Message: Ten Commitments and ‘How Can I Help?
hello i'm the reverend david breden yes i'm the senior minister first unitarian society of minneapolis last week j exodus hooper joined us he's our affiliated humanist clergy and we were considering how we can put the human into humanism and take out the ism here's the situation kind of the pandemic has accelerated the already disastrous collapse of traditional liberal religious communities in american society conservative religions are beginning to see declining numbers as well and people are voting with their feet and they're calling it a bunch of different things but um spiritual but not religious sbnr is the the new terminology on that one ineo nessie nuns nothing in particular a lot of people put on surveys these days secular of course the religion of no religion is catching on as a catchphrase a lot of people are converting to religions that are outside the traditional western monotheism such as buddhism and taoism and of course then there's the whole idea that dogma is a thing from the 20th century that nowadays we live in a post-christian or post-religious world so there's all kinds of ways for that people are saying what they're saying but the point is that things are very declining very very quickly for most mainline protestant religions and the point that jay and i were trying to make last last week is that humanist communities can theft by dogmatic traditions for more and more people as these changes occur in american society if we can manage to put in the human and take out that ism because again we're kind of in a post-dogma kind of world so creeds dogmas rules and regulations are not exactly what people want to be hearing about these days we are however a quickly secularizing nation and that's i think where humanism can shine if again we can take that ism off of it if we can stop saying what we're not as i was mentioning last week i know that that's part of the human explaining because people haven't heard of humanism but again saying what we're not is really not what most people want to hear we need to remember that phrase i keep using humanism is about the world it's not about humanism and if we can begin to talk about what people hope to do in the world then i think we have a chance at helping people in this quickly fragmenting nation secularizing and fragmenting now one thing we mean is breaking down that barrier that's developed between theism and secularism um again maybe that's so 20th century and and uh i began more and more to see that as a kind of beside the point of what we're really talking about um einstein albert einstein put it uh his finger on i think a long time ago he didn't support traditional religions but he did believe in the religious impulse and so he diagnosed this feeling of separateness that he was seeing uh in the world of the 1940s and he said a kind of optical delusion of ness exists this delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us our task must be to free ourselves from this prison a an optical delusion of consciousness that separateness that tells us to follow our own desires instead of reaching out to others an example of all of this the evangelical lutheran church of america elca lutherans that we know very well here in minnesota it's the largest group of lutherans in the nation and they've been doing studies that indicate that by 2041 2041 their denomination will no longer be financially viable studies show sunday attendance in 2017 and the lcla lutheran congregations was eight hundred and ninety nine thousand that'll be down to sixteen thousand by twenty forty one is the prediction the total membership of the elca was 3.4 million in 2017. the forecast for 2041 is 66 500. that is a catastrophic collapse that will occur in the next two decades if elca lutherans don't figure something out now luther's seminary in saint paul is working on the problem they recently landed at 1.5 million will be used to explore ways the church leaders can reshape and deepen congregational life members connecting to a congregation and then to one another and then to the larger world and again as this nation fragments into smaller and smaller secular subgroups this connection i think becomes more and more urgent and i find it uh surprising and maybe even inspired that luther seminary is spending a million and a half bucks studying how to reconnect to this rapidly secularizing u.s population at the same time that most liberal christian congregations in response are reacting to these membership deficits by exploring how to be more theologically relevant and that's the big catchphrase for most denominations right now theologically relevant and my suspicion is that the lutherans have it right here the luther seminary studying is it's being headed up by professor andrew root who just completed a three-volume study of religion in a secular america in his work professor root specifically rejects the usual tact taken by denominations that goes for that relevance and he calls it a fool's game and i agree with them religious organizations struggling to be relevant have already lost you know i'm old enough to remember the days when typewriter companies were struggling to remain relevant as personal began to take over and the relevance that the typewriter companies built into their computers were actually word processing features which computers already did better than typewriters could it was a fool's game and typewriters had to lose that game because pcs were already setting the rules of the game and of course typewriters did lose the game now their antiques churches taking on the trappings of secular gathering gatherings are in the the exact same boat i would say secular institutions already do things like volleyball leagues and book groups and lectures better than churches can i think that root has put his finger on this vast contradiction that's going to