A sermon delivered by The Rev. Kathy Schmitz on September 9, 2007
At Pathways Church, A Unitarian Universalist Community in Southlake, Texas
In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish the spiritual life.
William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), Unitarian Minister
Reading before the sermon: Disorganized Religion from Roller-skating as a Spiritual Discipline by Christopher Buice
Chaos and Order.
Two things that many of us struggle with.
Two things the universe provides with some regularity.
Like Rev. Buice in this morning’s reading, I struggle to create order in my life, and also like Buice, I have come to appreciate the gift that chaos can be.
I am using my arrival in a new office to try to turn over a new leaf, or perhaps a few new leaves, in the ways that I organize my space and time. So far the results are mixed. Some improvement. Always room for more.
I am also using my arrival in a new place to look with fresh eyes at questions of community.
What does it take to build a community? How do we do it?
This is what I have been considering. Here is what I think.
Creating community takes, it seems, a good dose of order and a generous helping of chaos.
It will take, I am convinced, some science. But it will take as well, some art.
Communities need all kinds of things.
For example, in a community, people need to know how things are done.
In the adult world, we often have policies and procedures, regulations and laws.
Children are perhaps use to classrooms in which there are rules.
Sometimes these things are written down in books or posted on the wall. Sometimes we are just expected to know them.
Rules and laws can help keep us safe. Rules and laws can help make our communities just and fair.
Rules and laws are examples of things that create order in our communities.
They are part of what I think of as The Science of Community.
They are important.
But they are only part of what makes a community.
Another important part of what is needed is what I think of as The Art of Community.
This is the energy, the creativity, the flexibility that we bring to our groups, and that we make room for, and allow to infuse our life together.
Sometimes it looks a bit like chaos. But it is what breaths life into the structures we have put in place.
Always it is a balancing act to know how much art and how much science we need.
Too much structure squashes creativity.
Too little structure leaves our energy undirected and meaningless.
Structures, as a concept, are not good or bad.
Each structure or rule needs to be evaluated. We need to ask if it helps or hurts what we are trying to do. Does it support or diminish the mission and life of the community?
One of the core convictions of the Pathways community is that “We evaluate the worth of ideas based on the impact of those ideas on ourselves, on others and on the planet.”
The same should be true of structures. We need to ask: What is their impact?
Suppose you are a third grader and you are in a classroom at school that has rules posted on the wall and one of them says, “Students will not speak out in class unless called upon by the teacher.”
And let’s suppose that the teacher is busy writing on the blackboard when you notice that a small fire has started in the wastebasket.
Twenty children could raise their hands and wait for the teacher to turn back from the blackboard and call on them, all the while watching the fire grow larger and larger.
But, I’m thinking that it would be a good idea if one of the students breaks the rule and yells. “Hey, there’s a fire in the waste basket!”
I also think that it would be a good idea if the teacher did not give that student detention for breaking the rule.
Perhaps at the end of the rule about speaking out in the class we need to add a few words so that it now reads “Students will not speak out in class unless called upon by the teacher… or unless it is necessary for health and safety reasons.”
Or maybe we should just know that there are times when rules will need to be broken but that we should try to follow them unless we have a good reason for breaking them.
Trying to write rules, or policies, or procedures that cover every situation that might ever come up is an impossible task. In fact, in the most challenging situations that I have encountered as a minister, I can think of no policy or procedure or rule that could have addressed the specific situation.
And so that is why we need something beyond the rules.
We need a vision of what we are trying to accomplish, we need goodwill, and we need flexibility.
We need to leave ourselves room to adapt to the situations that we will find ourselves in.
This is one of the reasons that in Unitarian Universalist religious education programs, we tend to think that rather than filling our children up with facts, that it is more important to teach children how to think, to inspire them, to instill in them courage for facing the new and the unfamiliar. We cannot possibly give our children the answers to every question that they will encounter. We can help them develop an attitude that will help them find answers for themselves.
I think about how different the world is now from when I was attending religious education classes. The teachers then, wonderful as they were, could not have imagined the complexities of today’s world. And there is no evidence that the rate of change is slowing down. The children in this room will face the questions and challenges of the future. Since we cannot know what those will be, we serve them best by helping them develop a healthy approach to new situations.
This need to have flexibility in our lives is reflected in the adult world of our Unitarian Universalist congregations as well. We do not have a creed or a statement of belief. We do not have doctrines or dogma. Instead, we create covenants. Statements of our promises to each other. Promises that reflect our highest aspirations for our communities and our lives.
Covenants take many forms. One form is of the sort that is printed in the order of worship and repeated by this congregation each Sunday in worship.
Love is the doctrine of this church,
the quest of truth is its sacrament,
and service is its prayer.
to dwell together in peace,
to seek knowledge in freedom,
to serve human need,
to the end that all souls shall grow
in harmony with the divine —
thus do we covenant with each other.
This speaks in broad terms about what it is the members of this congregation are trying to accomplish together.
Covenants are not contracts. Contracts are protective. They are about what I give you and you give me and the consequences for failure to fulfill these requirements.
Covenants are not contract. Covenants are about possibilities. They are about how we want to be together. Rather then laying out consequences for failure, they stand ready as a guide, calling us back to the direction we want to go, like the North Star.
