Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow. This is more horrifying than anything Stephen King ever wrote.

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Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've often returned to Neiman's Evil in Modern Philosophy and so was intrigued when I saw this new publication. In it Neiman stands up for four values of the left--universalism, justice, progress, and doubt--against their critics, especially those on the left itself who critique these values. It's a good read to help us philosophically understand our moment.

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I really enjoyed the writing of today's sermon "Awe's Purpose."

We were completing an autumn sermon series on Awe using Dacher Keltner's book.  In it he discusses eight "wonders of life," and today was the final one--epiphanies.  He emphasizes the power of awe to reveal to us knowledge of fundamental truths about the interconnectedness of the world.

With that buzzing in my mind, I read two columns this week that ended up framing my sermon.  The first was last week's piece by Ross Douthat on how the election reveals ways in which the world has changed, particularly that there is no longer any mainstream mechanism for setting the terms of the debate, and so more wild and extreme ideas are now a part of the conversation.  This set up the idea that truth is contested and institutions (like the church) are no longer trusted to help govern such debates.

The second was an essay in The Christian Century about Reign of Christ Sunday, which this is in the liturgical calendar.  Part of its meaning to defend truth that transcends nationalism, racism, etc. in this age of lies.

So, I used the sermon to establish an epistemology to respond to the challenge posed by Trump's election, according to Douthat's analysis.  Establishing an idea of what truth is and how we get to it (through awe & wonder and the spiritual practices that contribute to them).

Awe’s Purpose

Isaiah 60:1-5a

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

24 November 2024

            So, many of you have probably been reading articles, columns, and essays analyzing the recent election and what it means.  Everything from analyses of the polls to much deeper pieces claiming things like the end of the neo-liberal era have been all over the place.  The conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had a piece last weekend in which he claimed that the election was the clearest sign that the era we had been living in is over and a new one has begun.  He wrote,

probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.  A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.

            Instead, he pointed out,

All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.

            The consensus that has existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union is now over and political, social, and cultural debates will range over a much wider set of options and possibilities.  And there’s something else that’s new about this time we live in.  Douthat writes,

even the wilder influences are here to stay, because there is no cultural forcing mechanism to make the radical and reactionary go away . . . or to establish a zone of respectability and marginalize everything else.

That’s because we are also not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate.

            Douthat summarized this as “We’re experiencing a more radical kind of informational fracture.”

            I’ve been pondering what this analysis, if true, means for the Mainline Protestant Christian Church and the institutions and practices we’ve spent centuries building. 

            But today I’m going to talk about how this relates to the purpose of awe, as we wrap up our autumn series on the topic, with the eighth and final “wonder of life” as identified by the psychologist Dacher Keltner.  These are the eight ways that humans across the globe and in myriad cultures and religions experience awe.  We’ve examined nature, music, art, mysticism, etc. and today we come to epiphanies.  Ever had an epiphany that left you in awe?

            Here’s how Keltner describes the physical experience we humans have when we are in awe.  Read excerpt page 249.

            And that process in our bodies results in a shift in our thinking and feeling.  Keltner writes, “Awe shifts our minds from a more reductionistic mode of seeing things in terms of separateness and independence to a view of phenomena as interrelating and dependent.”  He continues, “Awe enables us to see that life is a process, that all endless forms most beautiful are deeply interconnected, and involve change, transformation, impermanence, and death.”

            In other words, the very experience of awe, including its seven other forms we’ve already talked about, generates epiphanies.  Awe and wonder lead to us seeing things in new ways.  Opening our minds to new things.  Transforming the ways we think and feel and interact with the world.

            Awe, he teaches, “is about knowing, sensing, seeing, and understanding fundamental truths.”  We gain self-knowledge in moments of awe.  And we gain knowledge about the world and how it works.

            The fundamental epiphany that Keltner declares results from an exploration of awe—our interconnectedness with all of reality and the ways we depend upon those larger systems.

            This is how he finally answers the question, what is the purpose of this emotion?  What is the purpose of awe?  He answers, “Awe integrates us into the systems of life—communities, collectives, the natural environment, and forms of culture, such as music, art, religion, and our mind’s efforts to make sense of all its webs of ideas.  The epiphany of awe is that its experience connects our individual selves with the vast forces of life.”

            One of my favorite 21^st century books of philosophy is Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought.  A fascinating discussion of the ideas of Frederick Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, John Rawls, and others, and what we can learn about evil and the struggle against it from their writings.

            For Neiman, the problem of evil is not just the classic religious problem of how evil exists if God is good and powerful.  Rather, she believes the existence of evil is a challenge and a threat for all belief systems that try to make sense of the world.  Even more a of challenge for those belief systems based on reason than those based on religion.

            She writes, “When the world is not as it should be, we begin to ask why.”  That’s the origin of the problem.  She adds, “We proceed on the assumption that the true and the good, and just possibly the beautiful, coincide.  Where they do not, we demand an account.”

            And nowhere is that human demand more obvious than in children when they cry out, “That’s not fair.”  Or when they won’t quit asking questions, trying to understand.  Neiman states it well—“The adamant child who wants every question answered expresses something about the nature of reason.”  She adds, “In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew.”

            This fundamental human insistence on understanding and fairness is what drives us to keep on.  When the world doesn’t make sense, we don’t resign ourselves to hopelessness and despair and give up.  We have the power to fashion human relations and culture that do make more sense than what we currently have.  And in that childhood demand we get a sense of the ideals we are aspiring too.

            Part of what kids awaken us to is awe and wonder.  And those are vital to the project of overcoming evil and making the world a better, fairer, more rational place.  Here’s how Neiman puts it, “We experience wonder in the moments when we see the world is as it ought to be.”

            Maybe the greatest thing about our experiences of awe is that they show us the world we desire—one that is good and beautiful and rich with meaning.  Our experiences of awe teach us what we yet may create.

            So for Neiman, wonder is an essential tool in overcoming evil.

            The theologian Kevin Hector, in his book Christianity as a Way of Life, elevates the crucial importance of the spiritual practice of paying attention.  He writes, “At the most basic level, to practice attention is to loosen the grip of our preconceptions in order to see a particular object in all its particularity and, so, to let our mind be filled with that object’s peculiar reality.” 

Think of all those great Mary Oliver poems that do this—paying attention to a rock, a turtle, wild geese, the waves on the shore.  Or the current wave of anti-trans actions, which surely stem from a failure of paying attention—of paying attention to trans persons in their particularly.  Paying attention is vitally important to our spiritual and social well-being.

            But Kevin Hector adds that attention by itself is not sufficient for the Christian way of life.  Attention trains us to see the world as abundant with the blessings of God our Creator, but we have to take a further step.  We can’t only attend to the thing in front of us, we must also wonder about it.  Wonder leads to appreciation.  When we wonder, he writes, we must linger in that wonder, “let it sink in, and just so, to do justice to whatever wondrous thing we have beheld.”

