Reading by Alfred North Whitehead:
“The secret of happiness lies in knowing this: that we live by the law of expenditure. We find the greatest joy, not in getting, but in expressing what we are. There are tides in the ocean of life, and what comes in depends upon what goes out. The currents flow inward only where there is an outlet. Nature does not give to those who will not spend; her gifts are merely loaned to those who will not use them.
Reading - “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle from “The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2005” edited by Philip Zaleski
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil point. A hummingbird's heart is most of the hummingbird. Joyas Voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers to the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, only here, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear were our elephantine ears pressed to their infinitesimal chests.
Sermon:
What a morning! hat was a grand banner parade, wasn't it? The purpose of the banner parade is to remind us what an active and dynamic church this is. You can come here almost any time of the day and night and find a slew of people in committees, task forces, classes, rehearsals and performances, book discussions, covenant groups, worship, and meditation. As you walk our halls you can hear serious conversations, laughter, singing and music, children playing, and at times weeping. You may have noticed that almost everyone who comes through our doors leaves with either a smile on their face or a look of contentment or enlightenment or excitement. And it's a place people want to come back to, and they do.
This morning we ask you for your financial commitment to our church for this next year, but I'm not going to use guilt or manipulation to do that, though I know many ministers do. For instance, one minister was preoccupied with thoughts of how he was going to ask the congregation to come up with more money for the repair of their roof that needed replacing. He was annoyed to find that the regular organist was sick and a substitute had been brought in at the last minute. The substitute wanted to know what to play. "Here's a copy of the service," he said impatiently. "But you'll have to think of something to play after I make the announcement about the finances." During the service, the minister paused and said, "Brothers and Sisters, we are in great difficulty; the roof repairs cost twice as much as we expected, and we need $40,000 more. Any of you who can pledge $1000 or more, please stand up." At that moment, the substitute organist played "The National Anthem."
I don't think that trick would work here for a number of reasons.
It is tempting to use guilt, but guilt works for Unitarian Universalists about as well as Dick Cheney speaking at a Democratic Party Fund Raiser.
I know that all I have to do is to remind you why we are Unitarian Universalists and why we are members and friends of this church. That's why this Sunday is perhaps the most important in the year, not only in terms of financing for our future ministries but in helping people to understand the depth of commitment they have to this faith.
Did you see the recent results of a PEW study that shows .3 to .5 percent of the American population claim to be Unitarian Universalists?
That comes to around one million people. The strange thing is we have only 200,000 thousand people on our roles. This shows that there are many more people who feel that our faith speaks to them and for them than come through our doors. They are the ones we need to welcome and make room for in our congregations. There are many reasons people are attracted to our liberal religious movement, but one of the most important is that we are always making room for those who are marginalized in our society, those who were rejected by other religious communities because of their resistance to irrelevant tradition, oppressive hierarchy, and irrational faith, those who insist that truth cannot be monopolized by any religion, and those who were kicked out of Sunday School classes or ostracized by friends or family because they dared to doubt, to ask questions instead of simply accepting others answers.
But there is another way in which we are always making room, and this is also why many of us are Unitarian Universalists. We are always making room for possibilities, for what can happen if we allow it to, for hope in a brighter future. I was filled with hope when I read the essay written by Brian Doyle called, “Joyas Valadorus.” As you heard in our reading, that's the scientific name for hummingbirds, “flying jewels.”
That sounds more like poetry than science, but it couldn't be a more apt name.
Terry and I have a perennial garden that attracts hummingbirds in the summer, and whenever one of us spots one we yell to the other “Hummer on the butterfly bush!” or “Hummer on the lilies,” and no matter what we're doing we gaze out of the closest window to spot the flash of beauty flitting from flower to flower. When we see one we are momentarily lifted up out of our daily routines to a place of hope. If the Earth can make such flying jewels then all can't be so bad.
Doyle tells us that hummingbirds “...visit a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest.” Hummingbirds also have “incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms,” Doyle tells us, but they pay the price for such a fast-paced lifestyle. “It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you an spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”
Two billion heartbeats. Two billion heartbeats. My question for you this morning is how do you want to use those two billion heartbeats?
Hummingbirds use their heartbeats to do what comes naturally to them. Their DNA programs them to shoot across the skies and to sip nectar from every flower they come across. Their beauty is in living their true nature.
