Heaven on Earth: How Do We Know We're There? by Rev. Michael McGee, Sunday, May 2, 2010

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Heaven on Earth: How Do We Know We're There?

        So, this is it friends: the last sermon in the “Heaven on Earth” series, the finale, the climax, the final word! So far you've learned where the heck heaven on earth is, who gets to go there, whether you can take your Iphone, whether you get to be yourself, if there's sex and tears there, and who's in charge? And today you will learn how you know you're there.

        I like the “Mother Goose and Grimm” cartoon showing St. Peter at the pearly gates with a line of people in front of him going through a security check, taking off their shoes and putting their purses and laptops on the infamous conveyor belt. A big sign in front of St. Peter reads, “Expect Delays.”

        That's just not right, is it? But many people believe they must delay going to heaven until they die, which is really a shame, isn't it, when heaven is right here beneath our feet every moment of every day. What a waste to wait for it.

        Buddha's message was that all you have to do is open your eyes to see heaven; we only need to wake up to nirvana. But that's not easy; to open our eyes we must also open our hearts, and that takes practice and discipline. And we must ackonowledge that life is not heavenly for many people; there is poverty, disease, death, injustice. So we must ask ourselves, does suffering prevent us from experiencing heaven on earth?

        I believe suffering is not an obstacle but an invitation into heaven. The common pain we experience helps us to open our eyes to the sacredness of every soul. And this is one way we know we're in heaven: when we are filled to overflowing with the awareness that within every person, including ourselves, there is the light of divinity.

        A story that demonstrates heaven on earth is told by the Buddhist writer, Jack Kornfield, who describes a large Buddhist temple in Thailand where an enormous and ancient clay Buddha stands. Though not the most beautiful of Buddhas, it had survived for over five hundred years. But he was showing his age, so the monks who tended the temple decided to clean him up and repair some of the cracks that were widening with the years. As one monk was cleaning and patching he came across a crack that was so big that he took his flashlight and peered inside. And what he saw amazed him: there in the middle of this aging, crumbling, great statue of the Buddha, at its very heart, he gazed at another Buddha, a glorious golden Buddha, one of the largest and most luminous gold images ever created in Southeast Asia.

         This brilliant Buddha is a metaphor for the essential nature of each one of us, that part of us that at times lies dormant beneath the protective layers of pretense and defensiveness. When we're able to peer beneath our roles and responsibilities, our masks and prejudice, we are stunned to find at our heart a genuine goodness and spirit, which some call our Buddha nature and others call Christ Consciousness and still others call the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

        I find it amazing that so many people have trouble believing in the innate goodness of humans. It's far easier to accept the traditional Christian notion that we are flawed and depraved, unable to be the kind of people our dogs assume we are.

        Why is that? Certainly, there are myriad examples of prejudice, hatred, and violence human beings have perpetrated upon each other, but we should never forget the multitude of kind, generous, compassionate, and healing acts that occur every single moment, most of them unknown and anonymous, and yet without them our world would cease to exist.

        Perhaps the reason we tend to believe the worst about ourselves is that it gives us a rationale for not radically changing our lifestyle. If we truly believed in our own dignity and the dignity of all people, that a golden Buddha resides within each one of us, just think of where that would lead us. We would easily forgive each other and ourselves. We would love each other from the depths of our hearts. We would end war and injustice.

        Marianne Williamson captured that dazzling possibility in her famous words, often mistakingly attributed to Nelson Mandela. She writes, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world... We are all meant to shine...”

        These words challenge us to use the great power we have to change the world around us. That should be the true purpose of religion: to urge us to go beyond the fears that paralyze us, to have the courage to release the vast resources of creativity and compassion and joy in every single person.

        Our Unitarian Universalist faith does just that. Our first principle is that, “We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” When you really believe that principle, when you hold it close to your heart and try to live it out in all that you do, your life is transformed. And if we all tried to live by that principle, then our world would be transformed.

        Certainly, if we believed in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, the state of Arizona would not pass laws that denigrate immigrants and those who are Hispanic, denying them their basic human rights because of their ethnicity. This is an outrageous persecution of innocent people perpetrated by idiots – oops, that inherent worth and dignity thing didn't last very long, did it?

        This is the hard part of our principle: to see the golden Buddha inside everyone, even the governor of Arizona. How can I see her Buddha when I know she's so wrong? One way is to recognize that chances are pretty good that I'm not 100% right – or correct – and she's not 100% wrong -- or right-wing. My challenge is to look beneath the surface of her actions, and shine the light of compassion on the Buddha within.

         I know: it's not easy. This is one of the hardest struggles in my life. We all need practice, and the world provides us with an infinite number of people who are difficult for us to understand and love. And we have a lifetime to embrace them.

