Good morning, friends! God be with you. It is a special blessing to revisit a place one once called home, and I’m feeling especially blessed to be here, to revisit, if just for a short time, the area where my daughters were born, and where their childhoods were spent, and where we had so many memorable times together, on weekend visits after their mother and I split up.
Santa Cruz was where I eventually returned to live, to be closer to my girls, and where I found my way to this Fellowship, where I found a spiritual home, a community of like-minded and like-hearted people where I could belong, where I found friendship, and fellowship, and love, and ways to participate meaningfully in worthy service to the congregation, and the larger community.
The people I came to know here helped me to heal, and grow, in many ways. I remember all this with gratitude to you who are still here, and honor to those who have passed on since I’ve been away. It was here that I first began to feel my calling to ministry, and where I began to discern the shape of my potentiality as a minister of the word and the sacrament, whatever those might turn out to be – because I hardly knew then, not that I know so much more now!
The bonds of affection are still strong for me here; this is a place where I felt very much at home, in community, in ways I have felt nowhere since I left.
As I contemplated setting to the task of telling my story, I realized it is not all, or even mostly, mine. Our lives, and those of all creatures, are profoundly connected with – and considerably determined by – those of others among them. And so it is with me. I believe that we engage with God most immediately and effectively in our relationships with other persons.
“I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to his disciples, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Each one of you is here today, I know, because you share an understanding that the world we live in is connected profoundly, and mysteriously. You gather to lift up your mutual care for and celebration of the interdependent web of existence, of which we all are a part. Your communal worship has sacred meaning for each and all of you.
The English word “worship” is derived from a combination of old roots meaning, “worth-ship,” or “worthiness.” We gather together to honor the worthiness, the moral value and sacredness of the life we share, and the love that gives us birth, that binds us together in a kind of holy communion.
I am here to share with you the meanings that I have come to recognize in my own spiritual practices. And I want to acknowledge that there are some here whose own spiritual meanings, and the words they use to express them, differ from mine. Let me honor those differences, as I try to express mine to you.
You are going to hear a lot of religious language coming out of my mouth this morning. If you’re having skeptical difficulties, I implore you to suspend disbelief, just for now. One hundred percent of the language and imagery of religion – every religion – consists in metaphor, myth, and symbol. Profound truths and ultimate realities are “pointed toward” by these verbal signs and imagery. Humanity employs such methods because the ineffable, ultimate concerns of our religious traditions cannot be adequately described, nor their meanings conveyed, by ordinary descriptive language.
We progressive theologians like to say, “To each its own meaning.” I even remember a textbook on critical interpretation having that title. So, if a word or idea sticks in our ears at first, we try to deconstruct it, and reinterpret it in a way that better suits our understanding and experience.
I have read the Bible, and studied its original languages, as well as the scriptures of Buddhism and Hinduism, and this has been my method for approximating an understanding of these books’ meanings for me, for accommodating them to my own system of belief and appreciation. So, come along with me now, and try beginning to unpack whatever words you may wince to hear!
When we set out on a journey of exploration, it never leads where we expected it to lead us.
I set out to prepare myself for religious ministry some seven years ago, and I thought I would go straight to Starr King School for the Ministry – a primarily Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley. I’d considered nothing else, since I’d identified as Unitarian Universalist since I was a youth. But my application for admission to the Master of Divinity degree program there was denied, and I was unable to find out why. I was told only that a second application for admission was strongly discouraged.
So, I decided to complete an undergraduate degree in religious studies first, and before long I was enrolled in a bachelors degree program at Holy Names University – a small Catholic liberal arts college in Oakland. When I was finished, after two years, I applied for admission to Starr King School again, and lo and behold, this time I was accepted!
But I had also applied for graduate studies at Pacific School of Religion – a progressive multi-denominational Christian seminary in Berkeley, which is part of the Graduate Theological Union, as is Starr King. I was offered admission there as well, and for reasons mostly intuitive, and non-rational, I accepted that offer instead of Starr King’s.
In care of the dedicated and radical Sisters of the Holy Names, I had studied the Bible critically, the history, theology, and ethics of Christianity and Judaism, philosophy of religion, and so forth, and I had begun to adopt a new identity as an appreciative heir to the long Judeo-Christian monotheist tradition.
The Unitarians and Universalists, after all, had first defined themselves as Enlightenment Christians, the intellectual liberals and radicals of Protestant Congregationalism. I had begun to feel I was recovering, and reconstructing, my Reformation religious heritage.
If the depth and breadth of my inherited religious traditions were new to me, God was not. I had formed the conviction long before, based in experience, that God is real, ultimately real, and of ultimate significance to the human condition.
A power higher than my own reason, a saving grace I had prayed for, had enabled me to recover from alcoholism in an earlier phase of my life. I came to find consolation and strength in prayer, from a source deep within me, and I knew that, whatever God is, God is present, always and everywhere with me. The feeling of God’s presence is love. God is love, and I know always, as the Gospels say that the Holy Spirit assured Jesus, that I am a beloved child of God, in whom my Creator delights. For me, religious experience is love, and in unconditional love, there is salvation.
Let me tell you a story, a bit of memoir I wrote in reflection on a very special experience I had, quite some years ago now:
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.
“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”
Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.
“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Soon after I wrote that reflection, I began seeking to understand and cultivate, and to try to communicate the meaning of that deeply spiritual experience of God’s love I shared with Anna.
In graduate studies, at Pacific School of Religion, I went on to study the Hebrew and Christian scriptures more thoroughly, seeking the central significance of the biblical religion that pivoted on the teachings of Jesus.
I also spent a good deal of time in study of the sacred texts Buddhism, and those of the Indian wisdom traditions, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita. Certain elements of those teachings have contributed importantly to my spirituality, and shaped my views of the teachings of Jesus.
In a postmodern, post-structuralist intellectual environment, my position may be an unpopular one, but nonetheless, I believe that the central personal experience in every religious tradition, despite all their diversity, is the selfsame relation between the human person and God.
And I have, step by step, come along the trajectory of the Christian tradition, for though there are many ways of ascending the spiritual mountain; I think it is better to follow a wide, well-marked way, than to wander through the underbrush unguided, or to skip from one trodden path to another.
I have learned that before the doctrine and dogma of the Latin fathers, and the Greek patriarchs, were erected into an institutional church, before the texts of the New Testament were composed, there was a very human revelation, a transforming message, that emerged in Jerusalem, and challenged the established religious authorities to a spiritual turnabout, to re-pent (which means, “think again”) and to embrace whole-heartedly and whole-mindedly, as whole human persons, the ultimate, incomprehensible reality of God, to which we can only respond with love.
Just what, exactly, was the “good news,” the Evangelien, the gospel, or God-spell that Jesus taught? One preaching professor of mine stressed that a sermon has to have some good news in it, somewhere. So, I took my search for the good news of God to heart.
Some of the work I found I needed to accomplish, after poring over Biblical translations, alternate versions, and commentaries, was to paraphrase the texts of the Gospels, and the most significant parts of them, in ways coherent with my own developing faith, and my theological understandings. Thus, according to the first-written Gospel,
Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
In my paraphrase,
Jesus came along, so it is said, and he preached a great blessing, saying, “The time for enlightenment and liberation of the spirit is now! God’s real presence is with us, among us, within us, now and forever. Let your hearts and minds be changed; believe in this very good news!
We can read too much, or too little, into Jesus' saying that time is fulfilled. From a God’s eye point of view, time is always fulfilled in the Eternal Now, and that is the point here. Not that the time of God, at long last, is finally upon us, finally full, finally filled – it always has been! Is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
God’s reign (or, perhaps better, the community of God) is not just near, almost here, about to happen. What Jesus meant is that God is not merely close by – God is present among us, and within us, and each other, here, now, and forever.
Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”
God’s presence is real and immediate, at all times, for everyone who is ever disposed to apprehend it. But we are made in God’s image; therefore, God’s presence is visible and most palpable in community, where we recognize, and speak with, and sing with one another.
Because we are God’s creatures, and God’s conscious embodiments, when we gather together to worship, we witness the presence of God in one another. All of creation is God’s embodiment, but we disclose God’s presence most immediately to one another in our loving, affirming, and forgiving presence for each other.
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.
Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love.
While I can assure you with the greatest of faith in my meaning, that you are a beloved child of God, in whom your Creator delights, I must in all honesty admit that I myself often cannot feel beloved, and I spend much of my time feeling lonely. This is not hypocrisy, it is hope; and it is human. True, an assuredness of God’s embracing love can be faint substitute for a warm human embrace when a person is without loved ones. But it can still be a saving grace, when nothing else avails.
