Questions of Faith

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 23 August 2009

On my first Sunday back from summer break, we’ve developed something of a tradition here at All Souls that I really enjoy and that is the tradition of gathering up the questions from all of you, your questions about faith, about God, about spirituality, about the church.  We’ve been collecting them over the last two weeks on little cards and we have sorted through those questions and David and Joe are going to ask some of those questions today and I’m just going to answer them, kind of spontaneously.  I say kind of spontaneously; I actually did see the questions yesterday, just so I could sleep on them and be somewhat coherent in my answers.  But I haven’t written out any answers or sort of planned anything formal to say.  It’s almost as if you were coming to my study and asking me a question that was on your heart. 

So this is a little different from what we usually do on Sunday mornings.  I also want to say we received dozens and dozens of questions.  I obviously won’t be able to get to them all today.  But please know that I have read them all; I’ve taken them all in and they often go on to inform my sermons throughout the year.  And I want to just make a special invitation to anyone who submitted a question.  If yours isn’t answered today, or if it wasn’t answered thoroughly enough, feel free to make an appointment and come see me and we can talk some more about it.

One of the things that’s missing in this back and forth is that if we were in my study I’d be able to not only hear your question but to ask you some follow up questions, get a little bit deeper.  So that’s missing from this.  But, here we go; this is called “Questions of Faith.”  David, you have the first question?

Question:  You have the first question, Rob.  [Laughter]  And the question is:  We’re living in a time of fear and anxiety.  Fear about job security, anxiety about health care reform.  Fear about catching swine flu.  In a time of fear and anxiety, Rob, what is our prayer for calm?

Rev. Hardies:  What is our prayer for calm?  I think the first thing I’d want to do is really acknowledge the anxiety that is in our culture right now.  I really feel it myself and sense it as I read the news and I look at what’s happening around the health care debate right now.  I think some of the acting out that we’re seeing at these town hall forums around the country, are in part a sort of anxiety that’s playing itself out in strange ways.  So there is a lot of anxiety right now in our culture.

For me, the way that I try to ground myself in the midst of anxiety is through a daily practice of prayer and meditation and centering.  For me, if I don’t have that, I drift in the wind.  That practice grounds me and I really want to encourage such a practice for all of you.  It grounds me, it centers me, it kind of connects me to the holy and to what I love in life which is really important when anxiety gives way to fear.  And especially when I’m anxious what I find that is helpful is prayer that engages my body and that engages my breath.  So I actually have a breath prayer that I use where I very consciously breathe in and breathe out.  This summer, at least, I’ve been using Spirit of Life to begin my prayer time in the morning.  Spirit of Life kind of lends itself, written in couplets; it lends itself to, [breathes in] Spirit of Life, [breathes out] come unto me; [breathes in] Spirit of Life, [breathes out] come unto me.  Even that repetition, beckoning the Spirit into our lives, can be very calming I find.

I also want to encourage us to use the energy that comes from some of this anxiety to join together and work for justice. Anxiety creates an energy that can be a fuel for doing the right thing and creating justice.  So, this fall, there’s going to be a lot of justice to be done.  There’s a lot on our horizon and our plates this fall and it’s exciting and important work and we can channel some of that anxiety and unsettledness into that work as well.

And then I think I’ll just say finally that a lot of times I think about the importance of community in times of anxiety.  When I think about the fact that this church community is almost 190 years old, that the members of this congregation have seen one another through far more anxious times than this – the Civil War for one, two World Wars, and in many of our recent memories in this congregation, 9/11 – and so together we can see each other through these anxious times.

Question:  How should we recognize the worth and dignity of people who don’t seem interested in recognizing the worth and dignity of others?

Rev. Hardies:  That’s always one of the most frequently asked questions, every year when we do this.  I want to begin by saying that we should, recognize the worth and dignity of those who fail to recognize the worth and dignity of others for to not do so is to commit the same sin, the same transgression.

Having said that, you know, in just about every religious tradition, God has two faces.  God has a face of justice that insists on right behavior and just behavior and doing the right thing and another face that is the face of mercy, the face of forgiveness and compassion and recognition of our brokenness.  And to be a religious person and to be a spiritual person is to somehow lift up both sides of this.  They are often in tension, and they often lead us to different conclusions and it’s often really hard to figure out which face to show when, or how to show both at the same time.