get a lot of congregations into trouble consider the difference between something being relevant and something being resonant that's really what i want to focus on today the difference between relevant and resonant relevance is about the content i would argue resonance is about a reaction and experience and we can find the words of saint paul or the words of jesus relevant meaning that their words still have meaning to us today but again relevance is about content but for religious traditions as professor root clearly sees in his arguments there's a certain amount of begging and pleading going on please oh please see what we've been preaching for two thousand years as relevant well that's exactly what the typewriter companies were saying when pcs took over the desktop instead the luther seminary project is pursuing that idea of resonance and they're basing that idea and that work on the theories of a german sociologist hartmut rosa and now dr rosa rosa claims that we're experiencing what he terms a shrinking of the present he sees that as a worldwide phenomenon he was writing before the pandemic and it's only getting worse and what he sees as the accelerations are it's no surprise to us technological acceleration more and more technology social acceleration america and the world is changing more and more faster and faster and the acceleration in the rhythm of everyday life what rosa describes as this acceleration is that queasy feeling that a whole lot of us have been experiencing in recent years and especially it's become even more toxic during this year of pandemic life has accelerated to the point that it's often difficult to even grasp the fact that we're living in what's really an eternal present of possibility it often feels as if the only moments that we can grasp are the ones that are already behind us oh i get it now well it's too late the past as we all know can't be changed and so it becomes a very helpless feeling in this acceleration uh no i can't keep up with technology i can't keep up with what's happening in american society and i can't even keep up with my basic chores that need to be done every day the present just seems like it flows away like water in the face of this what congregations can offer says dr root and i agree is an experience of resonance resonance now the greeks way back distinguished between two sorts of time kronos with a c and kyros with a k kronos is chronological time that's where we get the word it's clock time and that's the thing that we feel is accelerating out of control now unlike kronos chromatic time kairos is a moment of decision it's that moment when you say this is what i'm going to do it's the critical opportune moment where action is possible and we make a decision and now from the very beginning christian congregations have been making that distinction between keiros and kairos it enters christian thinking all the way back saint paul was talking about it and it appears they were talking about it even before uh he started writing because there's some old hymns that exist even before the time of paul so this has been a very old con construction but the problem is that cairo can't be boring it can't be offensive and so how do we get at kairos that failure to create kairos i would say is the disease that is driving people out of congregations today you know i mean we have that that saying i resonate with that right i resonate with that it's it's a harmonic uh resonance of some sort and that word resonance does derive from latin it comes it's in latin it's the word for echo and an echo is something that you know you resonate back you have to wait a little bit right uh something happens the echo comes back a little bit later it's a duration of time you have to wait for that bounce to come back so resonance is a has a time duration quality to it now again resonance that feeling is not about content so much as it's about reaction emotion it's about how we experience something and there's no pleading going on no one pushes anyone to hear resonance you get it or you don't we can put it out there but you get it or you don't it happens or it doesn't happen all that a congregation can do is really make space in time for that resonance that kairos uh that moment out of time and that experience that resonance is about experiencing the now that buddhists talk so much about that's why people are becoming buddhist i think that realization that the now is where action is actually possible and we can get into it but it does take some focus and then we feel that resonance i suspect it's very important to people in the u.s today and i suspect that
people are going to look for it somewhere else besides congregations and that's where i think humanist groups can step in experiencing that moment in the now and that resonance now allison wyeth mentioned this morning the 10 commitments come from the american association uh you may have seen the poster online we have it up around the building but we haven't been in there for a year the poster contains a list of things that most humanists take seriously ten commitments uh yeah sort of like the ten commandments but not these include critical thinking ethical development peace and social justice service and participation empathy humility environmentalism global awareness responsibility and altruism yeah that's a lot of abstract words but actually this tin commit easy to read chart look it up online and it's the sort of thing that we humanists have not done well over time we haven't simplified our message very well and i think the ten commitments really do that pretty well because you can look at it you can see it it all fits together in a nice circle it makes our ideas simple and also accessible so our religious explorers program is beginning a curriculum today that looks at those commitments as alison mentioned as a way for our younger folks to look at humanism