The Pathways DNA is a statement of this community’s convictions. It is a form of covenant. It holds out a vision of how to create, and how to be, a beloved community.
Will every member and friend of Pathways get it right all the time? No, of course not!
Will the DNA stand as a reminder of the direction that this community has agreed to go? Absolutely!
But the DNA does not answer every question, does not address every situation, and so the community will adopt policies and procedures. These in turn will not address every situation, and so the community will need flexibility, and creativity, and goodwill.
Science and art… Order and chaos.
Part of the universe... Part of the human condition… Part of this congregation.
This congregation is not the first religious community to address questions of order and chaos.
The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures often pointed out when structures no longer served their purpose. In the book of Amos, we hear that though they follow the traditions, the people have lost sight of what really matters. We hear:
21 "I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your assemblies.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, [a]
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
(Amos 5:21-24 in New International Version (NIV)),
The structures no longer served to create justice in their society.
And in the Christian Scriptures, we hear that the structures were no longer serving to inspire compassion and the meeting of human need. In the Book of Mark, we hear:
23 One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grain fields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. 24 The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?"
:
27 Then he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
The Sabbath is important. It meets the human need for a time of rest and reflection. It was not, however, intended that the human need for nourishment should go unmet.
All religious traditions have forms that are intended to help guide people to deeper spirituality and more meaningful lives. But, too often, we become attached to the forms and forget the deepening.
From the Hindu tradition, we hear the story of a certain temple.
When the guru sat down to worship each evening, the ashram cat would get in the way and distract the worshipers. So he ordered that the cat be tied during evening worship.
After the guru died the cat continued to be tied during evening worship. And when the cat expired, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly tied during evening worship.
Centuries later learned treatises were written by the guru’s scholarly disciples on the liturgical significance of tying up a cat while worship is performed.
(From the Hindu tradition as retold in Soul Food by Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman, page 226)
What is it we are trying to accomplish, to create, to inspire?
I think that the human need to create order out of chaos is behind some of our attachment to religious forms. This is an area where many of our earth-centered tradition take a different approach. They do not see that natural world as something dangerous to be tamed. The rituals and forms in many of the pagan traditions are not about controlling chaos or creating order. Rather they are about aligning oneself with the forces of nature which are seen as good and generative.
Put a completely different way, I recently heard someone talking about congregational leadership suggest that one should: Ride the horse in the direction it is going.
It sometimes seems that our explorations in science and technology do just the opposite of this. Too often, people think that science is all about categorizing our world, and technology about taming it. But, when we read the history of science, we see that it is a story of both structure and creativity. Over time new models emerge, each one more precise than the last. It is the structure of the models and their precision that allow us to build airplanes, and tunnels, and sophisticated medical devices. The structure is critical. And yet, each new discovery has behind it a creativity that looked beyond existing models. That imagined new avenues of exploration. That was willing to explore boldly – caring more about what might be learned than about getting it right… this time.
Inventor Thomas Edison is often quoted as saying:
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
How often do we get discouraged and declare failure?
Structure and creativity support each other as models inspire new ideas that can then be tested and go on to inspire more ideas.
Science is not the only area where structure and creativity support each other. Moving back to questions of community, look to the heroes of our larger society, who have helped to bring us to where we are today. Nearly all of them needed this ability to move between order and chaos. Think of people who created more just systems of government for the people. Adding structures that made our world a better place to live.
And yet, how many of them also had to challenge the structures existing in their day.
How many of the people we hold up as models today were hated by many in their day because they broke either the laws or the customs of their time. They were trouble makers. Creating chaos. Think Mohandas K. Gandhi. Think Susan B. Anthony. Think of the people you hold in high esteem.
Did they create structures? Did they create chaos? Did they perhaps do both?
Prophetic women and men confronting structure of evil and using creativity, and courage, and commitment to move our world toward to a more peaceful, just, and sustainable future.
Are we willing to do the same?
And so we return to this community. This evolving community. Full of both order and chaos. By-laws and DNA, common practices and expectations AND energy and creativity, flexibility and goodwill.
I am amused by Christopher Buice’s method of organizing religious education… “in much the same way that one would incite a riot.” … “Get everyone excited and hope it happens.”
Yet, just as most of us would not incite a riot without a purpose, neither would we presume to create a religious education program or a religious community without a purpose.
Fortunately, Pathways has a purpose, a mission…Creating a spiritual community that changes lives.
It is to this end that we plant our seeds of light and love. To grow greater understanding. To nurture compassionate deeds.
To create a spiritual community that changes lives.
Let’s get everyone excited and make that happen!
Guidelines for use: Here are Rev. Kathy's wishes for the material offered here. The main purpose for making these sermons available is for the use of members and friends of Pathways Church and for those interested in Pathways Church. In this capacity, it is expected that they will be read in place by interested individuals. Should they come to the attention of others, with attribution they may be quoted freely, without permission. With attribution they may be used in whole in the context of worship or religious education without advance permission though Rev. Kathy would be interested to know how they are used and by who. She asks that the text not be used in whole in print press or on another web site without advance permission. Thanks!