Sunday, May 12th, 2024

Title: The Good Life
Service Leader: Rev. Eric Banner
Worship Associate: Joan Wise-Skutt
Music Team: Tom Dudzinski, Christine Maxmeister, Loretta
Notareschi, Jordan Trimarchi, David VanCeylon
Beloved Community Offering

NOTE: This text is pulled directly from our Senior Minister’s sermon notes and may differ slightly from the message delivered on Sunday. Watch the recording of this service on Vimeo.

Reading: Upstream: Selected Essays (Mary Oliver) – Joan Wise-Skutt

“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Sermon: The Good Life – Rev. Eric Banner

“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do,” said Mary Oliver some years ago. It seemed like a fitting place to start off a Mother’s Day message in a church like ours, but also to set forth on a topic that’s been on my mind for a long time, the question of how we might put our lives, and our resources, to work in the world. I’ve had this conversation many times over the years, in my extended family, at other churches I’ve served, and here, at First Universalist. It can be a tricky conversation, because in a church like ours we know that there are people living on almost nothing, living paycheck to paycheck, or even literally living in their cars in our parking lot. And there are people who set out to do good in the world, and in the course of their living, they also did well.

All of which makes the questions of how we might put the products of our lives to work in the world a question that has no easy answers. But I learned long ago that most people who come to a Unitarian Universalist congregation didn’t come expecting easy answers, even if they came hoping that there was a place big enough for their questions.

So this morning, as we wind down our pledge campaign, and prepare to vote next week on a budget for this church, I was pleased to have a chance, thanks to the auction last fall, to address a question that so often feels like it’s just too fraught to talk about in mixed company, but that we are all asking much of the time, even if we fear to say it out loud.

One of the great challenges of a liberal faith is the awareness of the brokenness in the world. The way that everything is connected, and everything has consequences. We are good hearted people, and we want to do good in the world, not just for ourselves, but for the whole world. We’ve seen it these last few weeks as you have brought in an overflowing abundance for our All Church Project, giving of your time, your money, to help us help welcome in the newcomers in our community, and make sure they have what they need to settle in and raise their families so far from the places they have come from.

But we also know that it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling like everything is connected to injustice. Conflict diamonds. Strawberries raised in fields tended by migrant workers. The carbon footprint of the furnace that keeps us warm on winter nights. Clothing made in faraway lands by people who are paid but a pittance. It can feel like the folly of a conscientious life is paid in the price of joy always muted and with a kind of shortcoming that reminds us that we are not, and never will be somehow good enough, worthy enough, of a world that demands more than we can give.

It is easy to see why people throw up their hands, put on their blinders, and learn to say “Well, it’s not my problem.” Being perfect is a heavy weight to bear. It doesn’t take much to see how one can end up bitter, disillusioned, helpless, even, in the face of problems so big we know that we alone will never solve them.

One of the ways we talk about it, is we talk about money. There was a lot of talk just a few years ago about a movement called effective altruism. If you missed it, it was a modern day update of the Andrew Carnegie dictum that you should spend the first third of your life learning all you can, the second third earning all you can, and the final third giving away all you can. The hype around it has died down considerably since the leading proponent of it, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing eight billion dollars from the customers of his crypto exchange, and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The idea behind effective altruism is an idea that has some measure of appeal to the good hearted. You take the money you make, and then you put it to work in the world to address the hurt places in the most effective, and efficient, manner possible. You lay out the data, the harms, the costs, the resources, and then you invest in solving the world’s problems from the cheapest to the costliest.

It’s a philosophy that stands in contrast to the idea that if we have plenty and then some, that we should invest it in getting more for ourselves, or the ever-present temptation to take our excess and put it into things for ourselves or the people most like us. I never quite understood the foundation of the Protestant Reformation in Europe until I saw St. Peter’s Basilica, funded by the church collections Martin Luther was objecting to. Gorgeous. Amazing. Beautiful. Gigantic. And undoubtedly more expensive to build than I could ever imagine.

Effective altruism, at least on its surface, feels like it addresses the sentiment attributed to Unitarian writer and one time minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “We are not born free; we are born with a mortgage. That mortgage is a debt – a debt that we owe to the past and to the future. While we live, we pay interest and then pass it on to the next generation. That’s how churches, communities, and nations survive; by accepting what has been bequeathed and passing it on to those that come after them. This ritual of receiving and giving is an act of Thanksgiving.”

But even still, the problem remains. How do we decide how to give of our lives? Should we donate to the symphony, or to Save the Children? Is it better to buy shoes from Toms, so that poor children can get their own pair, or is it better to support micro-lending banks that make capital available to emerging businesses in underbanked places around the world? And what if that very action somehow triggers the expansion of investor, colonial capitalism that destroys … I could go on. I won’t.

I’ll simply note that the problem with this way of thinking, of always trying to predict the outcome, and to optimize the action, has been a source of trouble to our people for a long time. The UU theologian Sharon Welch wrote a whole book years ago about the importance of taking on the risk of not knowing, instead of falling prey to what she termed the ideology of cultured despair. “The search for guarantees,” she said, “and for single, comprehensive solutions is often paralyzing.” I think we know of what she speaks. “We are well aware of the costs of systems of injustice,” she continued, “but find it impossible to act against them, because no definitive solutions are in sight.”

And, I would suggest, that it makes of us one of two kind of people, neither of whom the rest of us really want to be around. The first is the person who is so bereft by the state of the world that they are the Eyeore of our days, their glass always mostly empty, never even half full. The other is the moral saint whose life seems to be so focused on saving the world, and optimizing the way that they do it, that you wonder if they have any joy left in their own days.

Back in the early 80s the philosopher Susan Wolf opened an essay criticizing both the followers of Immanuel Kant and the Utilitarian school of thought as out of touch with the real lives most of us live. “I don’t know whether there are any moral saints,” she opened the essay, before cutting right to the chase, “But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them.”

Speaking of people whose every action is as morally good as possible, in just the first paragraph, she wrote “it seems to me that none of these types serve as unequivocally compelling personal ideals. In other words, I believe that moral perfection, in the sene of moral saintliness, does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive.”

Her point, and ours, is just that trying to be perfect all the time is a recipe for failure, or bitterness. It is to ask of the world that there be a single answer that is right for all people and all time, and that each and every one of us is to give up the joys of our days that someone, somewhere, might be better off, and the joyousness of life in general be maximized by the diminution of the joy of everyone in particular. The flaw seems obvious, when you put it that way.

And yet, within these walls, and among those of you joining us online, we know that there remains this key question – how do we decide how we might make the choices about what we will do with the bounty of our days to repay the mortgage Emerson spoke of?

On this Mother’s Day I want to suggest that there are many ways to build the world we dream about. For some, it is the always inefficient, often overwhelming, work of parenting. I don’t know what the cost to raise a child to 18 is these days, and given how deep in the work our family is, I’m not sure I want to know. But in a world that often equates capital to value, it is easy to forget that bringing into the world and bringing up in the world a few more good people, children that learn about love, and care, and looking out for one another, and fun, and joy, and beauty, is a gift that keeps on giving, long after we are gone. Too many treat child rearing as though it is a selfish act, but done right, it offers to the world not more money, but more humanity, in a time when our shared humanity seems somehow always at risk. This is what Mary Oliver was speaking about in our reading. “Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Not everyone is called to be a parent, and I confess that there are days I wonder how many years of it I signed up for. But some of us are called to serve the cause of love made manifest in the work that we do. To teach, or be a social worker, or a civil servant that helps us all breathe air cleaner than the day before, or make sure that job sites are safer than they once were. Or a hundred other things.

And then there is the third option, the one that many in this space have come to. Having given to your children, having worked the allotted days of your lives, you’ve found yourself with plenty, and then some, and wonder how you might put it to work in a world that has needs always emerging. Do you give it to the church? To the library? To the Red Cross?

I can’t tell you what the answers are, but I can tell you a story. It’s a story of a man named Henry Rowan who looked around and asked himself what he could do with the immense wealthy his life and work had given to him. It was the early 90s and his alma mater, MIT, was in the midst of a 750 million dollar giving campaign, and he could have easily made a donation to that effort. But he looked around his part of New Jersey, and he thought about the kids who would never make it to MIT, but might yet make a difference in the world, and he did something that has changed the lives of tens of thousands of students in the decades since.

He pondered what it would mean to give a gift to MIT, and in words that I am sure will never come out of my mouth, he said to himself “And my little hundred million wouldn’t have made hardly any difference at all.” So, he went to a little state college, Glassboro State, with their endowment of less than a million dollars, and he said “What would you do if I gave you ten million dollars a year, every year for the next decade?”

What he did was help found an engineering school that continues to turn out students who change the world. Just a few weeks ago Ruth Gottesman, a former professor, and the widow of a Wall Street investor donated a billion dollars, billion with a B, to the medical school where she taught for many years to make sure that every student graduates from there debt free. A few months before that the largest ever gift, a hundred million dollars, ever given to a Historically Black College or University was given to Spellman.

What each of those gifts had in common, in addition to their enormous size, was they went to institutions and places that the donors had relationships with. The lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson has been known to say that if you want to change the world you first have to get proximate to the problem.

We won’t save the world by spending all our time trying to rank all the causes and find the one perfect one that will fix everything. The world is too big and complex for all of that. But what we can do is listen to the callings of our hearts. We can hear the heartbreak, and we can get closer and we can learn more and maybe we’ll find that isn’t the right cause for us, but at least we’ll know. We can build all the spreadsheets, and we can project all the ROI, and in the end we are still left to live in a world in which we will never know everything, or anywhere close to it.

And we must be content with that truth. That we not fall into the trap of the ideology of cultured despair, but instead that we start somewhere, and then we grow our way into possibilities as yet unknown to us. For some it’s systemic change, or helping elect the people who will change the laws, for others its tutoring and volunteering, for others it’s raising good human beings, and for all of us, it will change in the course of our days.

But friends, as the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale once said, “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

And if we each do what we can, then a whole wide world of possibility opens before us.

If only we will make it so,

Amen.