Sermons

Bible Text: Matthew 5: 1-14 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

When the center cannot hold—and we do feel it—we need new ways to hold ourselves together. In the cycles of history new religions are born out of the disintegration of its parent culture. In the collapses of our personal lives new hopes are born out of the way we think and feel.

Now I want to speak with you all—these coming ten times—out of deepest life-won intuitions I have. You have given me a rare opportunity—here at the end of my life—to speak words of hope, hope for this time of the shaking of our foundations, the foundations of our culture and the foundation of our minds.

I had two intuitions when I was twenty that have emerged like crystals in the rock and sands of my own mind. As a junior at Davidson I had to write a Philosophy of Religion Thesis. The tile of mine was “Just The One Of Us.” Just the one of us, my stab at grammatical mysticism. Its epigramatic conclusion was that “Truth is Meeting.” Truth is meeting.

What continues to astound me is that I had words for the human truth that we are all one–just the one of us, a mystical vision. And I had words for how quantum physics describes the sub-atomic building blocks of life, a physical vision: Truth is meeting, about physics, and also the only social path for peace—not to mention love and justice as well..

These intuitions—and they must have been revelations—included the idea that little tiny things really are in some way not separate, and that, in a similar way, their relationship is the basis of life.

Now we have learned in quantum physics that waves of light and particles of light are so much really just an “us” that they are best named wavecles. In religion such an idea is called mystical, such as a human being and God can be one.

There is a corollary to this level of physics that says that things are and are not where they are. In religion we call that paradox. After getting the highest grade in the class for my thesis–and we had a future Rhodes Scholar in that class–I was embolden to say from then on that in religion, as well as physics, truth is paradoxical, and that has gotten me a long way in life.

And as to the cultural statement that Truth is Meeting, well that has gotten me many dates, and a career as a therapist and preacher. More importantly it is the axiom of hope for civilization, for peace and justice, in the same way at that idea about little tiny things in physics is the axiom of life.

So you all are good to me that you have stayed seated for this opening.

Let’s go back through this and talk about it differently and see why it is relevant to our religious and cultural situation here in America, in the West, and in this church.

“When the center cannot hold—and we do feel it…” Is that true? Are things falling apart? To continue W.B. Yeats’ poem is there some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, some terrible monster moving towards the manger-place of the baby Jesus?

We are entering the 100th anniversary of World War I. I have made it my task to read some of the history. I remember reading “All Quiet on the Western Front” when I was in high school and feeling dizzy and sick, repulsed and unable to accept the reality of such insanity. I remember later seeing the movie, from the book, “Johnny Got His Gun” and having that experience all over again. Well, doing this reading now, of the more objective history, makes those aesthetic images of horror even more horrible, because of the statistics, the logistics, the sheer craziness of leaders and people. People as well as leaders made this happen, and religion as well as greed and nationalism brought it about. There would be battles where 100,000 men would die on each side—and nothing would have been gained. So are we better off now? Are “The Better Angles of our Nature” as Robert Pinker claims in his book taking over with statistically fewer people dying in fewer wars now?

Maybe. Maybe we are on the verge of a new golden age where we will eschew war, create justice and save the earth. It is certainly possible. It is not impossible.

But I have said “when the center cannot hold—and we feel it.” If the center does hold we will need a new kind of hope to have it hold. In the meanwhile looking at what we instead feel is important to our religious and civic life here and now. And we do not really feel that our civilization, maybe even our own lives, are holding to some center that is strong and good. Although, there is a little center of gravity on mid-coast Maine. We have discovered that in the last two years, and it is worth noting, especially when we get to looking at new hopes, new religious hopes, for our lives.

But in the larger picture we are still living in the era crated by the World Wars. Those collapses were caused by the same two things that threaten us now. Arnold Toynbee calls them War and Class. What he means is militarization and economic disparity. Civilizations disintegrate when the society becomes increasingly militarized and when a larger and larger part of the population becomes, as he says recalcitrant—that is divided off from a smaller ruling minority. Then people no longer believe in the institutions of their lives—schools, churches, government bureaucracies, and media. Well, we have all that recalcitrant mistrust and the largest military budget in world history, we have militarized our police, and we have reduced economic equality to a fraction of the American promise, and the plight of the emerging world, of course, is even worse than our 99%.

History is like a wagon with wheels, drawn, we hope by a divine horse. The wheels fall off, civilizations break up and fall away. New wheels, new civilizations born out of a new spirit and new religious ideas, replace the old wheels and the wagon goes on towards a very known end—the oneness of all life. Remember: Just The One of Us.

So war and the ruling rich may break our wheels. And with the fate of the earth in the balance, maybe even the wagon will not last.

And we, in various ways from various events and dreams and problems, feel this. Feelings are not everything, but they count. They can even drive us crazy with their truths.

So if the center will not hold, and if our feelings are true, then we do need new ways to hold ourselves together.

What could that new way be? Well, it turns out to be just the same as the original old way: The Golden Rule. Do onto others as you would have them do on to you. Only now we have both mystical vision and physical science to motivate and support and guide us.

People are not motivated by the Golden Rule because they were taught it in school or Sunday school. Nor do they do it because they make a pragmatic calculation that it’s a good policy. They do it because they profoundly believe and feel and know it to be the truth worth living for and by.

How can we get there? Well. Remember in Just the One of Us vision that Truth was Meeting? Have you ever felt and known or acted on a truth that was not in some sense shared? Can you fall in love with someone whom you think has no love for you? Can you see the truth of someone else’s life without in some sense sharing in their life? Can you ever close a business deal without offering your opposite something that meets you with him in some way if not also half way? Is there any kind of justice that does not approximate some golden mean, some balance of interests? Some meeting? Can any group work that doesn’t have some kind of meeting of the minds? Isn’t, then, relationship, shared inter-action the one and only way to live, truthfully? Does that not also apply to the natural world, our mother Earth? Do we not need to know that we need to meet her, now, half way or more so? That she is not—as the Pope says—just for us but we are for her?

Isn’t this what that young and isolated college student was longing for as a world view when he wrote, despite himself, that truth was meeting and that life needed to be about Us not me, or him or her or it. Wasn’t I-Thou, the primal relationship, the source of all life? And is it not even more true now as it is the only way left?

But what about those little tiny things. What about quantum physics? Maybe religion with its ethical golden rule idea is not enough anymore. Maybe we need to know that the whole real structure of the universe is teaching us how to be, how to recreate the wheels for life.

Well, listen to this. From a review of a new book out about how quantum physics is also quantum biology. The grand synthesis we have sought is to have the rules that apply to the macro big world also apply to the micro little world. And if the big outer cosmos and the small inner cosmos operate in the same way then maybe we just join the world the way it is as our new religious life.

There is something in the little tiny inner workings of cells called “entanglement.” Now this is something that Einstein knew about and could not accept. So we are now smarter than Einstein. Entanglement is when two or more tiny little things, called “quantum entities”– what Einstein called “those nasty quanta”—entanglement is when they become in some sense in tune with one another. When electrons become in tune with one another, they don’t get over it. When one of them is prodded the other one twitches—even over great distances. “This,” say the WSJ writer, “is a profound realization, because entanglement is such a bizarre concept, that for decades even many physicists doubted that it could be real. Albert Einstein famously referred to it as ‘spooky action from a distance.’ (But) The equations tell us that once two particles have interacted, then forever afterward, no matter how far apart they are, a measurement of one particle will instantaneously affect the properties of another.” Einstein called this paradoxical. How could something affect something else when it was not physically connected to it any more, he asked?

Well, sir, are we not now, then, in the realm of religion, the life of the spirit, where we have always known that over time and space the bonds that bind us last, cause effects, make up for justice and lead to love, establishing a way of peace and leading to a kind of childhood, innocent, one world way of living.

Let me illustrate a childhood, innocent, one world way of living.

Some years after I had written all those astonishing words about Just The One of Us and Truth is Meeting, I was at a summer institute where I saw a film on the history of the Wild Boy of Avignon, the 18th century true story of a wild child found in the forests who was captured and trained by a French linguist and scientist, but who breaks out of the clothes, the house, the laboratories and ends up one night naked in the woods again hollowing at the moon. Why is he doing that? Because once upon a time he was in fact, just like a little electron, close to the moon and close to the wolves, and that has never left him, and he is only really at home with himself when he is away from the language and the science and, indeed, the religion, that separates him from nature. He is back home in his true religion, naked and howling in the forest moon light. Do we not all have a deep and inner, primal religious place for such a sense of pure oneness with the real world. And as we see the wolf boy do we not also have that golden-rule impulse to love and support him in his deep truth, as we would also want that from him for us.

It is only this kind of empathic love that can lead to the willingness to sacrifice and to suffer for the other that will bind any society together and hold any personal life together.

So maybe the center will not hold. Maybe, as we feel and fear, we are at some break-up, break-down, point in history, as a nation, as nations and a world. And perhaps our extreme struggles to hold our own lives and minds together are because we live in deeply troubled times. Maybe the wheels are falling off our wagon. But the wagon will still be drawn on. There is only one direction to life and that is to the increasing realization and actualization of the oneness of all life. Just the one of us, an innocent and primal vision. And the building blocks of the physical and the biological world may guide and shape us as each little quantum entity “says” to the other, “Well, little one, now that we have met what happens to me happens to you, the truth is once we’ve met, we keep on meeting.”

So the religion of the Golden Rule isn’t just an ethical religion, it’s more primal than that, it’s the way things are.

So be it.