            And in this way attention, leading to awe and wonder, teaches us something.  In other words, an epiphany.  What does it teach?  Hector answers that we will get better at contemplating God because we’ve gotten better at seeing God’s glory in everything around us.

            Today is Reign of Christ Sunday.  Originally “Christ the King Sunday” before we Christians made the wise choice to listen to women and alter our language and practice, and thus take one tiny step toward a better, fairer world. 

            A great essay this week in The Christian Century by T. Denise Anderson told the origin of this liturgical day:

In 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast day of the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. To understand why he did this, we should consider what was happening in the world at the time. That year, Adolf Hitler had just published the first volume of Mein Kampf, which detailed his descent into antisemitism and his sinister designs for world domination. . . .  A year later, more than 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington to demand, among other things, immigration restrictions based on race and nationality. With membership of over 5 million at the time, the Klan was the largest fraternal organization in the United States. . . . The world was still navigating the aftermath of the Great War, and there was growing nationalist sentiment around the globe. Pius wanted to counter what he perceived to be unhealthy nationalism and increased secularism. He called the church to declare Christ’s kingship over all creation. The Christian’s first allegiance is therefore to Christ, whatever the nation of their citizenship. Regardless of where in the world Christians live, they should be guided by their values as followers of Christ, over and above national movements or cultural ethics.

            Anderson then draws on why this liturgical celebration is important in 2024.  She writes, sounding somewhat like Ross Douthat, “In a world in which misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories abound, the truth is not always obvious. The lies are often so much louder, more insistent, and definitely more abrasive.”  She adds, “The truth is anathema in this age, probably because it’s easier (and often more profitable) to deal in lies. Lies concentrate power among the few, while the truth disperses it among the many.”

            What, then, are Christians to do?  If we truly live under the reign of Christ?  Here is Anderson’s answer.  Which I think is our Christian response to the world we live in as seen by Douthat in his essay.  And an answer we can get to because of what we learn in our moments of awe.  Which means this answer may be the purpose of our own exploration of awe this autumn.  So, let me conclude with her words:

When we love our neighbor as ourselves, when we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, and when we care for the afflicted and stand up for the oppressed, then we abide in truth and count ourselves as citizens of Jesus’ unique kingdom. The lie is fear. Scarcity narratives that stoke the fear that we don’t have enough, when scripture assures us God knows and intends to provide for our needs, are lies. The fear that siblings with different or no citizenship papers would all seek to do us harm affronts God’s truth that commands us to welcome the stranger among us. Fear is a lie. Love is truth.

A recommitment to truth in these times is in order for everyone, but especially for Jesus’ church.

Self-Transcendence

Isaiah 6:1-9

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

17 November 2024

            In their book The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, the scientists David Yaden and Andrew Newberg describe the Awe Experience Scale which is used to measure spiritual experiences.  These experiences are measured according to these six different aspects:

• Vastness—the feeling that we are in the presence of something grand
• Accommodation—we struggle to take it all in
• Time—which feels like it is slowing down
• A feeling that the sense of self has diminished
• Feeling connected to everything, and finally
• The physiological responses like goosebumps and chills

I’m going to venture a guess that probably none of us sitting here have had the type of mystical vision described by the prophet Isaiah?  But I am guessing that we have had spiritual experiences that check all the criteria on that scale.  What are your most profound, moving, and memorable spiritual experiences?

The next wonder of life in our autumn series is mystical awe.  We’ve talked about various other types of awe—arising from nature, music, art, and the beauty of moral character.  And while each of those has had what we might call a spiritual component, we haven’t explicitly gotten to spiritual and religious experiences until today. 

Religion has another connection with awe.  As Dacher Keltner points out, our religious and spiritual teachings and practices themselves arose from some person’s awe experience.  Our beliefs and rituals are themselves archives of ancient experiences of awe.

Yaden and Newberg identify that these religious experiences generally contain a feeling of unity with God, nature, the universe, or other people.  And some sense of transcending or losing the self, the ego.

Mystical experiences are the most extreme version of what are a variety of self-transcendent experiences.  Psychologists also list mindfulness, flow, awe, and peak experiences as other common human moments of self-transcendence that fall short of the most vivid mystical experiences.

In his classic study of mysticism, the father of American psychology William James, described them has having four qualities—ineffable (that we can’t adequately describe our experience to others), a noetic quality (meaning that we’ve gained some sort of knowledge or revelation—like Isaiah and his vision), third, that these experiences are transient, not lasting long, and finally that we are passive in these moments, that they come upon us from the outside.

More recent empirical studies have revealed similar but differing qualities.  A 2015 study of mystical experiences, for instance, found that they include a feeling of unity with ultimate reality, being overwhelmed with positive emotions in a form of ecstasy, losing our sense of space and time, and, finally, James’s idea that we cannot adequately describe the experience.

But even if these experiences are difficult to describe to others, that generally hasn’t stopped people from trying.  Prophets, poets, and all sorts of religious practitioners have talked about and written about these types of experiences.

For example, the journalist Michael Pollan in his book on psychedelics—How to Change Your Mind—describes the loss of the ego he experienced on one of his trips:  Read excerpt from pages 263-4.

Pollan, who is not a religious person, takes this loss of the ego as the defining characteristic of the spiritual.  That spiritual experiences are precisely those that “arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced.” 

And this, he takes, is a good thing.  The ego so often gets in our way with its negative self-talk and its limited perspective on the world—what he calls “a measly trickle of consciousness.”  Spirituality is what opens us up to see and feel and experience more than what our ego limits us to.

And the neuroscience seems to back that up.  MRI studies have demonstrated that when a spiritual experience is being had, the brain’s default mode network (the source of our ego and sense of self) is quiet.  Leading Pollan to conclude that “the mystical experience may just be what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network.”

The psychologist Mark Leary reports more of what neuroscience has taught us about religious experiences.  He writes, Read excerpt from page 160.

 

So the latest science affirms what religions have long taught—that the ego gets in the way of us achieving enlightenment and experiencing the fullness of God.  Western religions have traditionally focused on how we can control and change the self, while Eastern religions have focused more on quieting or losing the self.  A great example of the latter is Zen Buddhism where the goal is go to through every moment of life, no matter what we are doing “with full and complete attention and no self-commentary.”

Mark Leary, in his book The Curse of the Self, explores all the ways that our egos hold us back and limit us.  So religions have devised ways to control, overcome, and quiet the self.  Regarding mystics, he writes that they “aim to obtain direct knowledge or first-hand experience of reality without the use of thoughts or reasoning.”  And they do that by turning of self-reflection.  When they do, “they experience a world that is somewhat different from the one they experience in their ordinary state of consciousness.”