You know, I’m thinking the most obvious case is just this week, the Scottish Justice Minister released one of the men who was implicated in the bombing of the airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland.  People have been watching that on the news and there’s been a huge uproar, of course, both in Scotland and in the United States, from the President and there’s a perfect example of, you’ve got the face of justice and the face of mercy.  He was dying of cancer; he’s probably got three weeks to live.  And there is this real tension of wanting to hold up both sides, both faces of the holy.  Now there are real questions about, well, whose job is it to hold up both of those faces?  Maybe it’s the Justice Minister’s job to speak for the justice side; maybe it’s someone else’s job to speak to the mercy side.  I don’t know enough about the details to weigh in on that particular example.   But the thought did cross my mind that if I were a Scot, I’d probably be more proud of my Justice Minister than I was as an American, for instance, in the wake of 9/11, watching what our country did in the wake of a terrorist attack, from torture to what I believe was an unjust war in Iraq, to the restriction of human rights in our country.  For me, that was really clearly an inappropriate reaction to someone else’s transgression of the worth and dignity of others.  It was a repetition of the cycle. 

So that’s a very difficult tension that we face in our personal lives and in our collective lives.

Question:  Rob, I want to give voice to one of the questions submitted by a woman in our congregation.  She writes:  This year, my husband and I were expecting our first child.  We were almost five months along when I got sick and I went into early labor.  The baby was fully formed and healthy but was not viable outside the womb so we lost him.  We named him Willow.  Now he is gone.  I was in the hospital for a week with an infection and have endured months of tests.  My case was very atypical and my doctors have little advice for me for avoiding this tragedy again.  What I am surprised at is my rage at God.  I have always been a deeply spiritual person.  I pray regularly and, before this occurred, I felt God in all aspects of my life and in nature.  Now I feel quite certainly that God is either my enemy or does not exist at all.  I feel guilty about these feelings but I can’t seem to shake them.  What do you think?

Rev. Hardies:  I can’t imagine a loss more profound that the loss of a child.  I am also aware that the depth of that tragedy makes it very hard for us to talk about it in our culture.  It’s almost a taboo subject.  When you lose a child it’s hard for people to know what to say and so there’s this silence that surrounds it that adds to the difficulty.  And it’s also been my experience that when couples lose a child that has not come to full term there’s an additional layer of confusion and complication in the culture about how to respond to that.  That’s a very painful situation and I’ve watched a lot of couples and women struggle with that loss in silence and isolation.  So I appreciate the courage of this person for lifting up that struggle.

To rage against God, and even to experience God as an enemy is a normal expression, actually, of religious practice and of relationship to God even.  One of the things that I respect most about the Jewish tradition is that Judaism holds this up better than any other tradition.  Christians usually fight with each other and Jews are always fighting with God.  And it’s okay to fight with God, to wrestle with God.  And there are stories that Elie Wiesel or Viktor Frankl, of, in the concentration camps, of Jews putting God on trial for his betrayal of his people.  And, at the same time, acknowledging that that very trial is still an expression of relationship to God.  And so quarrelling with God is okay, and it’s just like, you know, we fight with the people we love most.  Well, if we love God, we’re going to fight with God too.  That is okay, and it’s oftentimes part of the grieving process and part of the spiritual life, part of what we struggle with as we go through cycles of doubt and faith and despair and hope, as we wrestle with God.  I think that’s okay; I don’t think that’s something we have to be ashamed of, and I think that God loves us through our wrestling and our anger.  That’s my belief.

Question:  We only have time for one more question. So the question is, what does Unitarian Universalism teach about the spiritual practice of forgiveness and reconciliation?

Rev. Hardies:  What does Unitarian Universalism teach about the spiritual practice of forgiveness and reconciliation?  I think . . . You know, Unitarian Universalism imagines creation as vitally interconnected, as an interconnected and interdependent web, and each of the nodes of the web are in harmony with one another and in balance.  And when one’s out of whack, it puts the whole thing out of whack.  And therefore, Unitarian Universalism places a very high priority on being in right relationship with one another, with creation, with all of creation.  And so, there’s a high ethical and moral imperative in Unitarian Universalism for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are two different things.  Forgiveness is a personal act; it’s something that each of us can do personally, to forgive someone who we believe has wronged us.  It is a process that often takes a long time and that can often be very difficult.  Reconciliation is a different thing.  Reconciliation involves the coming together of people or groups that have been in conflict and requires the willing participation and the desire on the part of each of those parties to come together and make that reconciliation happen.  That is often even a longer process than forgiveness, and a vitally important one.  A vitally important one.  Because Unitarian Universalism is right in its vision, I think, of creation; it’s right about seeing the universe as radically interconnected and interdependent.  And we must always strive to live in right relationship with our loved ones, with our community and with our world and with our earth. 

One person said that he comes to All Souls Church because, “it helps me learn how to love better.”  And that’s kind of what comes to my mind when we talk about forgiveness and reconciliation.  We’re all imperfect lovers, imperfect lovers of our spouse or partner, of our parents and our children, imperfect lovers of the community and the world.  And together, part of what we’re about here at All Souls is, together, trying to learn how to love better.

So I look forward to another year of learning how to love better with all of you.  Thank you very much for this time.

[Applause]