FROM LOVE TO ACCOUNTABILITY A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason Offered at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church February 8, 2015 Rocky River OH

Transcription

1 1 FROM LOVE TO ACCOUNTABILITY A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason Offered at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church February 8, 2015 Rocky River OH READING from an Ancient Source from Exodus 20: When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance 19 and said to Moses, Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die. 20 Moses said to the people, Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning. 21 The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. From I John 4 (read responsively from the hardback hymnal #639) Let us love one another, for love comes from God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 2 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us.. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear. Those who say I love God and hate their brothers and sisters are liars, for those who do not love a brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. No one has seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us. SERMON PART 1: In the first century of the common era, an astonishing thing happened in the religious culture of a small group of Jews in Palestine who were followers of the executed teacher Jesus of Nazareth. They began to preach a new understanding of what love meant to those who would listen to them, an understanding that was a based on experiencing God in a new way. The two scripture readings we have just heard from the Bible, one from the Hebrew texts that Christians call the Old Testament, and one from a letter written by Jesus disciple John, from what we call the New Testament, give us a good picture of what had changed. For the Hebrew people, the exodus from Egypt is the defining story of their faith and of Judaism today. It is not the first story of how they established a relationship with God based in covenant. That first story involves Abraham, who was promised that he would be the forefather of a great people who would have a special relationship with God if they kept up their side of the covenant and worshiped the One God. At the time of the Exodus that faith in the One God with whom you were in covenant was tested, when Moses told them that God had called him to lead them out of Egypt. Once they were out, and facing a long journey across the desert, the people s faith began to crumble and Moses went to the mountain to seek guidance, returning with what we call the Ten Commandments. The verse we have just heard is how the story continues after the Ten Commandments have been delivered. The Hebrew people tell Moses that he should be the one who speaks to them because they are too afraid to speak directly to God. Moses tells them that this fear of God is what keeps them from sinning and that he will continue to speak with God for them, a God that is found in thick darkness. What we have from God to understand and to obey to hold up the covenant is God s laws, and pages and pages of them are what follows this story in the Book of Exodus. Contrast this story with the words of John s letter. Where has the fear of God which keeps us from sin gone? The thick darkness at the time of the Exodus may still be a cloud of unknowing, for the letter tells us that no one has seen God. But the letter goes on to say that we can experience God and know God in the most ordinary of our life experiences in the relationships of love that we sustain. More importantly, the letter implies, those

2 2 loving relationships are not ones that are defined only by the bounds of tribe, Jews among Jews, Romans among Romans. No, the love where we find God is love between human beings, as brothers and sisters. If we love one another, God lives in us. With the popularity of the Christian message being amplified by its adoption by the Roman empire, this understanding of God became incorporated into the culture of the Christian west. While some Christian sects still emphasized God as a judge who ultimately ruled over us through a covenant expressed in moral and social laws, the picture of God as a parent whose judgments or discipline should be seen like those of a human parent, rooted in love and in the best interests of the child became much more widespread. Moreover, in the person of Jesus and in the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in which Jesus becomes an expression of God, we see Christianity expressing a confidence in ordinary human love, not just as an impulse the supports procreation and stability in the tribe, but as a gift and an expression of a relationship with the divine. Our culture s understanding of love has been influenced by this essentially mystical idea ever since. We see loving relationships as the place where we find deep and fulfilling emotional experience that is the closest thing in everyday life that people can come to mystical union with God. Whether it is a mother describing her bonding with her first child, or two lovers in the first throes of acknowledging their romantic attraction, or the ripe and mature love of those celebrating golden wedding anniversaries, the card shops and the poetry books are filled with tributes to love as the most sublime experience a human being can have. And so they should be! The mystical side of love, whether that is expressed in words, in physical expression, or in a feeling of union, is absolutely one of the best things about being human. The depth of our understanding of and appreciation for experiences of love sets us apart from all other creatures. When I think about my own life experiences, the two years when Kathleen and I were starting to fall in love, and then becoming crazy in love, have to be two of the best years of my life. They were the best because I had the sense that I was being given a gift that I did not deserve, and because being in love called forth from me a willingness to risk intimacy and depth in a way that I had never done before. We had the greatest time during those years. Then, we decided to get married! Now you laugh at that line, even though there wasn t an obvious joke there. You laugh because it s common knowledge that the ecstatic years of falling and being in love are time-bound. That kind of love absolutely does not conquer all. Like everything else that we experience, intense romantic love is impermanent. That doesn t mean that being in love ends on the contrary and so many of the long term marriages and partnerships in this room and among our families and friends are testimony to that. But falling in love and staying in love involve different things as time goes on. Today I want to explore why that intensely emotional, even mystical, dimension of love cannot be the be-all and end-all of our understanding. Love in personal relationships, and in other important relationships that we have in our lives, has not been fulfilled or fully expressed until it is based not only on mutual emotional satisfaction but also on mutual accountability. Accountability is a word we are hearing a lot lately, especially in public contexts. Accountability is what we want from police officers, from government officials, or from anyone who hurts or offends us. But accountability is not talked about as frequently in the context of personal relationships or spiritual practices. The word has two related meanings: you are accountable when you have to explain yourself or justify yourself to someone; and something that you do is accountable if it is explicable, if your explanation for it is understandable by someone else. Accountability is not something that most people in our culture say that they aspire towards. To what do we aspire instead? for many people words like freedom, independent, self-reliant and liberated better describe what our hopes for our lives but accountability? That sounds like something kids have to be in school to their teachers, or something you owe to your boss, or something the police