What do mystics report?  That they experience the universe as a unified whole.  Often they feel that they have merged with God.  Time becomes irrelevant, as if one has escaped from it.  They are usually flooded with positive emotions, reporting feeling peace, love, and joy. 

So, the pay off to these spiritual experiences, to these moments of awe is the loss of personal identity, the ego, the sense of self.  Mark Leary describes the “nonegoic person.”  Read excerpt from 196-7.

That sounds to me like the best description of the kind of spiritual growth and development we ought aspire to.  Leary is quick to admit that none of us, even the most spiritually mature, function at that level of well-being at all times in every moment.  But it remains the ideal, the inspiration, the goal of our spiritual lives.

This wonder of life, mystical awe, provides us insight on how to transcend our self, quiet our ego, and grow in spiritual and emotional maturity.  Most of us are unlikely to have a profound mystical vision like the prophet Isaiah, but we can cultivate the daily spiritual, religious, and emotional practices that open us to awe and help us to transcend the self.

And the easiest way to start is to pay attention.  Which is a point I’ve made every single Sunday.  Learning to live with more attention to ourselves and each other and the wonders of the world around us is maybe the easiest and most important spiritual practice we can engage in.  Cassidy Hall, in her new book Queering Contemplation writes that “Attention is the undistracted self, willing to truly look, deeply understand, and release attachment to moments before or after what is present.”

This week I can’t give you the assignment to go out and have a mystical vision. (But if you do, please tell me about it!)  But I can encourage you to pay attention, to cultivate you awareness.  And thereby to quiet the ego and begin to transcend the self.

Sacred Geometries

Proverbs 8:22-9:6

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

10 November 2024

In the mountains of southeastern Turkey lies the archaeological site Göbekli Tepe.  A Neolithic site around 11,000 years old and maybe the oldest example of monumental human architecture that’s been discovered.  UNESCO describes it as follows: “this property presents monumental round-oval and rectangular megalithic structures erected by hunter-gatherers . . . . These monuments were probably used in connection with rituals, most likely of a funerary nature.”

The first excavator of Göbekli Tepe, Klaus Schmidt, called it “the world’s first temple,” an idea later dismissed.  But it is still a site that stuns, to think of hunter-gathers, at the dawn of the age when human settlements began, were already erecting monumental structures that would persist for thousands of years. 

In her book, Reality is Broken, the video game designer and theorist Jane McGonigal describes Göbekli Tepe:

[which]  features an intricate series of passageways that would lead visitors through the dark to a cross-shaped inner sanctum, almost like a labyrinth.  This particular architecture seems designed intentionally to trigger interest and curiosity, alongside a kind of trembling wonder.  What would be around the next corner?  Where would the path take them?

            And McGonigal draws upon some research in Smithsonian Magazine that suggests that instead of complex, settled human societies giving birth to monumental architecture, that maybe it was the reverse that happened.  Humans first came together to build monumental architecture and the effort involved in doing that gave birth to settled, complex human societies.  McGonigal draws the conclusion that these works “actually inspired and enabled human society to become dramatically more cooperative, completely reinventing civilization as it once existed.”

            Whatever could have inspired neolithic hunter-gatherers to build monumental megalithic structures?  McGonigal believes it was the human need for awe, which she describes as “the single most overwhelming and gratifying positive emotion we can feel.”  We are drawn to awe because it makes us feel so good and also because it provides us a “potential source of meaning,” to be a part of something larger than ourselves, a collective human action.

            She writes that humans need and desire “epic environments” that she defines as “vast, interactive spaces that provoke feelings of curiosity and wonder.”  These epic environments then make space for epic projects, the massive, cooperative tasks of humanity that are carried out over the long-haul.  And these then become part of the epic stories that we tell to connect ourselves to something much bigger than ourselves.

            These ideas resonate with what Susan Sink writes about today’s scripture lesson, in which Wisdom builds herself a house.  Sink writes, “Wisdom is with us and beyond us, accessible to humans in the world around us but also greater than our minds can grasp.”  We build ourselves epic, awe-inspiring spaces to inspire us to wisdom, to become part of epic projects, that bring us adventure and meaning.

            The next wonder of life that psychologist Dacher Keltner discusses in his global study on awe is the awe we experience from visual design—designs in nature and of human creation in art, architecture, movies, and even video games. 

            He writes that “there is transcendent, even spiritual, feeling found in seeing the deep geometric structures of the world.”  Think of the fractal shapes of a nautilus shell or the complexities of a dandelion puff.  Have you ever found yourself staring at the intricate shape inside the bloom of a flower?

            Keltner opens his chapter on visual awe by describing the first time seeing that scene in Jurassic Park when the brontosaurus appears.  And then the shot pans out to the valley filled with dinosaurs.  Remember how thirty years ago we had never seen CGI like that before?  The awe was multi-layered, right?  Awe at the artistic and technical wonder that went into creating the film.  Plus the awe of being transported for the first time into what it might actually feel like to encounter such massive beasts.  A few years ago when I rewatched the film with Sebastian, I was amazed at how well that moment holds up over time.  It still brought me chills and goosebumps and absolute delight.

            Keltner draws upon the work of philosopher Iris Murdoch and proclaims that good art allows us to delight in what is excellent while also giving us “a new way of seeing the world.”  Such moments of visual awe allow us to transcend our selfishness and join “with others in an appreciation of what is meaningful and live-giving.”  He summarizes these ideas by declaring “In good art, there are so many opportunities to reach the highest part of the soul.”

            I hope you’ve been to the newly reopened Joslyn Museum.  If not, you really should.  The new building is a marvel of design and sacred geometries, while also allowing us to see the old building in fresh and new ways.  Much less the art, including so much new art, that graces the exhibition spaces.  I’ve been three times already, and there’s one particular room in the Schraeger collection that I find to be a meditative, spiritual space.  The walls covered in abstract paintings, mostly fields of color.  The response it elicits in me reminds me of visiting the Rothko Chapel in Houston.  Another place you should visit if you ever get the chance.

            According to the latest science of awe, viewing excellent and beautiful visual designs and art stimulates the dopamine network in the brain leading to greater wonder, increased creativity, more inspiration, improved problem-solving abilities, and “openness to others’ perspectives.”  As Keltner writes, “Art empowers our saintly tendencies.”

            While working on this sermon, I thought back to Holy Week 2019 when the cathedral of Notre Dame burned in that catastrophic fire, compelling a global grief.  At the time I talked about how the Gothic architecture pioneered in the cathedral and the art and music it inspired were ancestors of our own sanctuary and the music and art of our worship. 

            So many read deeper meanings into the destruction of the cathedral. 

