An Open Faith or a Deeper Faith: Where is the Unity in our Theological Diversity? Sermon preached at the UU Congregation of Phoenix January 31, 2010 The Rev. Dr. Earl K. Holt III Minister Emeritus, First Unitarian Church of St. Louis Readings Excerpt from a sermon entitled The Depth of Existence by Paul Tillich, a meditation on the words depth and deep, based on two biblical passages: Psalm 130:1, Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord, and a verse from St. Paul: But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things God. (I Corinthians 2:10) The words "deep" and "depth" are used in our daily life, in poetry and philosophy, in the Bible, and in many other religious documents, to indicate a spiritual attitude, although the words themselves are taken from a spatial experience. Depth is a dimension of space; yet at the same time it is a symbol for a spiritual quality. Most of our religious symbols have this character, reminding us of our finitude and our bondage to things that are visible There is a great wisdom in our language. It is the embodiment of innumerable experiences of the past. It is not by chance alone that we use certain visible symbols and do not use others. Therefore, it is often useful to find the reasons for the choices of the collective mind of former generations. It may become of ultimate significance to us, when we see what is implied in the use of terms like "deep", "depth", and "profound", for the expression of our spiritual life. It may give us the impulse to strive for our own depth. "Deep" in its spiritual use has two meanings: it means either the opposite of "shallow", or the opposite of "high". Truth is deep and not shallow; suffering is depth and not height. Both the light of truth and the darkness of suffering are deep. There is a depth in God, and there is a depth out of which the psalmist cries to God. Why is truth deep? And why is suffering deep? And why is the same spatial symbol used for both experiences?... All visible things have a surface. Surface is that side of things which first appears to us. If we look at it, we know what things seem to be. Yet if we act according to what things and persons seem to be, we are disappointed. Our expectations are frustrated. And so we try to penetrate below the surfaces in order to learn what things really are. Science has been carried on in this way. Science questions the common assumptions which seem to be true to everyone.then the genius comes and asks for the basis of these accepted assumptions; when they are proved not to be true, an earthquake in science occurs out of the depth. Such earthquakes occurred when Copernicus asked if our sense-impressions could be the ground of astronomy, and when Einstein questioned whether there is an absolute point from which the observer could look at the motions of things..[and] It occurred in the most eruptive way when the first philosophers questioned what everybody had taken for granted from times immemorial -- being itself.
When they became conscious of the astonishing fact, underlying all facts, that there is something and not nothing, an unsurpassable depth of thought was reached. Sermon The Rev. Dr. Earl Holt III I want to thank Susan Frederick-Gray both for her gracious welcome and for honoring me with the invitation to preach here today. Prior to retiring from King s Chapel last summer, I had preached at least one sermon most Sundays for nearly forty years. People used to ask me how I did that, a sermon every week, and since I stopped and have had some time to think about it, I have found myself asking the same thing. How did I do that? To say the least the last several months have been a change, and I can t say I really miss the looming sermon that sometimes seemed to hang like a Damoclean sword over the week. And it makes me admire all the more the fine younger colleagues who have entered our ministry over the years and carry forward the work. In my estimation your minister stands high among them. One of the great joys of these past few months has been the opportunity that active ministers very rarely have simply to go to church, to worship, to be ministered to. All of us need that, even ministers. And we should remember also that we all, whether it is our profession or not, on occasion serve as ministers to others. This is in fact part of our common religious calling, what the early church Reformers called the priesthood of all believers. As my wife Marilyn and I have traveled about the country over the last several months, we have worshipped in a number of churches, mostly though not exclusively Unitarian. Since we were gadabouts I came to rely on church websites for information, and in consequence for the first developed a real appreciation of how important they are. I m told that nowadays it s website creates the first and strongest impression most newcomers have of a church. If that s true, I should say, they deserve much more care and attention than most churches seem to give them. In any case I happened to be looking at church websites last December, when I needed to submit a sermon title for your January newsletter. At the time I had been struck by the emphasis in virtually all UU-related web-sites on the word diversity. It seems to have become even more prevalent among us than the word community, which if true is quite an accomplishment. As Tillich points out early in the passage I read earlier, the words that emerge as significant in our common language may be revelatory. As it matters what we believe, the words that we use to describe what we believe also matter. So I got to thinking some about this word diversity. It took me back to my Unitarian childhood in New England more than a 50 years ago. The word was familiar to us back then, end perhaps even formative for me, it was just part of a higher aspiration, which we called Unity in diversity. In my understanding at least, it expressed the belief that what we share in common with others is more important than the differences between us. The phrase was an affirmation of the importance of honoring individuality, the unique gifts that make each of us who we are, but also, while accepting our differences, striving always to find the common purposes and loyalties that transcend them. The American motto E pluribus unum from many, one expresses a
