HUU Sermon Archives

This I Believe

by: David Lane, Christine Robinson, Bernie Mathes, Grayson Sless, Michele O'Connor, Claire Prideaux
April 30, 2006

Ringing the Bell
Announcements
Call to Worship (Hymn #347) “Gather The Spirit”
Welcome, Affirmation, and Chalice Lighting

Welcome

• Welcome to Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists.
• We are a lay-led, religious community offering a unique spiritual and moral witness in the Shenandoah Valley.
• We meet here each Sunday in the historic Dale Enterprise School House.
• We invite all who search for truth and meaning with open hearts and open minds to join us in worship, in mutual support, and in shared ministry to each other and to the world.

Affirmation

HUU is a welcoming congregation. This is because we affirm the spiritual value and equality of all persons.

By this we mean:

• All persons possess dignity and deserve respect.

For each individual is a unique source of truth and meaning.

• The lessons of every life journey are valuable and irreplaceable.

For without the contribution of everyone, our vision is clouded and our truth incomplete.

• A common humanity unities us all.

For whether old or young, male or female, straight or gay, white or black, the same human condition drives our search for truth and meaning.

• To embody this affirmation in a small way, we invite each of you at this time and as you are able to stand and greet your neighbors –

those before you, those beside you, and those behind you –
extending to each the hand of welcome, respect, and support,
the hand of human kinship and affirmation.

Chalice Lighting

Now as a welcoming community of neighbors and friends, let us make for ourselves sacred space: Let us make that space where our many separate journeys intersect: in the sorrows and joys of our common human life. Let us make that space out of the stories we tell each other, the gifts we give each other, the truths we share with each other. And let us create that space around a lighted chalice: the chalice that gives visible form to the one light of truth, the light we all see but see differently through the many windows of our minds and hearts.

Opening Words

When the Dalai Lama was a child, studying the doctrines of Tibetan Buddhism, his teachers explained that the moon emits its own light. But one day they brought him a telescope. He looked at the moon under magnification and saw that its surface contained shadows. He had made a discovery: The moon’s light comes from elsewhere. It must come from the sun. The doctrine was directly at odds with what he could perceive with his own senses and a scientific instrument. What to do? Simple: Change the doctrine.

Joys and Concerns
Singing Out the Children

A CHOIR OF VOICES: Belief and Unbelief in the Words of Saints and Sinners

Be willing to relinquish the life you’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for you. - Joseph Campbell  -

Never forget that your most bitter enemy may be God in clever disguise, testing your ability to forgive. - Mother Teresa  -

Someday I’ll find it, / The Rainbow Connection, / The lovers, the dreamers, and me. - Kermit the Frog  -

I pray every second of my life, not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I know there is no God of the universe made happy by me getting down on my knees and telling him how great he is. - Susan B. Anthony  -

The Bystander, the one who sees injustice and simply stands aside and does nothing to assist the victim, is as guilty as the perpetrator of the injustice. - Elie Weisel  -

I firmly believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth – but it would be difficult for me to stop there and believe that this spark of divinity was accorded to none other of God’s creation, who, like the Master, took on the living form, and, like him, lived the human life. - Clara Barton  -

Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be your own confidence. Hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp. - Gautama Buddha  -

At the center of the gathered community dwells the Holy. We are the prayer, each and all. - L. Annie Foerster  -

Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. - George Bernard Shaw -

Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are the children of God, and must share the wealth of the world. - Olympia Brown -

We must love one another or die. - W. H. Auden  -

Love is not concerned with whom you pray or where you slept the night you ran away from home. Love is concerned that the beating of your heart should kill no one. - Alice Walker  -

We affirm that everyone of us is held in Creation’s hand – a part of the interdependent cosmic web – and hence strangers need not be enemies; that no one is saved until we All are saved where All means the whole of Creation. - William Schulz  -

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things. - Mary Oliver  -

I must content myself with being a Unitarian by myself, assured that many around me would do the same if they could only hear the matter fairly stated. - Thomas - Jefferson

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead  -

Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.  - Ralph Waldo Emerson  -

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do. - Dorothy Day  -

I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.  -Henry David Thoreau  -

We are so tethered to all by the beautiful dependencies of law, that not only the sparrow’s fall is felt to the uttermost bound but the vibrations set in motion by the words that we utter reach through all space and the tremor is felt through all time.  -Maria Mitchell  -

Offering and Response
Hymn #295 “Sing Out Praises For The Journey”
Message: “This I Believe”

Introduction: “Not We Believe, But I Believe” David Lane

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion – a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

Edward R. Morrow used these words to introduce the original “This I Believe” radio program in 1951. But they might easily be used to describe our own time some 50 years later.

In fact so similar do these periods appear that last April National Public Radio revived “This I Believe” as a continuing national project that invites listeners once again to write about core beliefs that guide their daily lives. NPR has now been airing these personal statements each Monday on Morning Edition and All Things Considered for a full year.

If like me you have been closely following these regular Monday-morning self-revelations written by “thoughtful men and women in all walks of life,” you may have wondered what it was about them that made them so arresting, so powerful, so moving. Whether written by a celebrity or a nobody, by a roustabout or an intellectual, by a believer or an unbeliever, by a centenarian or a child, each essay compelled attention.

Emotion. Honesty. Integrity. Was that it? Or the directness of personal conversation? Or the first-person immediacy and intimacy of radio? Or was it just the impact (while I shaved and dressed for work) of hearing an actual confession from the soul!

And stories. In every case that’s what I noticed. Not articles of faith, not doctrines and dogmas, not the “what I’m expected to or supposed to believe in .” No. Instead, the reality of belief that emerges out of life experience, out of what happened on a certain day in a certain place to one individual person.

For me the shock of “This I Believe” was that it was all about the I of believing not the We of believing. Whether atheist or theist, conservative or liberal, anti-something or pro-something else, the beliefs all came out of lived experience, life stories. That was my real “Ah-ha!” That Our lives give us our beliefs, not the other way around.

Values and ideas are instruments of understanding and meaning-making, not fetters and chains that enforce conformity. They help us make sense of our lives. And, if they don’t, we need to replace them with beliefs that do accord with, and that do grow out of, our lived experience.

Now let three NPR contributors make this point. Here are their personal belief statements and the life experiences from which they emerged. (Links will open a new window.)

• Reading #1: “Each Other’s Business” (Eboo Patel)
• Reading #2: “The Right Story” (Greg Chapman)
• Reading #3: “Mysterious Connections” (Azar Nafisi)

Challenge: “Taking Responsibility, Sharing Our Truths” David Lane

So why do we believe what we believe?

• because God says so?
• because the Bible says so?
• because everyone else I know believes the same way?
• because if I don’t believe what my parents, siblings, children, co-workers, neighbors, or friends believe, they’ll ridicule, reject, or shun me?

If these are reasons for our beliefs, what responsibility are we taking for them? Are they in fact really, honestly, authentically our own? How can they be our own, if they emerge not out of our own lives, our own experiences, and our own stories? If truths are not our truths, whose truths are they?

Courage is the real measure of truth. Edward R. Murrow knew that in the 1950s. And each of us right here in the Shenandoah Valley in 2006 knows it too.

What we know is what our lives tell us, what the stories in our lives require of us. To honestly confront the truths that our own lives teach us and to bravely share those truths in the public square when we need to is the challenge we face as people of faith searching for truth and meaning with open hearts and open minds.

Join me now in carrying that quest one step further. Can we make “This I Believe” a visible feature of our common life? Can we create our own anthology of “This I Believe” statements for each other and for visitors and for friends in the larger community? I believe we can and should!

Here now are copies of NPR’s essay-writing directions and Murrow’s original invitation to contribute to the 1950s radio program. Of course, you can submit to public radio as well. But my hope is that several of you, even many of you, will contribute to our own HUU “This I Believe” anthology. If you write them, they will be published (I’ll see to that). And they will be read. And just like those we heard today, I know these statements will move and inspire and compel attention. Yes, I believe this– this I believe.

Hymn #169 “We Shall Overcome”
Community Sending Forth

Benediction

Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be your own confidence. Hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp.