Sermons

Minister: Rev. Margaret A. Beckman | Unitarian Universalists have said for centuries that there is room in our religion for all seekers. Skeptics and poets and scientists are welcome here, as are nonconformists and shy and uncertain folk. We believe that restlessness and doubts are a sign of grace, that the love of truth is the holiest of gifts. ~ Barbara Merritt
 

READING Krister Stendahl’s Three Rules of Religious Understanding – reported to have been enunciated at a 1985 press conference in Stockholm, Sweden

Krister Stendahl is credited with creating Stendahl’s three rules of religious understanding, which he presented in a 1985 press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in response to vocal opposition to the building of a temple there by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His rules are as follows:

When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
Don’t compare your best to their worst.
Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this Stendahl meant that you should be willing to recognize elements in the other religious tradition or faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.)

READING ~ from Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others by Barbara Brown Taylor. Harper Collins Publishers, Mar 12, 2019. Kindle Edition.
The first time I heard the phrase “holy envy” I knew it was an improvement over the plain old envy I felt while studying other faiths. When the Jewish Sabbath came up in class, I wanted it. Why did Christians ever let it go? When we watched a film of the God-intoxicated Sufis spinning, I wanted that too. The best my tradition could offer me during worship was kneeling to pray and standing to sing. My spiritual covetousness extended to the inclusiveness of Hinduism, the nonviolence of Buddhism, the prayer life of Islam, and the sacred debate of Judaism. Of course this list displays all the symptoms of my condition. It is simplistic, idealistic, overgeneralized, and full of my own projections. It tells you as much about what I find wanting in my own tradition as it does about what I find desirable in another. This gets to the heart of the problem: with plain old envy, my own tradition always comes up wanting. The grass is always greener in the tradition next door.
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy (p. 64). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

SERMON

This is “the story of a Christian minister who lost her way in the church and found a new home in the classroom, where the course she taught most often was not Introduction to the New Testament, Church History, or Christian Theology, but Religions of the World. As soon as she recovered from the shock of meeting God in so many new hats, she fell for every religion she taught. When she taught Judaism, she wanted to be a rabbi. When she taught Buddhism, she wanted to be a monk. It was only when she taught Christianity that the fire sputtered, because her religion looked so different once she saw it lined up with the others. She always promised her students that studying other faiths would not make them lose their own. Then she lost hers, or at least the one she started out with. This is the story of how that happened and what happened next.”

(Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy (p. 1). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.)

I begin with these words from the introduction to Holy Envy, Finding God in the Faith of Others.

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal Priest, college professor, and perhaps the best Christian preacher I’ve ever heard. And . . . somewhere along the way, she lost her way. She gave up on her religion and left church. In her effort to hold on to it – too tightly as it turned out – she uncovered all the ways that her traditional Episcopal Christian religion disappointed her and hurt others. She found her way through the morass of doctrine, dogma, ancient ritual and persistent prayer by loosening her grip on her Christianity and embarking on a journey to explore the land and landscapes of other religions. Hers is a fascinating story and she is a brilliant story teller.

I don’t mean to give you some sort of Cliff Notes version of her book, Holy Envy, Finding God in the Faith of Others. I encourage you to read the book for yourselves. Then, let’s get together over morning coffee or mid-day lunch and talk about what we are learning.

I do mean to tease out of her story some truths that we Unitarian Universalists might find meaningful and helpful in our own questing for truth and meaning and a spirituality that is worthy of our devotion.

A question that I come back to from time to time is this – What is the unique core of my Unitarian Universalism? What do I cling to and why do I cling to it? What do I discover in other religions that I wish I could bring into my own faith and practice?

Most Unitarian Universalists agree that we need a faith that is expansive and life-affirming. For me, I can say that the faith of my upbringing became too confining for me.

Seeing weakness in our own faith tradition often results in a crisis of faith and many of us wind up, as Brabra Brown Taylor did, leaving church. Perhaps it is what brought us here to this more open and life-affirming tradition, as it did me. That too, however, is not enough to satisfy the impulse to either be too crtical or too accepting of my own tradition and that of others. What then, shall we do?

Well, one approach is to keep opening ourselves to other religions and other religious expressions. There we will surely find many beautiful things. We experience Holy Envy for those beautiful things. Holy Envy is different from just plain old regular envy.

When Barbara encountered the holy in other places, she wanted it for herself. Oh how that resonnates with me. Been there. Done that.

My envy was simplistic and crude and so was my enthusiastic appropriation of aspects of other religions to use as if they were my own. I have come to understand that taking elements from traditions in which I am not deeply grounded and carefully taught is a misappropriation of the sacred, tempting as it may be. Do you know what I mean? Are you with me in this realization?

Holy Envy is an acknowledgement that there are things in other religions that are beautiful and work marvelously well for people who practice them. It is admitting the feeling of wishing that you could have more of that kind of beauty and meaning for yourself in your faith and practice, but not taking it as if you could, by wishing, making it your own.

Holy envy resists the temptations of religious misappropriation.
Holy Envy commends the practices of others with integrity and respect.

What I’m learning anew from Barbara Brown Taylor is what she learned in her years of teaching and learning about world religions.

Holy Envy warms my heart and makes more room for others in my circle of care and affection.

I must learn to hold my own faith lightly in order to take delight in Holy Envy.

If I hold my faith and religion too tightly, I am rigid. I am defensive, combative, and critical of others. I cannot allow any room within myself for doubt or dissatisfaction. I cannot permit the possibility of valid truth claims and experiences or expressions of the divine in other places. I cling so tightly to what I have and have been taught that my eyes, my ears and my heart are closed to others.

Some of us will stay in that tight-fisted place and hold on to our religion and traditions with all that we are and all that we have.

Some of us will collapse under the strain of competing claims of truth and meaning. We may reject all religion. We may have a crisis of faith that leads to what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul.
Suppose, however, that I can relax my grip on my religion and tradition. Suppose I can open my fist and hold out my hand to someone who comes to faith or goodness in an entirely different way than I have always done.
Suppose I can really listen to others who speak of their faith with an open heart and open mind.
Suppose I begin to see my religion and tradition through the eyes and experiences of others and come to understand it in a new way.

Here is a truth claim – what I believe is less important than how I live.

Barbara Brown Taylor found God in the faith of others as she leaned into her holy envy.

She was able to loosen her grip on her familiar ways of being Christian.
She was able to recognize the best of other religions and begin to ask what her religion might offer of a similar nature that she had simply not seen or grasped in her life so far.
Rather than simply taking what shines and sparkles in other places, she asked deepening questions about what within her tradition could be made to shine. She deepened her own faith by appreciating the beauty of other faiths. She deepened her own faith and reclaimed much of what she had come to distrust by coming back to it from a whole new perspective and willingness to see with new eyes and hear with new ears. Her grip is now light, though constant.

More from BBT:
“One of the greatest gifts that holy envy has given me is the ability to reimagine my own tradition. I would like to tell you that it is the product of gaining wisdom, insight, and perspective through the study of other religions, but that would not be true. Instead, it is the product of losing my way, doubting my convictions, interrogating my religious language, and tossing many of my favorite accessories overboard when the air started leaking out of my theological life raft. Only then was I scared and disoriented enough to see something new when I looked back at my old landmarks, many of which I was approaching from an unfamiliar angle.”
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy (p. 175). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

In loosening my rip on my religion and traditions, I am free to experience holy envy and to appreciate the lives of others in a more open and welcoming way. Jesus, the Buddha, Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama do not instruct their followers to love their religion. They instruct them to love their neighbors and the strangers they encounter.

What a relief! Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last.

But this freedom from the constraints of a religion held too tightly does not come without a fair dose of terror and daunting responsibility.

I am now compelled to look more deeply within to find my own ways of being an authentic human being – to practice love for my neighbors and the strangers I meet along the way. I am instructed to listen and wonder and ask questions and rejoice in holy envy that lead me to the waters of life. My practice is not simply to know and understand Unitarian Universalism; it is respecting others and loving the neighbor who I know and the stranger who I do not know.

BBT:
“While I am waiting to learn how this story I am working on ends, I will continue to ask much of my tradition, especially since it has much to answer for. I will keep insisting that it produce good fruit in a changing world, even as it helps me and others like me catch the new wine of the Spirit that is being poured out. When I am thirsty, I will dip my cup in the well nearest to hand, while longing to return home to the one I know best. Even if the water in the Christian well does not belong to Christians—even if it is funded by the same great underground river that feeds all other wells—I know where mine is and I know how to use it. My Christian cup works well enough, and when it does not, I can still use my hands.”
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy (pp. 184-186). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Ultimately, we may conclude this: we are at our best when we are authentic human beings. What matters is relationships. It is how we encounter and treat others – most especially, the stranger; the one who does not look like me, speak my language, or practice my faith.

Faith’s answer to encountering the stranger is Welcome. Opening ourselves up to holy envy and the deepening of our own understandings make room for this kind of radical welcome. Like so much of life: It is just that simple, but it sure isn’t easy.

BBT:
“I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead. I asked for solid ground, and God gave me human beings instead—strange, funny, compelling, complicated human beings—who keep puncturing my stereotypes, challenging my ideas, and upsetting my ideas about God, so that they are always under construction. I may yet find the answer to all my questions in a church, a book, a theology, or a practice of prayer, but I hope not. I hope God is going to keep coming to me in authentically human beings who shake my foundations, freeing me to go deeper into the mystery of why we are all here.”
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy (p. 213). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

May it be so for me and for you.
Blessed Be. I Love You. Namaste.