Sermon “New Measures of Progress”

The Rev. Rali Weaver

First Church and Parish in Dedham

January 24, 2010

If you are on Facebook you may already know this but for those of you who are not I must admit that at about 8pm last night I was having trouble believing I would make any progress on this sermon at all.

And so with help of my Facebook friends I started considering new ways to fill this time.

15 minutes of silent meditation?

Or silent reading?

Or I could recount my own progress through procrastination or maybe we could just do the hokey pokey?

I suppose that all of these things could have been a solution to how to fill our time together but they wouldn’t have denoted any progress on my sermon.

To measure progress on anything it stands to reason that we must first know what it is that we are measuring.

If I am measuring progress on my sermon I could measure just getting it done. Or I could try to measure the effectiveness of getting my point across. Or I could try to measure how good you feel when it is over. All of these would denote some progress in my sermon.

According to the dictionary Progress is forward or onward movement toward a destination.

To measure forward or onward movement toward a destination we must begin by knowing where we’ve started.

It might help for us to begin by trying to answer the three questions offered to us by our choir this morning. "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"

These questions were first posed by the reclusive artist Paul Gaugin in his most famous 1897 painting in which he inscribed in French these questions. D'où venons-nous?/ Que sommes-nous? / Où allons-nous?

I would argue that these questions have dramatically different answers depending upon our worldview.

Gaugin who spent his life struggling with depression and vowed that he would commit suicide following this painting's completion might naturally answer these questions differently than a more optimistic viewer of life. The long painting which hangs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has the three major figure groups illustrating the questions posed in the title. Three women with a child represent the beginning of life; a middle group symbolizes the daily existence of young adulthood; and the final question is represented in the artists own words as "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts"; at her feet, "a strange white bird...represents the futility of words."

In reading Gaugin’s description of his own attempt to answer these questions I wondered if it might indeed be futile to use words to answer these questions.

Life is a riddle and a mystery. And measuring it in any form, from any vantage point is complicated.

When something is complicated we as humans in our never ending attempt to triumph over nature measure our forward movement toward predetermined destinations, we measure our progress.

From some vantage points this is an easy thing to do. For example if you were a Christian you might say we come from God, We Are God’s Children and We are given life everlasting. As a Christian you could establish rules of right living, and conditions of acceptance and if you believe the outcome is heaven you could determine your trajectory toward that outcome by your adherence to the rules of right living.

Our ideas of progress might be dramatically different if we were operating within the constructs of a Hindu or Buddhist, Sikh or Janist faith with a belief in Samsara with its endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Imagine having all the time in the world to get things right? Or the promise of life – real life- here on earth after death? How might that change your own answers to these questions?

Both Atheists and Agnostics might resolve these questions still differently focused on the concerns of here and now and as Unitarian Universalists I believe we may fall more into their camp. Not holding to any defined understanding of the truth of life and death, we do not strive toward some goal of an afterlife or even relax into the samsara of life leaving us with few answers as to the question of where we have come from or where we are going.

Yesterday I spent my morning with the Massachusetts Council of Churches at their Annual Meeting held at Assumption College in Worcester.

The National Council of churches is an ecumenical partnership of 36 Christian faith groups in the United States.

If you aren’t already familiar with the term ecumenism refers to initiatives aimed at greater religions unity and cooperation.

Having been involved in many state Council of Churches groups in the past to this definition I would add that generally these groups are quite Christnocentric. As I see it the goal of the Council of Churches has been to increase communication and cooperation across the many different sects of Christianity and as a result Unitarian Universalists are generally not offered delegate status at these meetings. Massachusetts is different.

What I realized while participating as a delegate in the meeting yesterday and what is relevant to our discussion today is how dramatically our ability to answer the questions as a group is depending on which lens we choose to look through. Once the unifying starting place of ecumenism is agreed upon the measures of progress to that goal became less muddied and easier to agree upon.

A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with a family who was at odds over many political issues. One camp more conservative in ideology and another more liberal they were arguing over the issue of Global Warming. We have all heard the various camps spouting statistics trying to articulate their worldview. Is it real or isn’t it has become the starting point. And in listening to them I realized what a stumbling block this starting point had become. In an attempt to redefine “where we have come from” I simply reminded them of the 1970’s campaigns against pollution.

Do you remember those endless commercials and educational efforts reminding us to pick up our litter, to keep America Clean? I had a favorite childhood t-shirt that read “Keep America Clean. Eat a Pigeon.” I suggested to this family that if our starting point is trying to stop pollution we might all agree. And you know what? – They did.

Knowing our starting point is an important way to begin any conversation of progress. Finding a starting point we can all agree upon is the first step.

In the book Getting to Yes Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton suggest that the first step in solving any problem is to separate the people from the problem.

Starting with our history is a good way to do that.

The second question that Gaugin poses is “What are we?”

It stands to reason that to measure our progress we must first know what we are.

Yesterday I heard the ecumenical Christians answer this in a variety of ways. They called themselves Christians, and the voice of the voiceless, they sang “They will know we are Christians by our Love” so I would say they would identify themselves as Love. But they also described their relationship to Jesus a their savior and redeemer. In listening I began to understand how we see ourselves can offer us loose framework or a vice.

With my more liberal worldview I found some of the conversations frustrating. I wanted to shout out the words of Sophia Lyons Fahs the Unitarian Universalist Religious Educator that wrote the words we read each year on Children’s Sunday. I offer them to you this morning.

Some beliefs

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.

Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.

Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.

Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

As Unitarian Universalists describing what we are takes on a unique challenge. Our longing to both be comfortable and our drive toward inclusively make our definitions of self more fluid.

I was born to the son of a Methodist Circuit Minister, I was baptized and confirmed in the Methodist church. This is where I come from. But what am I?

Yesterday sitting at the table with a wide range of Christian Clergy I realized that I am an inclusivist. Ok so I had to make up a word to describe myself. But what I realized yesterday was that while culturally and spiritually a Christian every fiber of my being wants a world community that recognizes how as Fahs puts it all the “differences beautify the pattern”. I am an inclusivist or in other words A Unitarian Universalist.

Knowing that I start from this place, and measure my progress as a human and as a sermon writer against this goal of inclusivism makes it easier to plot my progress from who I am and to measure where I am going.

And that is after all Gaugin’s final question: “Where are we going?” In his painting he was encouraging thought of the afterlife or lack thereof and I can say with certainty that for centuries our faith traditions have focused its agenda on what we can do in this life. Taking into consideration the natural cycle of life and what we actually have control over is important.

For far too long the deciders have measured our progress on growth without ever recognizing the natural cycles of growth and death and rebirth.

For new measures of progress to ever emerge this simple understanding of the nature of life must be present.

Working with nature to create the world we want to live in, is the goal of a Unitarian Universalist.

When we ground our measurements of progress in the natural cycles of life it turns out that what we measure might in fact be more important in determining progress than how far we go from start to finish.

Ok so I did finish this sermon I guess we could consider that progress but what you can’t really know or see is my progression from angst to joy as I turned a weeks worth of thoughts into a cohesive idea. And while that progression is vital to my performance the real measurable progress comes not from any completed sermon but from how my words make you feel.

Let me suggest that in 2010 we stop counting in the old ways with beans and grains of sand and start measuring the things that make us all feel good.