the conception of creative process as an interplay between chaos and order, especially in regards to genetic mutation and natural selection. See especially his book, Dancing with the Sacred: Evolution, Ecology, and God.

Gravity

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

We had to cancel Sunday service at North Church this past Sunday, so I’m posting this sermon from Rev. Tamara Lebak of All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK.

‘Gravity’ was already my favorite new movie of the year and Rev. Tamara’s sermon exponentially deepens my appreciation of its artistry and meaning. This sermon will appeal to lovers of science, spirit, and art, no matter what their ‘theological orientation’ may be.

I’ve said before on multiple occasions that Rev. Tamara and her colleague at All Souls, Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, are (to put it bluntly) the finest preachers I have ever heard. This message is worth every minute of your time that it takes. So pour another cup of whatever makes you feel spiritual and sit back for “one hell of a ride,” as they say in the film…

Freedom Bound: Being a Religious Liberal

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Image
The Rehnberg Window

 

I come to you this afternoon on loan from the First Presbyterian Church of Boonville, just north of here, where I have served as minister for the last three years.  I want you to know that you have many allies in faith communities of various traditions around the world.  I believe that Unitarian Universalism represents the very pinnacle of religious liberalism, but it does not have a monopoly on that label.  No, progressive believers of every imaginable religious stripe exist in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples of the world.  Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, they seek to embody the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism within their respective traditions.  I am one such person.  Speaking as a Christian, I have discovered that these Seven Principles are as clear and concise a description as I have yet found for the way in which I seek to practice my faith.  Like you, I am proud to call myself a religious liberal.

Too often, religious liberals have been pigeonholed according to what we don’t believe: we don’t interpret our sacred texts literally, we don’t claim to possess exclusive access to absolute truth, we don’t hold fast to a rigid, black and white moral code.  All of these statements about us are true, but they’re not the whole truth.  Too often, people have negatively defined us in this way and thus propagated the myth that we don’t believe in anything.  (Joke about religious liberals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.)  They say that we don’t care about truth, that we don’t care about morality, and that the sacred texts of our traditions mean nothing to us.  And that is certainly not true.

Today, I’d like to take a look at what those two words mean in a positive sense: religious liberal.  I’d like to talk about what it is that we do believe. 

And the phrase we picked for today’s service is “freedom bound”.  I like that.  As religious liberals, each of us is always in a state of being “free” (liberal) and “bound” (religious).  Let me explain what I mean by that.

I’ll begin with the word liberal.  As most of us already know, the word liberal comes from the same Latin root as the word liberty, which means freedom.  On the most basic level, ours is a free faith.  Freedom is where we come from.  Religious liberals are those have declared their independence from the narrow confines of antiquated and superstitious dogma.  We struggle to keep our minds open to new insights from fields like science and philosophy.  For us, critical thinking is a means of grace through which reality is being made known to us.  As the 18th century Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing once said: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to the light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.”  Freedom is where we come from.

Freedom is also where we are going.  We are “freedom bound” or “bound for freedom.”  More than most, religious liberals are able to look at their forebears with simultaneously respectful and critical eyes.  For example, we have no problem honoring the memory of someone like Thomas Jefferson as one of the founders of American democracy, but we also recognize that he didn’t go far enough in championing the cause of liberty. 

Jefferson’s most famous words are captured in the Declaration of Independence, which he composed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

However, we know that Jefferson himself was a slave-owner who held his fellow human beings in unjust captivity, treating them as mere objects and property.  Abolitionists and civil rights activists in subsequent centuries have called for the extension of those unalienable rights to people of all races and ethnicities.  Our sisters in the women’s suffrage and liberation movements have drawn our attention to the truth that all women, just as much as men, are created equal.  Environmental activists have expanded the boundaries of equality even further to include all beings, not just all humans.  Through them, we learn that the Planet itself has unalienable rights that we ignore at our own peril.

Thomas Jefferson gave us a good start in the cause of equality, but our free faith demands that we keep going past the point where he stopped.  Freedom demands that we stand up for the equality and unalienable rights of all beings.  Freedom itself is a growing thing, as is equality.  Freedom is where we are going.  So that’s what I mean when I talk about being a religious liberal: I’m talking about freedom. 

Here in the Unitarian Universalist Association, you express this truth beautifully in two of your seven principles.  You affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” as well as “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”  These principles, taken together, provide a firm foundation for the pursuit of religious freedom.  Insofar as you affirm these principles, you are a religious liberal.

Now, I want to turn and take a look at the other word in that phrase: religious.  I want to talk about what it means to be a religious liberal.  Now this one’s tricky.  That word, religion, can mean a lot of different things to different people.  What does it mean to be religious?  Does it mean attending services on a regular basis?  Does it mean adhering to a set of beliefs?  Does it mean celebrating the holidays and participating in the rituals of a tradition?  Religious can mean any or all of the above.