            John Pavlovitz blogged, “Watching the flames swallowing up such a universally beloved testament to the staggering creativity that humanity is capable of, we recognize how tethered to each other we are, how fragile and fleeting everything here is—and how starved for beauty we all are these days.”

            Historian of religion Jean-François Colosimo described the scene as ‘images of the end of the world’ that communicated ‘the extreme fragility of our situation.’”

            The art critic Jonathan Jones wrote:

A cathedral can endure the loss of its stained glass and other fineries . . . .  It’s precisely this endurance that makes medieval architecture so special. Almost a thousand years after its original creation Notre Dame still speaks to us. Like cave paintings, it connects us with some primal aesthetic urge. Now our time faces a challenge. . . . If we can reawaken the creativity this building embodies it will be a great moment of artistic renewal . . .

            And it seems that that renewal is underway.  The Paris Olympics this summer gave us glimpses into the grand and glorious work that is being done.

            Another thing John Pavlovitz wrote at time was this: “We all belong to one another.  The more we remember that, the more beauty we will make together in this place.  And the world needs beauty now more than ever.”

            Wisdom reminds us that we are part of something far larger than ourselves.  Something bigger than the times in which we live.  An on-going human project that spans the aeons. 

            We are invited to be a part of that collective project.  Enjoying the awe and wonder and helping to create it and maintain it, for the good of all.  For the beauty we crave is the beauty that can touch our souls deeply, inspiring our imaginations, leading to transformation.

            Let me close, for the second time this autumn, with the invitation that Divine Wisdom offers to us:

Wisdom has built her house;
she has hewn her seven pillars.

She has slaughtered her animals,
she has mixed her wine,

she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls,
she calls from the highest places in the town . . .
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

For young people, particularly young LGBTQ+ people.

I know that the election results have left you confused, sad, afraid, heartbroken, and angry.  These are proper emotions for what has happened.  Now is a time for lament and grief.  And in this time of deep emotions, I offer these pastoral thoughts.

First, politics can and will be heartbreaking, more than once in your life.  Your side will lose vital elections.  Bills you work hard to pass, will fail, and vice versa.  Your hopes and dreams will only sometimes be realized.  And those times when you are triumphant will feel glorious.

So you must be sure that your sense of identity, meaning, and purpose are not primarily shaped by your politics.  Find those in something bigger and more lasting.  For example, people of faith let their religion and spirituality shape their identity, meaning, and purpose.  Other pursuits like art, culture, scientific exploration, and sports work for people too.  Be grounded, rooted, centered in something other than politics.

Find your community, your safe spaces.  Or even create them if you must.  Our LGBTQ+ community has always created our own spaces where we can be our authentic selves and find caring and supportive friends.  Clubs, organizations, social groups, sports leagues, churches, etc. all exist.  Find your place to belong.

And have your group of core friends, what we call our “family of choice,” to be your closest allies and support.

Second, I believe we may have failed you in not preparing you for the world as it actually is.  After the highs of the Obama years and winning the struggle for marriage equality, we did enter a new phase in which LGBTQ+ folks have been able to live more openly and freely with much broader mainstream acceptance. 

Maybe this election is a wake-up call that we have not come as far as we thought.  But, if so, we do have traditions, skills, creativity, and resources to draw upon.  We should remind ourselves that it was only 21 years ago that the Supreme Court said that laws banning gay sex were unconstitutional.  And not long before that majorities were still opposed to LGBTQ+ people.  Yet, even during the injustices of that time we could live rich, full, joyful lives.  In fact, doing so was part of our defiance and subversion, our challenge to the injustices.

We changed the world back then by living our lives and working to persuade people and institutions, to change their hearts and minds, to see us and eventually to welcome us.  Clearly this work continues.  And, yes, it involved emotional labor, and we wish we were past it, but it seems that we are not.

So, we must protect ourselves from those who would do us harm, while also finding ways to engage and try to educate and persuade folks from the majority of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump.  We cannot hold half our fellow citizens in contempt or fear if we are to be successful in the long-term work of securing our civil rights and the opportunities for us to flourish.

And in the midst of that on-going work, you’ll need to retreat and renew among like-minded folks where you belong.  So finding your community, your family of choice, your safe spaces and fun places, is vital.

Sometimes these losses feel more devastating than other times.  Sometimes after a loss, we need a break from politics and advocacy.  It’s okay to take breaks and take care of yourself.  Be sure you have good self-care practices.

And balance those with how to remain engaged in the work we have to do.  Find your avenues for being part of the educational, persuasive, and political work going forward, that fits your gifts, temperament, and passions.

Do be informed and keep aware.  Study up on what is happening and the most effective ways to respond.  There are lots of great resources on defending democracy and human rights and organizing ourselves for justice. 

My final pastoral word is do not let them take your joy.  As hard as it might be right now, as down as you might feel, a joyful queer person is an act of subversion and dissent and a witness for a better world.  This is one reason gay clubs were so important, and sometimes when the worst things happened, we went dancing.  To feel alive and sexy in our bodies and the sense of community with each other, and to let it all out.

In the next few years there will be moments that call for our outrage and despair, but we cannot live in those emotions every day.  Nor will we be successful if we respond to everything with our anger set to volume 10.  We must use discernment, both for our own health and well-being and for the success of our movement. 

So, find the things that you enjoy, that give you joy, that express your joy, that are fun.  Things to do alone and with friends.  The other day I was cooking breakfast and put on some of my favorite music (just so happened to be the very lesbian Indigo Girls) and grooved and danced while I was cooking.

These are acts of defiance.  Our opponents do not get to ruin our lives, they do not get to dominate our emotions, we will not grant them that power.

Let’s be there for each other and keep each other safe.  Our community has done this before, and we can do it again.  And I believe right and truth, good and beauty and love are on our side.  These are the greatest things.

My Inward Journey: A Story of Spiritual Transformation by Sheila Mee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A brave memoir of spiritual transformation. Mee not only deconstructs her fundamentalist faith but reconstructs a whole and healthy wisdom spirituality. Her journey includes honest, open, and raw discussions of marital conflict, childhood abuse, and toxic families. Plus, because of the decades she spent as a missionary in Latin America, her personal story often plays out during major geo-political events like the 1980's civil war in El Salvador. This is a rich, compelling exploration of healing, wholeness, and faith.

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Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World by Alvin W. Graylin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Picked this book up at our denomination's statewide meeting, being sold by one of our seminary's booksellers. Felt like I needed to better understand what might be coming in the next few years.

Surely, I pondered, they must be overstating the case and being overly optimistic. But still good to be informed on what the techies are imagining and planning for and how that will impact the rest of us.

