Sermon: Growing Up by Growing Down
|
EHCC Home |
Sermon: Growing Up by Growing Down Text: Psalm 1 Date: May 28, 2006 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational UCC “This is our work, our laboring upon the earth: not to make our lives safe but to make them deep.” [Doug Thorpe, Image magazine] To me, one of the worst insults in the English language is to call someone “shallow.” Shallow. I would rather be called almost anything else. Call me mean, tell me I’m ugly and my mother dresses me funny, use the ultimate insult in a rudeness contest in the movie “Hook”—“Substitute Chemistry Teacher!”—but just don’t call me “shallow.” Because that would hurt. Does a particular type of person come to mind when you try to call up an image of a shallow human being? What does he or she look like? What are they wearing? What are they driving? What does she or he sound like? What kinds of things come out of their mouths that make the word “shallow” come to mind? What do shallow people do with their time? Now imagine the opposite. Imagine a person you might think of as “deep.” Does a particular type of person come to mind? What does he or she look like? What are they wearing? Driving? What do they sound like? What kinds of things do they say that make you think, “Deep”? What do “deep” people do with their time? I doubt anyone ever has becoming a shallow person as one of their life’s goals. You never hear a kid say, “When I grow up I want to be a shallow person leading a meaningless existence.” And yet it happens. Shallow people dot the landscape. I think of a shallow person as one who has bought whatever the popular culture is trying to sell. Bought it hook, line and sinker. A shallow person, in my mind, is one who waits to see which way the wind is blowing before stating an opinion. Her or his concerns are trivial and self-centered. The “me” decade which was declared in the mid 1970’s or early 1980’s never ended. Years ago, Al Franken did a Saturday Night Live sketch which framed this beautifully. He said that it was time for the “me decade” to end and the Al Franken decade to begin. Rather than asking how something going on the world would affect “me,” everyone should start asking themselves how events would affect “me, Al Franken.” He gave examples, something like, when oil prices go up, stop and ask yourself, “How are the rising prices affecting Al Franken?” As I recall, he thought this common concern would bring greater unity to our great nation. A shallow person does seem to put himself at the center of the known universe. Has it been your experience that there are shallow people around every corner, swaying in the breeze? I think our current culture actually encourages shallowness to a great degree. One of the dozens of speakers at the “Network of Spiritual Progressives” conference in Washington, D.C. from which I just returned spoke passionately about the marketing industry and the way children are being targeted. Children are being trained by an endless bombardment of advertisements to be the next generation of consumers. They are being schooled in what the speaker called the “gotta-have-it-gimme” attitude that is the lifeblood of sales. The gotta-have-it-gimme attitude pervades our popular culture. It is a major force in the creation of shallow people as we breathlessly await the Next Big Thing that we’ve gotta have. I think of the gotta-have-it-gimme attitude as a thing that lies just under the surface of the habits and traditions and practices that make up our popular culture. I remember reading about the biggest living thing on planet earth—some kind of underground fungus that is 3.5 miles across living under the surface in eastern Oregon. (Several states are vying for the honor of having the most humungous fungus but this one’s definitely in the running.) It’s as big as 1,665 football fields; all one huge living organism. The little mushrooms that pop up above the surface are like the tip of the iceberg; it’s got a huge network of tentacles 2 or 3 feet underground that wrap around the roots of trees and steal their water and nutrients. I don’t know that much about it, but in my imagination this giant fungus keeps the other plants growing in the soil on top of it from putting down deep roots. I imagine a little maple sapling starting to grow but being stunted by this thing that keeps it from tapping into the water table beneath. The tree’s roots spread out in the shallow soil available to it, but a strong wind can blow the poor little thing over because it can’t go down deep. Does the pervasive gotta-have-it-gimme mind-set in our culture work to keep people shallow by blocking access to deeper values? Doesn’t it seem sometimes like we’re all planted in shallow soil when we’re being told day in and day out that having is more important than being? Few people are immune to the lure of the consumer culture. Even if we’re not shoppers, we may seldom question the nature of the bottom line as we have come to understand it. You know the bottom line? When you hear the phrase, “bottom line,” you generally understand that’s shorthand for maximum profits—the corporate form of gotta-have-it-gimme. Rabbi Michael Lerner, the key leader of the effort to develop a network of spiritual progressives, describes what he calls “the old bottom line” like this: The old bottom line…teaches people that their life’s activities will be judged by how much they can advance their own material well-being, power, and prestige. Surrounded by an ethos of selfishness generated by the old bottom line, people increasingly treat each other as vehicles to satisfy their personal needs. Instead of seeing other people as embodiments of the sacred, they are viewed instrumentally as “useful” or as “human resources” for the sake of advancing societal goals. Living in a society where people regularly absorb and then act upon this “marketplace rationality” in which “looking out for number one” seems the only rational way to live, many people feel lonely, alienated, and scared even in the midst of friendships and marriages—because they see themselves surrounded by so many people who only seem to care about them to the extent that they can “deliver something.”[1] When people come to see themselves and their neighbors strictly in terms of their instrumental value—how they fit into the bottom line of maximizing power and profits—their souls begin to starve. The society’s singular focus on acquiring money, power, and stuff keeps roots shallow and sucks the life out of the human spirit. Maybe this “old bottom line” is “the way of the wicked” for our time. “Wicked” isn’t a word we use much any more, except as slang with a positive slant, as in SNL’s Wayne and Garth reviewing guitar riffs (WICKED!!). But the psalmist was simply contrasting God’s way with the worldly values of his day when he used the word translated as “wicked” in the psalm. We could assign other words to stand in wicked’s place: greedy, or shallow. Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the shallow, or take the path that the greedy tread, or sit in the seat of the scoffers. (We can keep the scoffers in the verse, because we’ve got plenty of them still around.) The happy who avoid the shallows are putting their roots down deep into the word of God. Meditating on God’s word day and night. Pondering God’s ways. Drawing strength from them like a tree planted by the water, and then bearing fruit in season. Parker Palmer says we need to learn to grow down in order to grow up. “This is our work, our laboring upon the earth: not to make our lives safe but to make them deep.” The commission for every spiritual journey is to sink our soul roots deeply into the underground river of God’s grace. It is possible to break through the humungous fungus of gotta-have-it-gimme values that underlie so much of our society’s life and grow down into the underground river of grace. The Creator’s ways are down there, down deep, a rich spring of love, forgiveness, creativity, generosity, mercy, faithfulness, kindness. Spiritual practices help us to tap into that divine life. But what about the life sapping fungus that keeps so many of our contemporaries living a shallow life? The intriguing proposal of the network of spiritual progressives is that we shouldn’t just settle for the old bottom line which is resulting in so much damage to the human community and to the green earth. They are proposing a concentrated effort to create a “New Bottom Line” for America. These leaders invite our commitment to traditional spiritual values: love, generosity, kindness, responsibility, respect, gratitude, humility, honesty, awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe. The old bottom line squeezes too many of these traditional values out to the margins. The new bottom line, in Rabbi Lerner’s words, “judges institutions, corporations, legislation, social practices, health care, our educational and legal systems, and our social policies by how much love and compassion, kindness and generosity, and ethical and ecological sensitivity they inculcate within us, and by how much they nurture our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred who can and do respond to the universe with gratitude, awe, and wonder at the grandeur of all that is.” [2] Why should we be content to live with the way things are as if that’s the way they will be forever? Why could we not seek ways to bring love into the public sphere as vigorously as we seek to bring love into our intimate relationships? God’s love is for everyone; how can we bring that conviction out of private piety and into public practices? How could we break the stranglehold of the old bottom line on our social practices and our imaginations? I don’t think God meant for us to just drink deeply of God’s love and do nothing but enjoy the experience. Bob Deffinbaugh wrote a commentary on Psalm 1 in which he muses on what it means to be compared with fruit-bearing trees. The tree in the psalm prospers by fulfilling its purpose of bearing fruit. The fruit which the tree bears is not the same as the water which produced it. He writes, “The fruit of a peach tree may be mostly water, but it isn’t water. The water is transformed in and by the tree into another, even more delightful, form. If trees were like us instead of us being like trees, the trees would not have fruit—they would have faucets! A faucet on a tree might make water available to…[people], but it would not have changed it from the way it was received…While it is true the Word of God should transform us, it is also true that the Word of God should be transformed in us. Each believer should be sustained by the Word and then that Word should be manifested in a variety of beautiful ‘fruits’ which benefit others. Too many of us are simply containers of the truth. When we see a brother or sister in need of help we quote Scripture verses to them. We put out Scripture in exactly the same form that we take it in. That is not what trees do.”[3] I suspect Deffinbaugh was writing for a slightly more traditional audience when he mentioned believers quoting scripture when they see a brother or sister in need. I don’t hear a surplus of scripture quoting in these halls. His point, though, is well taken. After drinking deeply of the sustaining grace of God, we are called to put that grace back out into the world in the form of fruitful works of mercy and justice. The transformed life results in efforts to transform life as we know it to make the world safe for love. As another of the conference speakers, Obery Hendricks, noted, “Spirituality is not a sensation. Spirituality is what we do, not just what we say or feel. You know you got the Spirit when you get up off your rusty dusty and go out and do something to make a difference!” It’s a leap to imagine that our gotta-have-it-gimme society could be transformed into a gotta-give-it-loving society. It’s a leap. A leap of faith. Rabbi Lerner called those of us who were at the conference to remember the character of the God in whom we have faith. He explained the meaning of the Hebrew name for God—we know it as Yahweh, when we pronounce it. Hebrew has no vowels, so the name is spelled YHWH. The HWH is the form of the word “To Be.” To add the Y makes “to be” point forward to what can be. The name of God we are given in the Hebrew scriptures suggests that God is the movement from that which is to that which can be. Then name of God is a transformative name. Lerner went on to say that strictly being a realist, accommodating to the way things are, amounts to idolatry. Further, humans, being made in the image of God means that we have the capacity to move from that which is to that which can be. Since God wills it, it is most certainly possible to draw on the strength God gives us as God waters the roots of the whole world with pure love to feed the world with that love until that day we see the peachy juiciness of it running down every chin. [1] Lerner, Michael Notebook for “Network of Spiritual Progressives” conference, May 17-20, 2006, p. 35 [2] Ibid. Read more about the New Bottom Line and the Spiritual Covenant with America at www.tikkun.org [3] Deffinbaugh, Bob “Psalm 1” article linked at textweek.com for Sunday, May 28, 2006 No virus found in this incoming message.
|