A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
February 4, 2007
Ancient Reading: Jain Scripture, "Vidyanandi" Tattvarthaslokavartika 116
The water from the ocean contained in pot can neither be called an ocean or non-ocean, but it can be called only part of the ocean. Similarly, a doctrine, though arising from Absolute Truth, is neither the Truth nor not the Truth.
Ancient Reading: 1 Kings 17 (trans. By Rev. Ellen Rowse Spero)
(Elijah, banished from the court of King Ahab, is wandering in the wilderness during a drought and famine.) And the word of the Holy One came to Elijah: "Rise, go toward Zarephath which belongs to Sidon and live there. For I have ordered there a widow woman to feed you. So he rose and he went to Zarephath and he went in the entrance of the city, and indeed, there was a widow woman collecting wood. So he called to her and he said, "Please fetch me a little water in the vessel so I may drink." So she went to fetch it. Then he called to her and said, "Please fetch me a piece of bread in your hand." But she said to him, "I swear by your God the Holy One, I have no provisions except a handful of flour in the jar and a little oil in the jug, so I am here collecting two pieces of wood and I will come in and prepare it for me and my son. Then we will eat and we will die." And Elijah said to her, "Do not to be afraid. Go in and do according to your word. First make for me from it a small cake and bring it to me, and for you and your son, make something later. Because thus the Holy One, the God of Israel, says, ‘The jar of flour will not disappear and the jug of oil will not diminish until the day of the Holy One sends rain over the face of the earth.’" So she went and she did according to the word of Elijah, and she and he and her household ate for days.
The jar of flour did not get used up and the jug of oil did not diminish according to the word of the Holy One, which God spoke through the hand of Elijah.
And it was after these things, the son of the woman, the household owner, became ill. And his illness was very strong until no breath remained in him. And she said to Elijah, "What is between you and me, Man of God? You came to me to make known my sin and to kill my son." And he said to her, "Give me your son." Then he took him from her bosom and he carried him up to the upper room where he had been staying. Then he laid him down upon the bed. Then he called out to God, and said, "Holy One, my God, concerning the widow with whom I am sojourning . You do evil by killing her son." Then he stretched out over the boy three times and he called to God, and he said, "Holy One, my God, will you restore the breath of this boy into his body." And God paid heed (listened) to the voice of Elijah and restored the breath of the boy into his body and he lived. Then Elijah took the boy and he brought him down from the upper room of the house and gave him to his mother. Then Elijah said, "See, you son lives." And the woman said to Elijah, "Now this I have realized that you are a man of God and the word of the Holy One in your mouth is true."
Copyright 2007, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
Two Sundays ago, I reviewed the covenant we shared at my installation, which listed the various responsibilities of ministry beginning with: "We would have you dwell among us preaching truth as you are given to see it…" We have our UUA covenant with its third principle, to affirm and promote "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning." Our chalice is described sometimes as a symbol of the light of truth. Truth is obviously important to Unitarian Universalists. But what exactly is it? How do we know when we have found it? Is something only the truth when it can be proved, i.e., measured, weighed, dissected, or otherwise quantified? Are facts and data discovered by science the only kind of truth? Or is truth like pornography: hard to define but you know when you see it? Is truth always relative, and always an individual experience? Or are there truths that are true for all of us?
I love the metaphor from the Jain scripture I read of our understanding of truth being like a scoop of the ocean in a pot. Because of our limited knowledge, our humanity, we cannot know absolute Truth, with a capital "T." There is something about truth that, like the ocean is infinite, or almost infinite. But that does not mean that what we know is not truth. It is just not all the truth. And each time we bring our pots together and empty them into a bigger pot, we have a little more of the truth, a greater perspective on it.
The danger, of course, is when we believe that what we hold in our pot is the absolute of truth, the whole ocean if you will. Religion especially can be dangerous with the truth because it tempts us human beings into believing that we do know the whole truth, that we know the mind of God or the whole reason for life, the universe and everything. At the same time, however, religion offers us a way for understanding truth beyond the facts and figures, the data that lies before us. It helps us make meaning out of the fact that we are born, we live, and we die. We know how to judge scientific truth, although even that can be manipulated. But how do we know that the values, the ethics, the beliefs, the faith that guide our lives are truthful? Why do we offer our loyalty to one particular set of religious truths, when there are hundreds out there, each claiming to offer us the real one?
So, I understand from this metaphor that truth is dynamic, rather than static. That does not mean it changes with the wind, but that we come (hopefully) to understand it better and deeper as we live our lives, the more we gather. Take for example the opening words to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal." Our understanding of "all men are created equal" has undergone some major shifts in the last 200 plus years, to slowly include non-landowners, people of color, women. We still have some room to grow. The truth of that statement as it was generally understood then and how it is understood now are very different. So, if we are engaged in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, in an ocean of truth, how do we know when we have found something truthful?
Which brings me to Elijah and the widow. I love this story, for a lot of reasons. The intimacy of it, the sadness of it, the honesty and courage of it. Elijah comes to a widow and her son, who are at the end of their resources and preparing to die, and gives them a new hope. And just as the widow begins to trust that new hope, her son dies in her arms. We know little of this woman or her son, not their names, nor their ages, nor how they came into their tragic circumstances. But we do know that this woman loved her child and was devastated at his death. Elijah takes him from her and confronts God with his death: "Holy One, my God, concerning the widow with whom I am sojourning. You do evil by killing her son." Elijah, who has spoken the truth to lords and kings and been banished for it, now speaks the truth to God. He does not shrink from it either, telling God that God has done evil. And God heeding the truth of this, restores breath into the son. And the widow says, "I have realized that…the word of the Holy One in your mouth is true."