        A second way to know we are in heaven is when we are filled to overflowing with a deep compassion for all life. Jack Kornfield writes that, “Compassion is our deepest nature. It arises from our interconnection with all things.” He's telling us that once you are aware of the Buddha in everything, you cannot see anything as separate and alone; you wake up to the web of the world.

        The skit this morning reminded me of another story, called “Dr. King's Refrigerator.” The story is about a gifted young minister from Atlanta named Martin Luther King, Jr, when he was trying to finish his dissertation at Boston University. And he was having a difficult time.

        The title was, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” and he was drawing blanks. One night as he was sweating over his typewriter, he got up to get a snack out of the refrigerator. As he stood there with the refrigerator door open, something weird happened, and he suddenly started to pull everything out, Florida grapefruits and California oranges, corn and squash that came from American Indians, a pineapple from Hawaii, leftover tacos from Mexico, and on and on, until he was surrounded by mountains of food on the table and every counter.

         That's when his wife came in, wondering if he had gone bonkers she whispered, “Are you all right?” “Of course I am! I've never felt better!” he said. “The whole universe is inside our refrigerator!... When we get up in the morning, we go into the bathroom, where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap created by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk. Before we leave for our jobs, we are beholden to more than half the world.”

        “Yes, dear.... I can see that, but what about my kitchen? You know I'm hosting the Ladies Prayer Circle today...”

        Martin goes on without noticing her: “...What I'm saying – trying to say – is that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly!”

        Ah, that's where he got that idea: from his refrigerator! Sounds familiar for another reason too, doesn't it? “We affirm and promote the interdependent web of all existence of which we are all a part,” is our seventh principle. What keeps us from seeing this connectedness is the protective layers of fear, depression, confusion, and aggression, that we use to insulate and isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, and from our deeper selves. The abiding religious model promotes fear of the unknown and passivity, and the medical model that rules us pushes pills instead of urging us to unleash our inner power. But compassion breaks us open like a husk, spilling our joy out into the world.

        This is the third way we know we are in heaven, when we are filled to overflowing with happiness and joy. There are those who feel guilty at being happy when so many people are suffering. Are you one of them? Be honest. But isn't there a problem if you wish joy for others but not for yourself? And how can you not be overwhelmed by joy if you see the Buddha within each person, including yourself? And how can you not be drunk with joy when compassion opens our hearts to the connectedness of every being in our universe?

        Jack Kornfield tells the story of a high school history teacher who one day asked her class to write down the names of each person in the class, and then to write beside each name one thing they liked or admired about that student. The next day she collected the papers. Weeks later, the teacher handed each student a sheet with his or her name on top.

         “On it she had pasted all twenty-six good things the other students had written about that person. They smiled and gasped in pleasure that so many beautiful qualities were noticed about them.

         “Three years later this teacher received a call from the mother of one of her former students. Robert had been a cut-up, but also one of her favorites. His mother sadly passed on the terrible news that Robert had been killed in the Gulf War. The teacher attended the funeral, where many of Robert's former friends and high school classmates spoke. Just as the service was ending, Robert's mother approached her. She took out a worn piece of paper, obviously folded and refolded many times, and said, 'This was one of the few things in Robert's pocket when the military retrieved his body.' It was the paper on which the teacher had so carefully pasted the twenty-six things his classmates had admired.

        “...Another former student nearby opened her purse, pulled out her own carefully folded page, and confessed that she always kept it with her. A third ex-student said that his page was framed and hanging in his kitchen; another told how the page had become part of her wedding vows.”

        Kornfield goes on to write, “The perception of goodness invited by this teacher had transformed the hearts of her students in ways she might only have dreamed about.”

        So let us all be angels in this heaven on earth, working for a world where every child is affirmed for his or her inherent worth and dignity, and let us tell them so! May every person be awakened to the Buddha within and to the web of connections that binds us together, and let us be thankful and joyful for these blessings.

Watch Video Excerpts of the Sermon

Watch the Reading: "The Angel's Retirement Speech"

Photos From The Service

Covenant Group Questions

1. Is there a person or event in your past that has helped you discover the Buddha within?
2. What does your refrigerator say to you?
3. How do you experience the interdependent web?
4. As a child, did you hear the message that you are a good person?
5. Do you believe that ''Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure?''
6. How has this sermon series ''Heaven On Earth'' been helpful to you?
7. Do you have any ideas on a theme for next year's sermon series?

Resources for Sermon

• “Dr. King's Refrigerator” by Charles Johnson, The Best American Spiritual Writing edited by Philip Zaleski.
• The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield.