First Parish Sermon Archive

“GIVING IN TO GOODNESS”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland (UU)

On February 12, 2012

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

 

            This morning I would like to talk about temptation, about some of those times when we are inclined to give in to our impulses. Now there is a good, traditional topic for a sermon. One wonders how many times over the centuries this congregation has been favored with a sermon on temptation. How many another Sunday morning my predecessors may have brought to mind the dread callings of sinfulness tempting the saints to turn from their righteousness into the paths of wrong doing. We are surrounded, my friends, the echoes say, by snares of delusion and lurid luring, opportunities too often at hand to betray our most noble nature for the moment’s sordid pleasure.

            Nor can one think that message utterly out of date. But it is not the one I want to deliver this morning. In fact, one likes to think that most of us are most of the time pretty good at resisting the temptations of evil. Unfortunately, we may be nearly as good, much of the time, many of us, at resisting, too, the temptations of goodness.

            Surely our impulses run that way, too. I have no brief to make here on behalf of the inherent saintliness of humankind. No more can I accept, as I once did, growing up, or as the Transcendentalists tended to say, that people are pure, in essence, by nature, corrupted only by their participation in unredeemed social institutions.

            Impulses to cruelty, to self-abuse, to violence, to apathy have come to seem to me part and parcel of our being. Perhaps in time those things can be eliminated; I am sure they can be lessened, controlled, directed. But I not averse to talk about sin, the way that Jesus, for instance, uses the concept, as recognition of the personal depths of the problems of the human race.

            The error in the poor word “sin” is not Jesus’, but of those of his followers who would turn sin into the singular fact of the human condition, as though there are not also strong within us impulses of the contrary nature. Jesus, after all, never spoke so much of sin that he did not speak more of love, about that force more strong than sin that could overcome self-concern. That, too, is a native instinct of the human heart, to reach out to others with a selfless concern and compassion. Had the matter been otherwise, were love some desirable abstraction, Jesus would have been a teacher of a wholly different sort, offering a manual for learning the tricks of a strange way.

            Instead, he exhorts his followers to accept what is already theirs, prods them with parables and assurances of the divinity that is within them, within us, the instinctual impulse to love, a potential so potent that it can sweep away petty self-interests, can call us beyond the miserable, lonely jails of our egos to participation in the life of what many would call the life of God on earth, which is to say, in actions of sacrificial, redemptive love.

            It is not a matter of forcing ourselves into some un-human mold; it does not require some unnatural discipline, like learning a golf grip; it is not an alien adjunct to our natures that only comes with a conversion experience; it is innate, if anything is. If we can believe that anything is inherently human, as so much of religion has tried to tell us, all too often in pushing a view of humanity’s native depravity, surely it is inherently human to reach out, to love, to feel the welfare of another person, other people, as important to one’s own wellbeing and happiness.

            I was once at a workshop in Boston, listening to a psychiatrist discuss marriage. At one point he was listing what to him are the things one gets from any secure, prolonged intimate relationship, things like rootedness and a shared history. Those more expert than I in the congregation may challenge his assessment, but he contended that psychiatry has moved beyond Freud’s claim that in love one seeks gratification of the libido, to recognizing that what the libido seeks is not its own gratification, but an object. And he listed that among the assets of sustained intimate relationships. Which is precisely the point, of course, in different language than Jesus’: what the libido seeks is not its own gratification but an object, a recipient of its need for actuation and fulfillment.

            We have, then, in brief, a temptation to goodness, to reaching out to others in the spirit of compassionate care that Jesus calls love. This is not goody-goody stuff cooked up by a conspiracy of ministers and Sunday school teachers. Concern for others and involvement in their struggles and pain, in their defeats and in their victories, is a profound human need and a vital ingredient in the health of a person, that we shall not become trapped in ourselves, shut off from the demanding and sustaining life of the whole.

            But it is not necessarily easy. We can resist our temptations, our chances at opening up to others, the steps we might make to bridge the gaps that lie between our solitudes. It need not be done, you see. Oh sure, resistance in the long run is disastrous, but even if we know that, in the day to day decisions of our lives the moment of action can usually be put off or rejected outright. Some one we know is going through a difficult time, someone we do not know and are not sure we will like is nearby, someone we care for or admire might appreciate our encouragement – but it can be put off.

            That is often the easier way – although sometimes it is not. Sometimes by putting it off, when we know we ought to be taking steps beyond our walls, we end up wasting time and energy and our own self-esteem, stewing about the task, making ourselves miserable hoping the moment will pass.

            It is not that we are cruel. It is not that we delight in withholding ourselves from others. I do not believe that. I believe that we need others, and that our moments of greatest growth and satisfaction come when we succeed in getting beyond the walls and reaching another person, being truly with them, and I do not just mean in their hours of hardship or despair; I do not want to make the message that tragic, for often it is just reaching out and encountering someone else in honesty and humanness, not because their life at that moment is particularly hard but because all our lives at every moment are emptier than they need be, because closed off in part from authentic human contact.

            I do not think it is our cruelty, or even so much our laziness and apathy, and certainly not our self-sufficiency, but just because it can be hard. It involves a risk. There is no risk in doing nothing, or usually there is not. Usually we can breeze right by someone. If it makes us feel a little guilty, it is only for an instant.

            But to stop, to introduce ourselves, say, or to stop long enough to really give the other person a chance to talk – I think many of us much of the time do not do these things even with those we love most, even with close friends, with our own families, but often retreat from moments that might prove trying, intense, that might disrupt the surface calm, rather than meet another person as person, honestly, as just you with just me, or, more difficult, as just you with just me a person in need at the moment. That is a risk.

            We shall botch it, we fear. We shall end up feeling silly. Taking an immediate if mundane example, most of you here shall in a few moments be standing together waiting to go downstairs. And next to you may well be a person you do not know, or think you don’t. We all know the danger there. You can say, “Hello, my name is so-and-so,” and the person may say, “Of course, I have been sitting in church with you here for the last ten years.”

            Or they will say nothing, or, “So what?” I doubt if anyone would be that insensitive, but something like that has happened to most of us at some time or another. Blessed be those who have survived and go on saying, “Hello, my name is so-and-so.” (A personal unfavorite of mine is the time or two – I hope not many times more – when I have said at the end of a conversation, when the right words would have been, “It was nice to see you again,” and I said, “It was nice to meet you.”)   

            At other times the risk may seem more severe. We will be misunderstood, we will make fools of ourselves, we will make nuisances of ourselves. I am not trying to justify making nuisances of ourselves; but I think many of us err in the other direction. We avoid the risk.

            And who is to notice if we do? That is the safer course, at least in the short run. Don’t reach out. Stand pat. Guard the defenses. Sure, we have temptations to goodness, impulses to reach out, to show the world a loving openness. But we may restrain ourself, restrict ourself.

            I suspect that the attitude is habit-forming. I suspect that the more we respond to opportunities for openness and caring with procrastina-tion and restraint, the harder it becomes the next time to be open and caring. And I suspect that finally that attitude can become debilitating, robbing us of our ability to participate fully in the lives of others. And, finally, I would suggest that that debilitation is a form of spiritual death.

            The artist Corita Kent once illustrated somebody’s wordplay that said, “Don’t be little yourself; Be your big self.” Something in that contrast is what I refer to. To be less than our big selves, to restrain and restrict our virtuous impulses, our noblest nature, our yearnings to love, is to belittle ourselves. It is the opposite of growth.

            As the great 19^th-century Unitarian saint Margaret Fuller once said, “I learned at an early age that the one goal in life is to grow.” Growth is something that happens between us, as I open to you, as you open to me, as we come to see each other’s humanness, to grasp the hands of those fingers that sometimes point, to get beyond our piteous self-concern.

            I keep drifting over to a larger point about our human needingness, and the opening up to others that we might aspire to, that we might be more open to ourselves; but I have equally in mind the simpler point about the little things that we do not do, where maybe there is not any great risk, just some nice thought that comes to us and that all too often we too readily shelve.

            A late colleague, Arthur Foote, once noted that “So often we miss opportunities to help others. We see the need, but irresolution delays us, and the chance passed; or, preoccupied with our own concerns, we fail to see. The ancient prayer speaks of sins of omission as well as those of commission. Committed sins are no doubt the more serious, but one suspects that numerically, at least, the sins of omission carry the day. Most people are not downright vicious; the evil in their nature is diluted. They are fairly reasonable, reasonably good-natured and well-inten-tioned. They mean to be honest, fair, and kind. They are good, if not good for much.”

        I do not know if any of you can see glimpses of yourself in that picture, but I can. I am like that at times, too often. And for some of those times I do not apologize; we all need as well our moments of self-concern, our times when we regroup, consolidate growth, are alone with ourselves.

            It is a tender balance, then, and some of us may tilt too far the other way; but for many of us, maybe most, the pressing need is to unlock the outreachings, to give in more to our own kindness, not to let the moments pass, to shake off our preoccupation, to see, to hear, to sense the need, to let a good idea take form, come to life, to let ourselves grow, expand.

            What are we saving ourselves for? Do we fear our goodness to be in finite supply, to be hoarded up for some special time and person? Do we think our love grows stronger for its disuse? Or do we imagine that our time and energy can anyways better be spent than in this, that we shall brighten the day of others, that we shall let them know they have our love and sympathy, that we shall increase the world’s ever-insuffi-cient store of love?

            In the familiar words of an anonymous sage, “I shall pass through this world but once. And any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now; let me not defer it or neglect it, for I may not pass this way again.”

            There is a great goodness in the world, wanting to sing with our voices. May our chorus reach to the skies.