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Adam Gopnik's book on liberalism, A Thousand Small Sanities, was one of the better political reads of the last decade.  I encourage you to read it if you haven't.  This spring he wrote an essay for the New Yorker (I'm often months behind in reading my New Yorkers, plus they end up in various spots around the house to be picked up again long after they were set down) that defends liberalism from some of the recent projections of its doom.  This essay is also a worthy read.  A good paragraph:

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

Welcome this afternoon to First Central Congregational Church.  I am the Rev. Dr. Scott Jones, Senior Minister of this congregation.  We are one of the oldest Protestant congregations in this city, and have resided in this spot in the Blackstone neighborhood for 101 years. 

Today we religious and faith leaders are here to support ballot measure 439 and oppose ballot measure 434.  We do so as people of faith, because we are people of faith.

My own tradition, the United Church of Christ, is descended from the Pilgrims and the Puritans who came to this continent seeking freedom and autonomy, and our denomination has long supported reproductive justice and the freedom of people to choose their own health care,
including the right to an abortion.  In 1971 we called for all legal prohibitions to end, and for abortion to be removed from the category of penal law.  We declared that “voluntary and medically safe abortions [should be] legally available to all women.”

And so, as a Christian and as a pastor, I oppose ballot measure 434, which would give politicians control over personal medical decisions and force women to carry pregnancies against their will.  This ballot measure disrespects the fundamental freedoms we are entitled to as children of God--the very liberties that my religious ancestors fought and died for.

And, as a Christian and a pastor, I support ballot measure 439 which will end the current abortion ban and align with the doctrinal teachings of my Christian faith.  We should respect women and doctors, giving women control of their own medical decisions and letting physicians fulfill their vocation to care for the health and well-being of their patients.

In the United Church of Christ we proclaim that all Christians should “work toward a society where a full range of reproductive options are available to all women regardless of economic circumstances.”

So as a Christian and a pastor, I encourage you to oppose ballot measure 434 and support ballot measure 439.

Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology by Jürgen Moltmann
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I've read a few Moltmann books and been deeply influenced by him, but I had never read this early, seminal text. And, despite some gems, it just didn't resonate with me as much as other works. I think many of the ideas he pioneered here he developed more fully and eloquently later.

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The Wonder of Communion

Proverbs 9:1-6

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

6 October 2024

            Often when I’ve been in a group of clergy persons who are relaxing and enjoying each other’s company, we’ll get to laughing about our experiences in church and sooner or later we’ll get around to the genre of the funny communion stories.  Because for every minister something funny has happened to them during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. 

            One of my staple stories in this genre comes from a youth Sunday in the first church I served.  Four middle schoolers were helping with communion, holding the elements.  Derek had one of the half loaves of bread.  In this congregation actual loaves were used and when people came forward they were to rip their own piece of bread off of the loaf and then dip it in the cup for intinction.

            Now, Derek was at that point in a middle school boy’s life where everything adult and serious was amusing.  But he was trying his best to do this job well.   Which is relevant to the story.

            That’s when one of our older gentlemen, Bill, came forward.  Now, Bill was a retired math teacher.  He was often very serious and very proper.  Which is also relevant to the story.

            Bill reached for the loaf of bread, and when he tried to tear a piece of the crust, he failed to do so, at which point he muttered, “Damn!”

            And that’s when I knew poor Derek was going to lose it.  He turned beet red as he exerted all his will power and focus to contain the giggle that was trying to burst forth from him.  To Derek’s credit, he held it in, never erupting in laughter.

            Another of my funny communion stories is from here, my very first Sunday.  I was standing here in the center aisle serving the bread to everyone as they came by.  And for many folks, it was the first time they’d met me.  Which was the case for John and Dorothy Hill.  Dorothy was a retired minister, using a walker to get around at that time.  And John, her husband, was and is a character (he’s our oldest living member). 

            Dorothy was hurrying down the aisle toward me as fast as a person in a walker can move, clearly excited to meet me, her face beaming with that broad and bright smile she had. 

            And, then, suddenly, John, who was behind her, started chanting.  You know how someone who is losing their hearing often speaks far louder than they realize they are?  That seemed to be what was happening in the moment.

            And what John was chanting was “Boomer Sooner,” the University of Oklahoma fight song.  Loud enough for pretty much everyone to hear.  And then, when he got even closer, he kinda hollered, “We are Sooners too!”

            There’s another genre of communion story besides the funny one.  There’s the profound and moving kind.

            One time, while pastoring my church in Oklahoma City, I received an email from someone who had visited the church the day before.  With overwhelming gratitude they expressed their thanks to me that their daughter had been able to receive communion at our church the day before.

            Of course she had.  We were a UCC church and practiced an inclusive and open communion.  For our part, such a thing seemed routine and normal.

            But not for that family.  Their daughter had a severe disability and was unable to speak.  This parent explained to me how in their previous church the pastor had forbidden the daughter from taking communion because she was incapable of professing Jesus as her Lord and Savior.  Because she couldn’t actually say those words out loud for another person to hear, she wasn’t welcome in the full communion of the Christian church according to that pastor.

            After my candidating weekend here at First Central in May of 2010, my weekly clergy group back in Oklahoma City asked me about this congregation.  I said, “Let me tell you this one thing, and it will reveal all you need to know.” 

            And I told them about how Grant Switzer, who was then just a kid, not even quite in the youth group yet, brought forward a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to place on the communion table as an expression of this congregation’s food pantry and ministries to feed the hungry in the wider community.  And that was (and still is) Grant’s role every month.

            My colleagues all agreed that that alone revealed this place to be a real good church.

            “Communion is concerned with the ethics of our shared life and always has been,” wrote the longtime UCC pastor and educator Mary Luti.  The celebration of the Lord’s Supper is “a practice that produces just and courageous lives.”  She continues, “By the power of the Spirit, participation in the sacrament is meant to shape us collectively into a body that behaves in a distinctive way in the world: a body that looks, sounds, thinks, speaks, and acts like Communion, doing in the world what we do at our tables whenever we ‘do this.’”

            Mary Luti currently seems to be on a quest to get us in the UCC to think more deeply about how and why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  She has a new book published by our denomination’s press entitled Do This: Communion for Just and Courageous Living, and she’s speaking about the topic.  I got to hear her in January when she was the keynote speaker for the UCC Senior Minister’s annual gathering.  And her topic was the ethical imperatives embedded in the sacraments of baptism and communion. 

            She began her talk on communion exploring what has recently become dogma within the progressive wing of the American church—an open communion at which everyone is welcome.

            She said, our “invitations to communion . . . make it emphatically clear that everyone is

welcome, and no one will be turned away. As you know, these welcomes are not warm fuzzies,

but acts of justice, extended takedowns of every possible barrier that sin and shame construct:

Come if you’re this; come even if you’re that. Jesus welcomed everyone to his table; even

deniers, betrayers, and abandoners. You come, too.”

            She explains why we have done this: “the unfencing of the table stems from our current intuition about the profound difference it makes to human wholeness to have a seat there. We’ve reached a consensus that communion is the sacrament of inclusion. Christ’s love is a great feast, abundant, unconditional, and for all.”

            But then Mary Luti pointed out that this is a recent development and wildly at odds with the longstanding practice of Christianity.  She said,

It wasn’t long ago that every church fenced the table—you had to belong to this denomination, or this congregation, or at least be baptized. You couldn’t be a notorious sinner or hold incorrect theological beliefs. You had to be old enough to understand what it’s all about. To extend a fully un-boundaried welcome is a complete break with past ecclesial norms. The universal church has never witnessed, much less countenanced, the kind of openness that is now characteristic of many progressive Protestant churches in the West.

            She doesn’t point this out in order to judge our current practice.  In fact, she’s quite clear that our current practice is working, that we’ve hit upon something vitally important  She said, “Unfencing the table is in part a response to the weaponizing of past sacramental practice, perceived to separate, subordinate, punish, correct, and demean. And it’s proving itself by its fruits: we all know someone who’s been healed by graceful and emphatic invitations from the table.”

            Yes, like the family with the young disabled woman I told you about.  Or Judy, who was one of my church members in Oklahoma City.  A lesbian who had long felt ostracized by Christianity before finding Cathedral of Hope.  Judy, despite having been in that church for years by the time I pastored there, still cried every Sunday during communion.  They were tears of joy that she had found a place where she was welcomed and accepted just as she was.

            What Mary Luti wants us to remember and to think deeply about is how new and radical our open and inclusive communion is.  She also warns us not to get consumed with righteous indignation and moral self-satisfaction about it.  Not to become the mirror image of what we are reacting to.

            She also had a few points of critique of much current practice, and she used those to illuminate further some of the ethical implications of communion.

            For example, so often in our liturgies we talk about Jesus welcoming everyone to the table and so we do too.  I’ve used language like that.  Probably most UCC pastors have.  But here’s something Mary Luti points out:

I find only three instances in scripture when Jesus could be said to host a meal—the improvised feeding of the multitudes; the for-members only Last Supper at a borrowed table; and the post-resurrection breakfast on the beach for a handful of his dearest disciples.  Other than those instances, Jesus doesn’t host, and he never does so at his own table. He doesn’t have a table. He’s always at someone else’s. Pharisees and tax collectors throw dinners for him. Peter’s mother feeds him. And Martha in Bethany. Jesus doesn’t invite: he gets invited.

            What might it mean if we remind ourselves that Jesus isn’t a host, but a guest?

            Mary Luti thinks it will remind us of the same.  We aren’t the hosts of this meal, this table.  We are also all guests.

            These are her words:

So when we say we welcome everyone to our table because Jesus welcomed everyone to his, we’re on shaky evidentiary ground. Which isn’t meant to be clever, pedantic, or picky; much less is it to argue for exclusion or undercut the practice of radical welcome. But it does suggest that the ethical challenge communion poses may not lie so much in Jesus having been such an all-inclusive host, but in his having been such a willing, modest guest.

If our churches are not yet as inclusive as we hope, it’s not for lack of inviting. But it might be, at least in part, because we’ve mistaken ourselves for the Giver of the Feast. We’ve embraced the host’s role. But we’re not hosts. We’re guests among guests. We may have arrived earlier than the others, but that doesn’t give us proprietary rights over the hall. And if we think or act as if it does, we haven’t yet pondered deeply enough the Mercy by which we all got in here in the first place.

            So, if we aren’t the hosts at the communion table, but only the guests who arrived before others have, then how does that realization shape us differently? 

            She answers, “One of the ethical imperatives embedded in the act of eucharistic welcome is to relinquish any sense of entitlement we might have to be welcomers; to cease welcoming others as if there’s such a thing as ‘others;’ and to learn to be good guests, amazed as good guests always are at how generous and good the Giver of the Feast is to us, and to all.”

            She continues, “If we take seriously Communion’s ethics of guesthood, it could shape not only what we do in the church, but also our posture in the world. A communionized Body would gratefully accept the invitation of others, find comfort and strength at other people’s tables, respect their manners, sample their food, nourish itself with their fellowship, and cherish their gifts and graces. And when such a communionized Body does welcome the world to its own table, it would do so in amazement, in thanksgiving, on its knees.”

            One of my clergy friends, who was also at this same event where Mary Luti reminded us of the ethical imperatives of baptism, was traveling this last week from Chicago, where she had spent the weekend preaching and teaching at another friend’s church, to Cleveland for a meeting of the Stillspeaking Writer’s Group at the UCC national headquarters.  She realized that her drive would take her through Springfield, Ohio around lunchtime.  So, she made sure to go to a Haitian restaurant.  And in her broken French she ordered her lunch.   That’s an example of living out the ethical imperatives that we Christians learn at the communion table.

            Mary Luti taught us that the ethical imperatives of the Eucharist are many.  She only covered a few and I’ve got even less time today than she did at our conference.  So I’ve only highlighted a couple.  We could talk also of the truth-telling we learn from this ritual, what it teaches us about remembering, the hope and perseverance that sustain us in this meal, how we learn to share and to feed others, and what resilience and joy we draw from it (some of which was captured in today’s contemporary reading).

            Communion should evoke our wonder and inspire our imaginations to think and feel more deeply about what God is doing in this moment.  What God is showing us.  What we are to learn and how we are to be shaped so that we might more fully live God’s goodness in the world.

            As Holy Wisdom declares in today’s scripture lesson:

Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.  Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”

Wild Awe

Psalm 104

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

29 September 2024

            Once again, I asked on Facebook about where and when you have experienced awe in nature, and the list included hiking in the mountains, Niagara Falls, Denali, the Grand Canyon, the turquoise blue of the Aegean Sea, or closer to home like the Nebraska Sandhills or the Ponca Hills north of Omaha.

            Rick Brenneman, still a church member, though he lives in Texas, wrote about two trips to Africa as a zoologist:

I think my moments of greatest awe were on my first two trips to Africa. Early on my first trip we drove through the entrance to Hells Gate National Park and looked down into the valley at many clusters of various species all calmly coexisting. The second was when we first arrived at the Namib Desert, driving to the top of one of the magnificent dunes and seeing miles of dunes before the Skeleton Coast.

            Those sights sound sublime.  But we don’t have to travel around the world, we can find natural awe in our everyday environment, as Jim Harmon reminded us when he wrote about his daily hikes through the Loess Hills where he lives.  He wrote, “I have awe overload from nature.”  If you like to hike, you should definitely arrange to go on one of those walks with Jim. 