similar sentiment, a similarity that was a prominent theme in the theological writings of our Unitarian colleague and a dear friend, the late Forrest Church, part of what he called the liberal creed. We ought to recognize that there is an implicit and inescapable tension between the words diversity individual differences - and community common unity. In any case, this all led to the question occurred to me in December as the title of this sermon, Where is the Unity in our Theological Diversity? Please do not expect an answer to this question this morning. But I do believe that how we deal with the tension it implies may define the future of our religious movement for at least the next generation. I wouldn t say it is the only right question, but I think it is an important one, and I hope this sermon will help you understand why. I began studying Paul Tillich in seminary four decades ago, and he has influenced me more than any other single theologian. It was not so much that I chose him, rather that he chose me. There was something that drew me to his way of thinking and approaching issues that was just more compelling to me than that of other. It was something analogous to the way our personal friendships form themselves. We have many acquaintances, but only a few develop to the level of deep and close companionship; this occurs naturally, in a kind of mutual choosing. It is good to have a breadth of acquaintance, but it is important to have a few deep friends, to whom we are deeply committed. I have other deep friends, religiously and theologically speaking, those from whom I draw from a deep well of study. Channing and Emerson and Thoreau are the classical Unitarians to whom I again and again refer; Robert Frost, May Sarton and T. S. Eliot are the poets, and to this list of literary figures I have more recently added Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver, among others. Tillich and Martin Buber are my theologians, above all others. The sheer volume of what is available to read and study, with more being published every day, requires that we have to choose. Of the writing of books there is no end, we read in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, which was written a long time before there were word processors, or for that matter printing presses. I am always interested when someone recommends a new book to me that they have found meaningful to them, that may serve to broaden my own horizons. No doubt all our horizons could be usefully broadened, one way or the other. You could even say that this has been a guiding principle of what we now call liberal religion: expanding the horizons. The history of Unitarianism in this country over the past two hundred years can be described as a gradually broadening circle. The original Unitarian Christianity of William Ellery Channing was challenged almost immediately by the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his colleagues, Theodore Parker in particular. They rejected the authority of scripture in favor of individual intuition of the divine. By the late nineteenth century the centrality of Jesus was being debated, and not too many years later the earliest forms of what would come to be called religious humanism were beginning to surface, questioning whether even God, or at least the God of theism, was necessary to a religious outlook. That humanist-theist controversy, as I understand, is part of the history of this congregation.
The point is that in every generation, some kind of debate about expanding the boundaries of belief has been going on amongst us. I frequently recall a sermon I heard more than twenty years ago in which one of my colleagues made an analogy between the state of Unitarian Universalism and Robinson Crusoe s goat pen, which, he said, had so many holes in it that there were as many goats on the outside as there were on the inside. When I was growing up, we celebrated this breadth and broadening as unalloyed virtue. In high school we all learned a four-line poem by Edwin Markham, which went, as I remember it: He drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win We made a circle that drew him in. Far from abating, in the last three decades the circumference of that circle has grown wider still. To the point that (ironically, to my mind) a movement with a good many adherents who don t much like the word God has come to include if not quite embrace the Goddess. And a faith whose name still includes the word Unitarian, an affirmation of the divine unity, has managed to incorporate even selfstyled Pagans, who celebrate a pantheon of gods. Put simply, we have become collectively an ever more radically open faith, with relatively little questioning of whether or not this is an altogether good thing. Recently it seems, the traditional liberal principle of tolerance of diversity of opinion and belief has been transformed into a principle of more or less unchecked acceptance, at least in theory. The word Universalism, originally meaning a specific doctrine or belief in universal salvation, has been effectively re-defined to mean what I have often called Everythingarianism. You could say that this is liberalism or you could say that this is liberalism run amuck, but I have a slightly different question and concern today. I have come to wonder whether this collective concern with the broadening of the boundaries of our faith doesn t actually obstruct the path to the deepening of our faith, both collectively and individually. This is where Tillich comes in. Tillich defined religion as Ultimate Concern. He used the word-image Depth to describe the central concern of religion in contrast to the superficial, surface, ordinary concerns of life. He did not see religion as a separate, discrete, aspect of life but as the dimension of depth in all aspects of life. It may become of ultimate significance to us, he wrote, when we see what is implied in the use of terms like deep, depth. and profound, for the expression of our spiritual life. It may give us the impulse to strive for our own depth.