3 3 officer requires of you when you get stopped for speeding. Being accountable doesn t have immediate positive associations. In marriages, particularly, the sexist stereotype of marital accountability throughout many decades of television sitcoms and comic strips is the husband who can t go golfing because his wife makes him do chores around the house instead, or the wife who is expected to have dinner on the table after a full day of work herself. If we step beyond these caricatures of marriages, the other image of marital accountability that frequently comes to mind is what happens when one partner discovers that the other is having an affair. So those are the two big strikes I have against me in trying to say something deeper about accountability in committed partnerships today that it either has to do with not being able to do something you like, or it has to do with being caught doing something you shouldn t. In this kind of accountability, we are honoring the God of fear that keeps us from sinning, The accountability that I want us to appreciate comes from a different place, however. It comes from the God we find in our hearts. So let me change channels here for a while and talk about accountability and heart work in from a different angle, and then we can come back to marriages and long term partnerships in the second half of the sermon. In the conversation last week that Tom Williams and I had about this sermon, he gave me an insight into love and accountability from another part of our lives the part that has to do with whether and how we choose to involve ourselves in various kinds of social justice work. Tom said what you re talking about in marriages reminds me of what happens sometimes with people who say that they love nature! For many people the most wonderful times of their week or their year is when they can be out in the natural world in some way, in a national park, camping maybe, or just appreciating the beauty of what s out there. But do all those people get involved in environmental activism in some way? Not anywhere near as many as say that they love nature! So that started us talking about what happens to people who make a connection between their love for camping, or hiking, or fishing, and their personal responsibility for the public policies that protect natural areas and wildlife? Or their personal responsibility for climate change? Last year we heard frequently from our Intern Minister Matthew McHale about what it had meant to him to make a personal spiritual commitment to be accountable for a world undergoing a climate crisis in which he and all those who follow him will have to live. As I remember his first sermons about this, it all began with personal relationships with his father and with the love of hiking that he and his father shared. The heart work connecting Matthew and his father and the world around them became part of his upbringing and his UU religious education and spiritual journey. Matthew began to understand that loving hiking meant he had to take more responsibility than simply leaving no traces of garbage on the trail. He had to be personally accountable for whether the ecosystem in the areas of the country where he loved to hike would be sustainable in a future where the climate is warming. I use Matthew as an example here because many of us feel like part of being a responsible and ethical citizen and person does require us to take part in public affairs to give to non-profits supporting values and goals we care about, to vote, to be personally active with our time and money in public affairs to make the world we dream about true. It becomes a block of time or money we set aside in our lives, another item to check off on the to-do list. But in his sermons and in his personal life, Matthew taught me something about being personally accountable to something that is much bigger than living up to your image of what it is to be a good person, what a good person does to follow the rules. He taught me something about how to be personally accountable for what my Zen teacher used to call the whole catastrophe. Another example I could use comes from the way we teach anti-racist education here at West Shore, a theme that we spent some time on in sermons last month. The emotional turning point in anti-racist education for white people is when you begin to feel personally responsible for the systemic racism that surrounds us, not so much because you have been made to feel guilty about a whole lot of