I believe this: Love is our response in joyful recognition of our deep connectedness with one another in the ground of ultimate reality, of being itself. The ground in which we are all connected, and interdependent, and the fully human self-consciousness of that reality, is what I call God. Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus, an early Christian theologian.
For me, Jesus is a centrally significant religious symbol. He represents the potentiality of the fully human person, awakened to the ultimate reality of his fully human divinity. He has come to know himself as a beloved child of God, in whom his Creator delights, and he has come to understand his purpose on earth – to proclaim the good news of God’s loving, redeeming, and saving presence.
What does this tell us about how we can live our lives best, and most blessedly?
A pagan is said once to have approached the Rabbi Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus, and promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while standing on one leg. The Rabbi then stood on one leg and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” He said that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss, upon the Golden Rule.
Confucius first enunciated the Golden Rule in the fifth century BCE. “Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do unto you.” That, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching, and that his disciples should put into practice all day, and every day.
The great Rabbi Meir, of the second century CE, said that any interpretation of Scripture that leads to hatred and disdain of other people is illegitimate. Saint Augustin made the same point. He said that the Holy Scripture teaches nothing but charity (meaning loving-kindness), and we must not leave off interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation.
Religion is as religion does. A prophet called Micah, who lived long before Jesus, summed up the Torah this way: What does Adonai require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?
A first-century Jewish prophet, Jesus located the central tenet of the manifold Law of Moses in the single “greatest commandment,” the law of love that stood as Judaism’s holy imperative:
Shema Yisraeil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” And there is another like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On this, he said, “depends all the Torah and all the Prophets.”
An honored contemporary rabbi is asked by a lawyer, “What must I do to be righteous and merit God’s mercy?” The rabbi replied, “What is written in the Torah?” The questioner answered, “You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” The rabbi replied, “You have gotten the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But the questioner continued, asking, “And who is my neighbor?” The rabbi replied with this story:
“One day recently, at about dawn in an alley in Downtown L.A., a teenaged boy from Pasadena was mugged, beaten badly, and left for dead, lying just by the sidewalk. The first pedestrian to pass by that morning was a middle-aged woman, a wealthy physician on the way to work at her sports medicine clinic.”
“Noticing the motionless body, she hesitated a little, then hurried to cross the street, and continued on her way, thinking anxiously of her legal liability. Next, a young corporation executive carrying a hot cup of Starbucks coffee, while speaking into a cell phone, frowned at the unsightly mess, and sidestepping it, he strode on by, dismissing from mind what he’d just seen.”
“At last, a raggedy brown-skinned man, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, came upon the scene. When he saw the injured body, he was moved with compassion. Remembering his catechism, he stopped to see about the boy. Using his bandana and his undershirt, a plastic bottle of water, and some cheap vodka in a hip flask, he cleaned up and bandaged the boy’s wounds, flagged a taxi, and took the stranger to a skid row hotel room where this man and three other so-called “illegal aliens” were living. The man attended the beaten boy and cared for him all that day and night, even arranging for an unlicensed day nurse from the barrio to come in and treat his injuries.”
“The following morning, the rescuer left to seek a day’s labor, first paying the curandera fifty dollars to stay and nurse the boy; and he promised her when he would return he’d pay her as much as she needed to take good care of her hapless young patient.”
“Now, which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the robbed and beaten boy?” asked the rabbi. The lawyer answered, “The one who showed him mercy,” The rabbi said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
You’ve just tasted old wine poured from a new wineskin. You may recognize the parable I’ve just told as a revision and paraphrase of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.
Religion is as religion does. The religion that teaches me to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God is the religion I practice.
Now, I’d like to invite you all to take a few moments to turn, and look at the person beside you; look a while, with loving kindness, for you are looking at a beloved child of God, in whom the Creator delights! Let us bless one another with a sign of God’s love and peace; shake a hand, embrace, give a holy kiss, as may be appropriate, to signify God’s loving presence, and reenact the ancient ritual of the passing of God’s peace!
Go now in peace. May the spirit of love surround you everywhere you may go!
Jim Weller is a graduate of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is currently a member of Peace United Church of Christ, formerly called First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz.