I learn a couple of things about truth from this story. The first is that it takes a lot of chutzpah, a lot of courage, to speak it. It takes even more perhaps, to listen to it. And that is because while the truth is not always pretty, it is often sacred. I was listening to a conversation on the radio program, "Fresh Air" between Terry Gross and the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest who had left parish ministry. Rev. Taylor said something that resonated deeply with me: about the difference between public and private truth. She said that in public, people approached her and treated her with a kind of deference that they also approached God: polite, on their best behavior, doing and saying all the right things. But as a minister, she also dealt in the private truths: coming into people lives at the messiest, saddest, angriest, most heartbreaking moments: in the face of death, of illness, of failure, of the breaking of vows and promises, of helplessness and despair. And yet, these moments were also the ones that seemed to bring her and her parishioners closest to God, to the Sacred.
I understand completely what she means. When I was a chaplain, I was called to the ER to help when the doctors had to tell a mother of the death of her infant son, Abraham. The death was not unexpected. He had been a very sick baby and it was a miracle that he had lived eight weeks. That said, the mother was devastated by the news, and her grief was loudly and emotionally expressed. The truth of the situation was different for different people. For the medical staff, this was a sad defeat but an inevitable one. Their response to her grief was an offer of sedatives and to get the child away from her as soon as possible. For the mother, this was the death of her beloved child. Even if he had only been part of her life for a few weeks, she loved him as only a parent can love a child, in that mystery that binds us, one life to another, with a love we can never have imagined until we are given it to raise, to watch it grow and live. The death of a child always feels unnatural, out of the order of things, no matter the age. It just shouldn’t be. I was standing in Elijah’s shoes, watching a mother grieve her child, held close to her bosom.
So after a time of consoling and listening, I asked her if I could hold Abraham. I took him from her arms. I blessed him, I blessed her love for him. I bore witness to her grief and the wrongness of this child’s death, and I called God to account, to bear witness with me, and to know that in my understanding of the truth, this was an unbearable thing. No, the breath of the child was not restored. That is not the point of the story. The truth lay in naming something as painful and heartbreaking as this mother’s grief to be a sacred and holy thing, worthy of my attention, of God’s attention, of the Universe’s attention. I am not saying that the death of this child was a sacred thing. And so, I made no consoling noises about things being better, now that he was in heaven, etc. But his brief life, and his mother’s love for him were sacred because they were grounded in love and they were as true as his death. So many of the hardest and messiest and most painful moments in our lives are touched by the holy and the sacred precisely because they reveal something about our humanity that is real, that is true, that uncovers our deepest loves, our deepest loyalties, our truest and most vulnerable selves. It becomes clear what matter most: not money, not fame, not the car we drive or the computer we own, but the relationships that bind us, one to another, that can embrace us and love us and affirm life, even in our darkest moments or our least lovable selves.
Which gets me back to speaking the truth. When the widow says to Elijah, I know that the word of God is true", the Hebrew word used is "emet." Emet can be translated as true, in the sense of truthfulness. But it is most often used in the Bible to mean true in the sense of trustworthiness. When I read this story, I interpret the widow as saying that she can trust Elijah because he speaks truthfully, trustworthily, to those who need to hear it, even God. His words are not only truthful, but trustworthy. And that is what I understand to be a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We scoop our pots into the ocean and pull out our truths. But we do so in our religious community as a way to see if our truths are trustworthy ones. Do they resonate with the ideals the commitments, the promises that we profess our commitment to as Unitarian Universalist community? Do they reflect who we are, who we want to become, as individuals and as a congregation? Do they reflect the sacred and holy in our lives, in our human experience, and in our world, honestly, truthfully? Do they grow, not out of our fear, but our love?
I know that when I speak truth as I see it, that the scoop in my pot is limited, only partial. But I hope that I speak it trustworthily. My goal is not to be right, in the sense of correct. Rather I hope to be a trustworthy minister, one who has earned your trust to be able to name truthfully the injustices and the failures, the heartbreaks and the losses, the gifts and graces of your lives and our world, to bear witness to them, to be a good steward of these moments, and to give them voice when they need to be heard, by whomever needs to hear them. This is a sacred trust that I take very seriously, in part because of my call to ministry, but in part also, because I love this congregation very much.
Over the months and years, as we grow in depth and spirit as a Unitarian Universalist community, as we clarify and articulate our covenants and commitments to another and to our larger community, as we search and explore our individual and shared experiences and names for the source of ultimate truth in our lives, as we deal with the changes, positive and negative, that face us, as we continue in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, let us remember to strive not to be so much right as trusting and trustworthy with one another. After all, none of us holds the absolute truth, the whole of the ocean in our pot.
So, how do we know when what we say is truth, is trustworthy? How do I know that I am naming or honoring or bearing witness to something sacred, even the midst of ugliness and darkness and death? I listen for that still small voice of the holy and the sacred that lives in the words and deeds of the prophets, the teachers, and the philosophers, ancient and modern, which continue to call people into communities and ways of life that nurture, empower, liberate, and serve through love, respect, reason, and welcome, rather than power, fear or blinding superstition, that are open to both ancient wisdom and new knowledge, that do not lay claim to Absolute Truth, kept in a box forever unchanging, but who keep scooping their pots into the ocean, not in the hope of ever capturing and owning the whole of truth, but to keep learning, to keep sharing, to keep growing in mind, in heart, and in soul.