4 4 bigotry that you don t personally engage in or feel, but because you recognize that being accountable to people of color means that you are willing to think and feel about racism at least as much as they have to. Being an accountable anti-racist ally means to forego the white privilege of not having to think about this except when you decide to. To be able to engage with this kind of accountability in your reflections and actions on social justice means to be able to live your life with a more visceral sense that it really doesn t belong to you, and that it is something you have been given to make use of, to give back, to give away. I d like to talk more about how this applies to our most important personal relationships and partnerships, after we take a few moments to ask you to consider giving away a little bit of the money you brought with you today, or perhaps the pledge check that you decided to bring, in support of West Shore church as the ushers will now gratefully receive the morning offering. READING from a Modern Source: From Wendell Berry s The Country of Marriage Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are-- that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know, I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it. Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light enough to live, and then accepts the dark, passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen time and again from the great strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms. SERMON PART 2: If I am truly honest with myself, I would have to say that in my first two marriages I did not understand what it meant to move from romantic love to a love that included accountability. I thought I did, but especially in my first marriage, in my twenties, I thought and behaved as a person primarily accountable to my own needs, rather than to values which transcended my own needs. I had step-children in that marriage but I didn t feel responsible for living my life in a way that would put them first, and ultimately it wasn t that long before I brought the marriage to an end because it didn t fit where I was going. Was it the right decision? Was it a selfish decision? The answer is probably Yes to both questions, because I was in no place to carry forward the kind of commitment that I understand now to be critical for any long term relationship to survive and thrive. In my second marriage, a much longer one, a turning point came when I had my own child. Taking responsibility for having a child has to be at some level a self-less decision, one that takes you beyond your own self-interest, because no matter how much becoming a parent is responsive to your own personal drives and needs, you quickly come to terms with the fact that there is this other being in your world for whom and to whom you are accountable in a way that you may never have felt before. Becoming a parent should be a teaching moment in a marriage that illuminates how this same kind of personal accountability you feel to your child has to be part of the relationship with your spouse, but it doesn t always happen that way. Whether you re a parent or not, the usual standard of marital accountability is sexual fidelity, for most couples the one unbreakable rule that is the insurance policy for marital longevity. In my case, the marriage in which I became a parent was one in which I honored all the rules I didn t cheat, didn t get addicted to anything, didn t over-spend, didn t under-spend you name it. I was a pretty good husband. Except that at a deep

5 5 level I didn t feel accountable to a reality in my marriage that was bigger than me and my personality and needs and bigger than my wife and her personality and needs. I understand this when I hear the lines from Wendall Berry s poem. My marriage was in fact a little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. Berry points to the other possibility in a truly accountable relationship: We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? My second wife had the good sense to call a halt to our marriage, with deeper insight as to why it would not be good for either of us or our daughter to have it continue. It was a time of a great deal of soul-searching about who I was and what I was living for. When Kathleen and I were married, I felt accountable for this relationship in a different way than I had before. During our ceremony we recited a poem called The Third Body by Robert Bly, and it is one I come back to often when we talk about our relationship with each other or with you, sometimes around Valentine s Day, or at our anniversaries. We ve quoted it for you in church before, and my only hesitation in doing so again is that the language evokes only a heterosexual couple I beg the indulgence and imaginations of my same-sex couple friends who I am sure know the reality of this poem just as well: A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long at this moment to be older, or younger, or born in any other nation, or any other time, or any other place. They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know. The man sees the way his fingers move; He sees her hands close around a book she hands to him. They obey a third body that they share in common. They have promised to love that body. Age may come; parting may come; death will come! A man and a woman sit near each other; As they breathe they feed someone we do not know, Someone we know of, whom we have never seen. Accountability to a third body in a relationship is what happens when we move beyond romantic love, to something deeper. It is not that the romantic love disappears. It remains at the core of a long term relationship, the glowing coal that keeps generating heat and light, but the warmth of the relationship also depends on the container that holds that fire. That container is accountability to the Third Body. So this brings us back to where we began today, to the Ist Epistle of John and to the revolutionary spiritual insight that if we love one another, God lives in us. No matter whether we are theist, atheist, or agnostic in our attitudes towards how this world came to be, there is something compelling and truthful about seeing divinity in the Third Body of our most important relationships. The spiritual life is ultimately a search for how and to what you can give yourself away. You can spend your days holding on tightly to this personal possession of a life that you have been given, keeping it safe and secure, like a vintage car that is all shiny and polished inside a garage and only gets taken out on the road for parades on sunny days. Or you can recognize that you will never be able to risk-manage your way through relationships, and that your accountability is not just to your own needs but to the possibility of a Third Body a common life that two people, or a family, or a community can create and share. These everyday relationships are the known way as Wendall Berry describes them, the known way leading always to the unknown, the known place to which the unknown is always leading us back. May it be so.