Here’s what I mean when I say it:

The word religion comes from the Latin relego, which means “to bind together or connect.”  You’re familiar with Lego blocks, right?  What do they do that other blocks don’t do?  They connect to each other!  To be religious, then, is to be connected. 

To illustrate, let me return to what I was saying a moment ago about going beyond the original ideas about freedom and equality that started with Thomas Jefferson.  In the beginning, those ideas only applied to a very small, select group of free, white men.  Over time, thanks to the efforts of others, those men were joined by women, and people of other races, and people from other countries, and people of other sexual orientations, and people of other gender identities, and the animals, and the trees, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the oceans, and the air, and even the Earth itself: all bound together, connected, in one beautiful, perfect WHOLE.  For me, that’s what it means to be religious: to recognize and honor the many connections that exist between the parts and the whole of reality.  And I can’t think of any better way to put it than you Unitarian Universalists do in the last of your Seven Principles.  You “affirm and promote… Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”  I love that.  You have summed up so brilliantly and so beautifully what it means to be a religious liberal.  Religious means connected.

So then, I would say that a religious liberal is someone who is free and connected, connected and free.  We need both.  We can’t have one without the other.

If we emphasize connection at the expense of freedom, we end up with tyranny (obviously).  Individual people become little more than cogs in a machine, with no “inherent worth and dignity” of their own. 

But if we try to take freedom without connection, we end up with a very selfish, ego-centric view of the world.  This is the kind of libertarianism that says, “I don’t owe anyone anything.  If someone else is suffering or oppressed, it’s not my problem.  Let them eat cake!”

Folks who live like this have no sense of either history or obligation.  We see ourselves as self-contained units who exist independently of other self-contained (i.e. self-centered) units.  We say the welfare of the whole doesn’t bother us because it’s none of our business.

You know, there is a particular kind of cell in our bodies that behaves this way: a cancer cell.  A cancer cell, according to Michael Dowd, is simply a cell that has forgotten its history, so it consumes and multiplies without discrimination until its host body is utterly consumed from the inside out.  We are in the middle of a cancer epidemic in our society, so you can just imagine what it would be like if people started behaving like cancer cells, with no sense of history, identity, or purpose within the embrace of the Whole of reality.  Our existence is life out of balance with the whole of reality.  That’s what freedom without connection gets you: selfishness.

As religious liberals, we do our best to hold freedom and connection together as our primary values.  We affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” as well as “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”  We are free and we are bound.  We are bound for freedom and we are bound by freedom.

Cultivating an Abandoned Place

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Here is an article from UU World magazine about a new friend of mine.

Ron is the director of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship.  His ministry in Turley, Oklahoma bears some resemblance to our community vision at St. James Mission in Utica.  I’m getting to know Ron via Facebook and had one phone conversation with him.  A lovely guy committed to a unique ministry.  This article is a couple of years old, but that doesn’t diminish its fabulous-ness in the least.

From the article:

Robinson, who identifies himself as a Unitarian Universalist Christian, and who is executive director of the UU Christian Fellowship, a denominational organization of UU Christians, said that in Turley he presents “classic Universalist Christianity.” He added, “It’s definitely a liberation theology—the three ‘R’s: relocating to where people are struggling, redistribution of goods and justice, and reconciliation. We do the first two pretty well and we need to be a lot better at the third.”

He said the Unitarian part of Unitarian Universalism “doesn’t fit as well culturally with what we’re trying to do because people here identify it more with wealth and education. Universalism gives us our best connection.” He added that when people in Turley press him whether he is Christian, he says, “‘Yes, but you don’t have to be a Christian to be in our church.’ Then if people have more questions, I talk about following Jesus and ‘deeds, not creeds.’ People get that. If they ask, ‘Do you believe in heaven and hell?’ I respond, ‘I trust God’s love is for all time. The details we don’t know. You’re free to believe in heaven and stay and work with us.’”

Could a church become missional in a place like Turley without a Christian persona? Robinson believes it could. “A lot of the missional churches are not claiming Christianity today because of the ways it has been identified as bigoted, boring, critical, or irrelevant, and so many churches are now casting their faith in terms like ‘following Jesus’ rather than connecting to an institutional church. I think that question about whether you’re Christian, particularly for the younger generation, is becoming less important. Having said that, I do think that what you do have to have is a sense of the transcendent—a belief in something beyond yourself even if you only name it the human spirit.”

The liberal church brings a needed perspective to missional work, he noted, by its affirmation of diverse religions, sexual orientations, genders, and ethnicities. “That means we can channel our energies not into opposing these issues, but into the creation of relationships and communities of all kinds that reflect core progressive values.”

Click here to read the full article