and try to grasp what it is we're talking about with this word but you know i have suspicion the best way to sum up humanism is just to say how can i help how can i help i think that's the center and it's what critical thinking and ethical development and peace and social justice service and participation empathy humility environmentalism global awareness responsibility and altruism that's all it boils down to i think how can i help how can i help the planet how can i help my fellow human beings and you know i suspect that everybody who's listening to me today resonates with those commitments you're already committed to most if not all of those i have a suspicion you already know that these commitments are central to living a life of meaning and purpose on the planet you don't need convincing that these moral commitments are relevant and that's the thing you don't need to know they're relevant because you already resonate with them that's the idea and we need to work i think more and more on this idea of getting that message boiled down into something a little bit simpler because i think a lot of people who are joining the numbers calling themselves secular in the united states today that's exactly what they're looking for now i'm sure you've heard that very common response when someone learns about humanism and you may have even said it yourself when you heard about it wow that's what i've always believed and i didn't know there was a name for it well there is a name for it uh and i wish it had a different name like a lot of people do but history has given us this one so here it is we we kind of have that now but much more than the name humanism is about moral commitments to how we act in the world thomas paine was good at phrasing things succinctly long time ago he said my religion is to do good that's a pretty simple phrase and it's one that you can latch on to thanks thomas paine my religion is to do good how can i help and that's about getting into the moment getting proximate looking around and acting responsibly it's about resonating with those things that are around us living as a human without the ism means asking and answering a simple but profound question how can i help american children are going hungry today how can i help racism and sexism permeate u.s government and society how can i help fix that the city that we live in here in minneapolis is split apart by racism and poverty how can i help fix that people who are different are denigrated and mistreated how can i help fix that how can i join with the traditionally marginalized and listen rather than pontificate and spout abstractions how can i help save the planet the living things and the people how can i live a life of meaning and purpose a life of wisdom and kindness how can i help sigmund freud called what we humans often do to each other to categorize each other the narcissism of small differences this the narcissism of small differences it's what we do often because we're looking for identity we say oh well i'm this and i'm not that and you're that and i'm i'm not that and you know that's the narcissism of small differences and really we need to work to make that go away and back to albert einstein again i think he put his finger on that issue and that quote i mentioned earlier that's the entirety of the religious project i think for any denomination any religion how can we get past the selfish delusions that society force voice upon us and get into that place of connection outside of ourselves where we can ask how can i help how can i have meaning and purpose in this world another american author george saunders phrases it this way and i love this that's the way he says it kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition george saunders is a novelist kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition and notice there that einstein and saunders are both using that word delusion we become humanists because we don't want to live in delusion we search for answers that are real actual true answers and i for one want to join j exodus hooper in what he calls the theology of realness that's how we get beyond that narcissism of small differences the theology of realness that's a realness in which mind heart and body all come together all the time we bring our whole selves into those conversations jay calls us to serve realness as he says it and to embrace unconditional diversity unconditional diversity and i think that pretty well sums up all 10 of those humanist commitments to that's why i work for a future on the other side of all of the isms that we live with in our in our split world and our fragmented nation on the other side of those isms there is something else out there if we are bold enough to embrace that the vision of the unitarian ministers who created congregational humanism was to create church homes for people who could not in good conscience have other church homes all the benefits of a congregation without that snake oil and that dogma they wanted resonance instead and though american society has changed a whole lot in that hundred plus years since first unitarian society people undertook the humanist experiment we are changing and adapting to meet the needs of a changing nation and a changing world the numbers don't lie more and more people agree with us but sadly most of them have never heard of us and that's what projects such as the ten commitments are designed to fix the members of first unitarian society and your ministers and the young leaders that we are nurturing today we are all dedicated to the common purpose of creating a home for those who cannot in good conscience find a resonant home elsewhere to create resonance in this mad and rushing acceleration of clock time that all of us are experiencing now i believe that is a needed and a noble task and further i believe that we are the people who can do that
2021-03-09 02:07