And so is ours. Many people believe that our human nature is to be selfish and egocentric. It's every man for himself. The fittest survive while the weak wither away. But the evidence points to the opposite conclusion, that our natural inclination is to be generous and altruistic. Did you know that charitable giving in the US is about $300 billion a year, and you can double that figure if you add the value of volunteer time given to non-profit organizations. That makes altruistic action one of the biggest contributors to the US Gross National Product.
Some would respond that these figures are not the result of true altruism, of a real opening of the heart, but are instead manifestations of self-interest, a sign of guilt and displaced neuroses, or perhaps just irrationality. But there is evidence now that more and more people are responding to the pain and promise of the world out of a sense of what's called "creative altruism." Creative altruism has been defined as "the innate capacity for unselfish service to others motivated by love." ["Altruism: Self and Other," Institute of Noetic Sciences Newsletter, Fall, 1986]
It's creative altruism that moves us away from a closed heart that always asks "What's in it for me?" and towards an open heartedness that puts at the center of our lives the values of community, compassion, and commitment. When these values unfold from the center of our being they penetrate into every part of our lives: our creativity, our sense of morality and justice, and the way we relate to those around us. The moment we go beyond "looking after number one", we begin to become transformed, becoming more aware of the larger purpose of our lives and the fuller meaning of existence.
The irony is that altruism is not so much something you strive for as something you grow into. Ram Dass and Paul Gorman point out in their book How Can I Help? that "The suffering of others spontaneously releases our desire to help out." What they tell us is that the natural human response in the face of pain is to care and to heal. To respond in any other way is as unnatural as a hummingbird walking instead of flying. The reason we don't always respond to the world's pain with caring and compassion is that we are too often blinded by our fears, expectations, and personal needs. When we can free ourselves from those traps of the ego, when we can quiet the mind and open the heart, then the natural tendency is to commit ourselves to service and generosity.
And on top of all that, altruism is sexy! In a recent Washington Post article titled, “If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural” [by Shankar Vedantam, May 28, 2007], the author writes that recent research shows “that when ... volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.” It does feel good to be generous, doesn't it? Think back to the times in your life when you've been especially generous or altruistic. I would guess that you wouldn't want to take back any of those experiences, would you? So not only is altruism delicious and sexy, but it's also deeply religious, giving “support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, 'For it is in giving that we receive.'”
Isn't it amazing that just as a hummingbird is hardwired to dive at sixty miles an hour and to fly backwards, we are hardwired for empathy and altruism? Our brain has a built-in compass that, as a result of evolutionary processes, constantly points us towards what is right and good, compassionate and healing. Through this awakening to our true nature of altruism we learn the spirit behind the words of Albert Schweitzer when he wrote: "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."
After writing about the heart of hummingbirds, Brian Doyle describes the biggest hearts on our planet, those of the Blue Whale with hearts as big as rooms. He goes on to write: “So much held in a heart in a life. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment... You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a women's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”
To me this what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist and a member of this church, to constantly be breaking down the walls that close off our hearts so that we may make room for the Spirit of Life, of love and compassion. We make room in many different ways, but they all have to do with service and generosity. The way I have chosen to make room and to make a difference is to dedicate my life to this liberal religious movement because I believe from the bottom of my heart that Unitarian Universalism can be and is a significant force in transforming our lives and our world. I've experienced that transformation and I have seen it a multitude of times. In our own church I've been filled with hope when time after time I've witnessed the difference we make in the lives of those who enter our doors and our lives, those who are touched in so many rich and powerful ways by this congregation, as well as those who are touched in our community, in our nation, and in places like New Orleans, Guatemala, India, Romania, and in a multitude of other places and ways we will never even know.
There’s an old Celtic saying that, “We all drink from wells we did not dig; we warm ourselves at fires we did not build.” We are here in this church because of the many who have gone before us, their love of this church, of Unitarian Universalism, and of the values we promote.
And we are here to dig wells and build fires for those yet to come, to give them a place where they can transform their own lives and our world long after we are gone.
Anne Lamott tells the story of a child about seven, who had wondered too far from her home and become lost. "She ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived," Anne writes, "but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’" (from “Traveling Mercies” by Anne Lamotte)
Yes, this is the place and these are the people who help us to find our way home, who help us to live by our truest nature, and who help us to open our hearts in compassion and commitment to those who need our love and generosity. Welcome home friends! Welcome home!