            I turned this week to a few writers and their descriptions of wild awe.  For example, the opening lines to William Wordsworth’s The Prelude:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

To none more grateful than to me; escaped

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove

Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream

Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

            All it took was a gentle breeze in the countryside to evoke rapture in the poet.

            Closer to home, Nebraska’s own Loren Eiseley wrote beautifully about wild awe in so many of his essays.  Probably his most vivid description is about one time floating in the Platte River:

Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off.  The sky wheeled over me.  For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent.  It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward.  Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in the dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea.  I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion.

            Such wonder just from floating in a Nebraska river.

            As psychologist Dacher Keltner states in today’s contemporary reading, it’s difficult to imagine anything better you can do for your mind and body than to go outside and delight in nature’s beauty.  Such experiences can reduce inflammation, improve our immune responses, and help to address chronic diseases like depression, anxiety, heart disease, and autoimmune disorders.  It also helps with loneliness and despair.  He writes that awe is pretty much the antithesis to the stressors that affect us.  The stresses of daily life send chemicals through our bodies that lead to inflammation and distress, and moments of natural awe send the opposite chemicals, bringing us calm. 

The affect is so profound, he believes we have a biological need for wild awe.  We have been wired that way.  The clearest evidence is watching a toddler explore the world. 

Also our bodies respond to the signals nature is sending us.  Our vagus nerve activates at the sound of water.  The scents from some plants reduce our blood pressure.  So just being out in your garden can be a healing exercise.  Basil and rosemary, for instance, send signals to our frontal lobes, activating the region where emotions and ethics intersect.

Studies also show that wild awe helps in quieting the ego and promoting sound reasoning.  All around, then, there’s nothing you can so easily do to help heal your body and mind as spending time in nature, paying attention to the beauty around you.

Once again, we arrive at a reminder of the spiritual importance of paying attention. 

One of my favorite, recent nature books was The Forest Unseen  by David George Haskell.  He spent a year observing a one square meter space in the forest, and that resulted in a rich book, filled with details of the seasons and the vast amount of life that made a home in or passed through that small space.  The book is an excellent study in how we don’t need to go to the grand wild places like Yellowstone or the Alps, but how we can find beauty, awe, and wonder in the ordinary, if we only look.

At the close of the book, Gaskell writes, “We create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding ‘pristine’ places that will bring wonder to us.”  Even our urban and suburban backyards can provide us the healing beauty we require.

So, here’s an assignment for this week—every day spend some time outside.  You can just pick a spot in your yard, a comfy patio chair maybe, and for five or ten minutes just quietly absorb the sights, sounds, and smells all around you.  Feel the touch of the sunshine or crisp autumn air.  Magical, wonderful, healing, spiritual things can happen.

And we believe that all of this goodness is a result of God’s creative blessings.  God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has created us wired to connect with the world around us.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

The Psalmist begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.”  The great Walter Brueggemann writes that these words are a “summons to the self to turn fully to” God.  And the way we do that is by observing God’s glories and gifts in creation. 

Brueggemann goes on, “The psalmist is smitten with the beauty, awesomeness, generativity, and ordered coherence of creation as guaranteed by the creator.  Everything is in its place as part of a coherent, life-giving system.”

So we celebrate creation as the work of God’s hands while also meeting God in the wild.  Robert Alter, the great Hebrew scholar, calls this psalm an “ecstatic celebration” and emphasizes how the poem is a “whole chain of present participles.”  From this grammatical observation, Alter concludes, “The poet imagines the presence of divinity in the world as a dynamic series of actions.”  God is present in the world in dynamic, on-going ways.  The creation was not something done once and over but is God’s continuing action.  God’s continuing gifts and glory.

Yet, this weekend we have watched the horrible scenes from the southeast as Hurricane Helene has laid waste to towns, leaving a path of destruction and death over several states.  Our hearts go out to the suffering people who have lost so much.  And I’m sure in the days ahead, we will have opportunities to generously respond to help them recover.

We know that these storms are worsening and setting new records because of the changes wrought to our climate by human industrialization.  We now live in the era that calls for resilience as we face the consequences of our actions and those of previous generations. 

One of the new words to enter our vocabulary in recent years is solastalgia.  Which is defined as “the emotional distress that people experience when their environment changes.”  Particularly our home environments, those we’ve loved, those we’ve drawn sustenance, nurture, delight, and awe from.

The theologian Hannah Malcolm assembled a book to help the church in this new era.  Entitled Words for a Dying World it is filled with essays from Christians around the world helping us to come to terms with the loss and grief of environments we have loved.  According to Malcolm, we must take time to grieve these losses if we are going to be effective in taking the steps necessary to prevent even worse from happening in the future.

As she writes, “if grief is an expression of love, our grief takes on the shape of the places and creatures to whom we intimately belong.  We mourn the death of the world because it is where we come from.” 

Malcolm believes that “the tenderness of caring for the dying is not a despairing act but a courageous one.”  And so operating from that perspective empowers us, but in gentle, tender ways.  She writes, “Adopting an orientation of grief means choosing to invest in things that are small, that are temporary, and celebrating them in the broken, fragile beauty they bear in the eyes of God.  It is soft, cruciform foolishness.”

So, after watching the weekend’s news, we might not be able to sing today’s psalm with as much confidence as its writer—that everything is in order and all of creation is a blessing.  But, we also learn that even in our grief at the losses brought on by a changing climate, we can train our attention to perceive “the fragile beauty” that is God’s gift. 

God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has wired us to connect with the world around us in ways that are healing and transformative.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

Even as we grieve the losses of nature, we can pay attention to the glories and gifts of God still abundant in the world around us. (Even by spending just a few minutes in our own yards.)  God is calling us to work together to protect and restore the creation to the way God intended it.

Then let us join with the Psalmist and proclaim, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.  Praise the Lord!”

A Beautiful Life

Matthew 5:1-16

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 September 2024

            This week on Facebook I asked, “What is a movie or story that because of something good that happens makes you cry or get the chills?”  The answers were quite varied:

• Old Yeller, wrote Jim Harmon
• Jennifer Forbes-Baily offered The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Teague Stanley said A Man Called Otto
• Places in the Heart wrote Becky McNeil
• Krissy wrote of Homeward Bound “I cried as a child and I cried again as an adult showing the movie to Wyatt. They make it home safe and sound!”
• Charlene Wozny recommended A Stoning in Fulham County and Smoke Signals
• And Linda Gabriel wrote that The World’s Fastest Indian is a gem.
• Matt Gutschick added Cast Away and explained, “After all he’s been through. At that big open crossroads right at the end.”

            I feel like there are so many movies and stories where I cry every time because of something good.  What immediately jumped to mind were It’s a Wonderful Life and E. T. 