Speaking directly to those for whom the word God has lost its meaning, Tillich argued that depth is the essence of what the word God means. Depth is therefore the central issue of religion. If that word [God] has not much meaning for you, he said, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about [God]. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. [One] who knows about depth knows about God. So, the quest for faith is the quest for depth. However, life as most of us live it today can be viewed as an unconscious conspiracy against this quest. We live, in fact we must live, mostly on the surface. Our lives are full, overfull, of distractions from the kind of reflection that put us in touch with the depths, our depths, the world's depths, life s depths. And for the most part we actually welcome those distractions, I think. We keep ourselves busy. We keep ourselves informed. And in doing so we keep ourselves on the surface. We can live this way, contentedly, for long stretches of time. But every now and then we encounter a vague sense of something missing, something wrong. Or we suddenly become deeply conscious of the fact we most of the time successfully repress, that life does not go on forever, a sense of time slipping so quickly by. Or we read something that leads us to a deeper contemplation. Occasionally, something more dramatic happens to us. Occasionally, we are thrust against our wills into the depths: The depths of pain, or suffering, or grief. The depths of struggling with a hard decision. This very language is instructive. Why do we describe suffering as deep? The psalmist wrote, Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord. And why do we describe truth as deep or profound? Isn t our use of the word telling us something? Tillich says that, The depth of thought is part of the depth of life. Most of our life continues on the surface. We are enslaved by the routine of our daily lives, in work and pleasure, in business and recreation...we are more driven than driving. We do not stop to look at the height above us, of the depth below us. We are always moving forward, although usually in a circle, which finally brings us back to the place from which we first moved. We are in constant motion and never stop to plunge into the depth. This plunge into the depth, I believe, is the essential religious work. And one way to avoid this work, to escape it, is preoccupation with other seemingly worthy concerns. One way of looking critically at our own liberal religious history is to say that the preoccupation with constantly re-defining ourselves, of continually broadening the boundaries of our collective faith, is really a means of avoiding the demands, the challenges, of real faith. To state it simply: Religious breadth is no substitute for religious depth. In fact they proceed in opposite directions. Spreading a religious smorgasbord and inviting everyone to a tasting is the opposite of depth. There s nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but it leads us nowhere, spiritually. To say and celebrate Look how open we are, how broad, how diverse,
how much we have to choose from is fine. But it is not enough. It is no substitute, and can be a distraction from and even an obstacle to what is most important and needful. (To complete the food metaphor, the choice is between religious smorgasbord or feast of faith.) The challenge and the question for us is whether we are in danger of creating a religion that is a mile wide and an inch deep, a spirituality of the shallows. But if religion is depth, this is close to no religion at all, at least none worthy of the name. Being open-minded in religion, the liberal way, is a virtue; but it should not be confused with relativism, the idea that differences do not matter. This confusion is not unique to us. As the world becomes smaller, and as we come into more and more direct encounter with the variety of the world s faiths, the temptation to a kind of religious dilettantism becomes ever greater. Liberals, particularly in the arena of religion, seem to think that pluralism means either extracting the common essence of all faiths (as if that were possible except at the most superficial level) or borrowing whatever seems congenial from any and all. Both lead to a shallow faith. But what we believe matters, and so does the depth of faith, which is commitment. As the great scholar of world religions at Harvard, Diana Eck, reminds us: pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments." Commitment, in this sense, is another word for religious depth. Faith is commitment, our primary and deepest commitment. Now to conclude, let us briefly consider two of the shortest of Jesus parables, as set down in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. What could be that treasure, so great that one would sacrifice everything he has to possess it? What could be the pearl of great price, something so valuable that one would sell everything she has to purchase it? What matters to us ultimately, infinitely? What is of ultimate concern? Note that knowing the answer to that question is not enough. The parables describe not only a knowledge of our whole heart s whole desire but also an action, a decision and a commitment to gain it. As the Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly said; Each of us can live such a life of amazing power and peace and serenity...on one condition -- that is, if we really want to. Meaning, if we are willing to pay the price. These simple parables open up the depths. They are simple yet profound. They lead us to the deepest questions we can ask about our lives and their ultimate meaning: What are you living for, and why? What is your whole heart s whole desire? To quote Tillich one last time, their simplicity is an indicator
of their depth. We give him the last word: the mark of real depth is its simplicity. If you should say, This is too profound for me; I cannot grasp it, you are self-deceptive. For you ought to know that nothing of real importance is too profound for anyone. It is not because it is too profound, but because it is too uncomfortable, that you shy away from the truth. Let us not confuse the sophisticated thing with the deep things of life. The sophisticated things do not concern us ultimately; and it does not matter whether we understand them or not. But the deep things must concern us always, because it matters infinitely whether we are grasped by them or not. Let us pray. Grateful for this faith we share, where we are set free to follow the truth wherever it leads us, let us venture boldly on that path, encouraged by the knowledge that we do not walk alone but in company with fellow pilgrims, each one seeking a better way. And as we continue our journeys, let us be assured in our hearts that the truth that will make us free will in the end make us glad as well. Amen.