The story that really gets me every time though is Les Mis, usually listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway Musical.  And in more than one place—when the young students’ lives are sacrificed for freedom, when Valjean offers Javier mercy and Javier cannot take it, when Fantine dies thinking of Cossette, but the most impactful moment of all is when the Bishop defends Valjean and offers him forgiveness and new life after Valjean has stolen from him.  That act of Chrisitan charity has always felt so overwhelmingly good and so outside the norm of human behavior, that I’m overcome every, single, time.

            When the psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues did a big, global study of awe, they discovered that across cultures, the one thing that most inspires our awe isn’t nature, spirituality, or music—it is other people.  Particularly “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”  This result, as the most common experience of awe, surprised them.  So this is the first of eight wonders of life in Keltner’s taxonomy of awe, that we’ll be exploring the next two months.  He writes, “Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

            What a thrilling result!  And I love that phrase too, “moral beauty.”  It perfectly captures the experience he’s trying to describe.  When goodness is on display, when we actually see it, and we find it beautiful.

            That we find awe in one another is one of the reasons that Keltner believes we can find awe in our everyday experiences.  We don’t need to be able to afford travel to sublime locations or a visit the great art museums.  We can meet this “basic human need” everyday in our encounters with people.

            One of the ways other people inspire our awe isn’t about moral goodness but about rare talents.  We’ve just watched the summer Olympics and there we witnessed so many awe-inspiring moments like the new world record in the 100 meter dash or the incredible heights achieved in pole vaulting. 

            But far more common experiences of awe occur when we witness people being kind to others, when we see people overcoming obstacles in their own lives to live well, and, by far the most likely human action to inspire awe—courageous actions taken on behalf of other people.

            Think about some of the people whose moral beauty—through kindness, strength, sacrifice, or courage—inspires you.  Some of the names that come to mind immediately for me—Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, the passengers on board United Flight 93. 

            When we encounter moral beauty, Dacher Keltner writes, we can be taken aback.  Such moments “have the power of an epiphany,” a moment of illumination.  He writes, “The experience is imbued with a sense of light, clarity, truth, and the sharpened recognition of what really matters.”

            Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel every time I listen to the Bishop forgive Valjean.  An important lesson is being taught about grace.

            There’s even a physical explanation of what happens when we have these moments of awe.  Here’s Keltner’s description:

Witnessing others’ acts of courage, kindness, strength, and overcoming activates . . . [the] cortical regions where our emotions translate to ethical action.  These encounters lead to the release of oxytocin and activation of the vagus nerve.  We often sense tears and goose bumps, our body’s signals that we are part of a community appreciating what unites us.  When moved by the wonders of others, the soul in our bodies is awakened, and acts of reverence often quickly follow.

            So these moments of awe are felt deeply in our bodies, and they are likely to lead us into action.  We will be moved to reverence, gratitude, and appreciation.  Which can then prompt us into our own actions of kindness and courage. 

These very human moments of connection are what we consider sacred.  Over time we’ve turned acts of reverence and appreciation into our cultural and religious practices.  And those rituals can now themselves inspire our reverence and awe. 

Christian worship, for instance, is rooted in the experiences of awe that Jesus inspired in those who witnessed him.  Here, for example, is a description of the Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s Gospel reading is a part, by the German pastor Helmut Thielicke:

Then Jesus opened his mouth and something completely unexpected happened, something that drove these people to an astonishment bordering upon terror, something that held them spellbound long after he ceased speaking and would not let them rest.  Jesus said to the people gathered around him, people who were harried by suffering, misery, and guilt: “Blessed are you; blessed are you.”  The Sermon on the Mount closes with the remark that the crowds were astonished and frightened, even though it was a sermon on grace.  But this is what always happens when God unveils his great goodness.  It is so immense, so far beyond and contrary to all human dimensions and conceptions that at first one simply cannot understand it and we stand there in utter helpless bewilderment.

            Which is a pretty apt description of awe as a response to moral beauty.

            Today we aren’t exploring the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount or even going into all the rich details of the Beatitudes, but let me say a few things about what’s going on in this teaching of Jesus.

            The New Testament scholar Dale Allison writes about how this sermon is intended to inspire the moral imagination.  The beatitudes, he says, were originally intended to startle their audience because they were a reversal of ordinary values.  The folks normally on the bottom or the fringes of human society are identified as blessed and made happy by God. 

            Jesus’s teaching is a revelation of the very heart of God and a glimpse at what God intends for the human future.  This is what God’s kingdom is supposed to look like.  So, here we have an “exercise of the imagination” in what “human experience of the fullness of God’s presence” can be. 

            But we don’t have to wait for some expected fulfillment in the future—we can, and should, begin living this way now.  To live according to God’s dream for humanity will help to address the current human condition with all its griefs and pains.  So the beatitudes become imperatives of what a good and beautiful human life looks like.

            In the Middle Ages, Christian writers taught that the Beatitudes were “disciplines, cultivated habits of the heart” [David Lyle Jeffrey]. 

            So, if we are going to cultivate moral beauty in ourselves, as followers of Jesus, living as Jesus taught us here in the Sermon on the Mount, is the primary way to do that.

            Earlier we heard an excerpt of David Brooks’s book The Road to Character.  Brooks is critical of the narcissism he believes dominates our current culture.  Too often human achievement is now judged through professional success and competition, ambition, self-preservation, and cunning become the preeminent values.  He longs instead for the “aesthetically beautiful” persons of humble character who radiate joy. 

Such character, he writes, is built over time, beginning with an awareness of our own flaws and struggling against our own weaknesses.  We don’t build our character alone, but with the help and support of others in community.  We develop our self-respect through inner triumphs.  He writes, “It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation.”

The book is a rich exploration of various people who he believes exhibit this depths of character.  Like Frances Perkins, the New Deal Era Secretary of Labor or General George Marshall or Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham or Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. 

At the close of the book, he presents what he calls “The Humility Code,” which he describes as “a coherent image of what to live for and how to love.”  The first proposition of the code, which he says “defines the goal of life” is this:

We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness.  Day to day we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with moral imagination.  All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue. . . .  The best life is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the quiet sense of gratitude and tranquility that comes as a byproduct of successful moral struggle. . . . Life is essentially a moral drama . . . .

            And our Christian vision of that beautiful life was exhibited for us by Jesus of Nazareth and how he taught us to live.  In places like today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew.  And lives of such character and moral beauty inspire us with awe.

            Nothing inspires us more than beautiful people.  Not physically beautiful, but morally beautiful.  People of character who are kind, generous, gracious, and courageous, who overcome their struggles. 

            Let us not only admire such people, but aspire to be such people.  For that is the good life God dreams for you and all of God’s children.