THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation

"FETCH !"
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu,
March 3, 1996

Once upon a time a young man was flying an airplane out over the ocean. He noticed that the fuel gauge was dropping rapidly toward that little "E" on one side. He suddenly realized something must be wrong because that needle was dropping visibly. And then, BONK! on the little post next to the "E". The airplane started down. He had a parachute, so he bailed out. He pulled the ripcord and looked above him hoping the see the canopy open POP! Instead, he watched the canopy disappear.

"St. Francis save me!" he shouted.

A great hand came out of the clouds catching him by the collar. A great voice said, "St. Francis of Assisi, or St. Francis Xavier?"

"Uh, uh, uh, St. Francis of Assisi."

"Pity," said the voice and let go.

One month from today I'm going to be doing the invocation for the Legislature of the State of Hawaii. Set aside for the moment the appropriateness of public prayer, this ritual of the civic religion,in the first place. Understand that an invocation does not call God into presence, though that's what the word "invoke" means. Even conservative Christians understand that what is being invoked is our awareness of that presence. So I'm being asked to invoke in the awareness of the Legislators the presence of God. Now, if the gods are understood as competing truth claims, then all of the usual invocations invoke a spirit of discord, especially with the Hawaiian legislature, given the wonderful religious diversity of our islands. So what do I do? Do I use generic language? Pray to God in general but not in particular? I don't know about you but all of the generic religious language I've heard has the power to evoke, at best perhaps, a yawn.

Do I do the kind of prayer that begins with a prologue that says, "I will be leading this community of rich diversity in prayer. Follow along with me as I lead in prayer in my tradition; you follow along praying in your tradition." There is an appropriateness to this approach. For many of the traditions, involved authentic prayer is always particularistic prayer. You simply can't pray in general. Within the various traditions there are specified things that, in fact, mean you are praying and others mean you are doing something else.

But what about me? I have this rather difficult problem because, as far as I'm concerned, there is no "God" who "answers" " prayer", and therefore a great deal of poetic license is called for in a context where license is usually only understood as licentiousness. My personal prejudice is that no method of prayer, meditation or other spiritual discipline or religious belief, nomatter how much faith it is engaged in with, can alter the ontological structures of the universe or suspend the laws of nature.

Our pilot is going to fall.

Does prayer, meditation, contemplation, religious disciplines of that sort sometimes appear to work? Yes, they do. My suspicion is that is only because we do not, in fact, understand all of the structures of the universe and the laws of nature.

I remind you of Arthur C. Clark's now classic dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that prayer falls in that category.

I am also firmly convinced that what the human species has meant when we said "God" is, in fact, not something that humans can manipulate. From that earliest beginning of awe in the face of total dependency and chaos, as we were only beginning to learn how to take control in the smallest ways of the environments we lived in, to the most sophisticated theological concepts; what we point to is not the cosmic bellhop.

Imagine, if you will, the cascading chaos of consequences of even one suspension of natural law on your behalf. No, it is the awareness of the disciple that is modified by the spiritual discipline. The world does not change its focus when I put my glasses on. And yet, the relationship when I put my glasses on has changed dramatically. There are possibilities outthere and in here that were not available to me before.

Let me take a slight detour here. One of the things that bothers me about the culture's current fascination with spirituality is the implication that somehow there is something out there that you can get some of and add to your life. Spirituality is not something to add to your lives. There is no hole in the soul awaiting the insertion of the correctly shaped piece -- not even a Unitarian Universalist piece guaranteed one size fits all without modification. Indeed, the saints are those who, having added nothing, live as if they were complete. Their language, instead, is of having surrendered, of having emptied, of having let go -- the exact opposite of acquisition. It isn't about trying real hard or acquiring anything or controlling anything. It is about relaxing, about releasing, about getting out of the way. Not an addition but a different way of doing, a way of paying attention to, an attitude toward all of the various pieces of our lives.

This is part of what Buddhism means when it says, "Nirvana (badly translated into English as "heaven") is Samsara, the ordinary!" Heaven is ordinariness ? The notion of being ordinary, of being natural, of getting out of one's own way is sufficiently difficult for most of us. I recall in the early years of trying to learn aikido, repeatedly Sensei Kobayashi would say, "No, no, no. Not like that. Just reach up as if you were going to brush your hair. Be natural." Let me tell you, there is nothing more difficult than being natural on cue! I have a set of prahnayama plates. Prahnayama plates are quite fascinating. They are a pair of metal plates, about six inches square, with a wire and a metal handle attached to each. You lie down on the floor. You put one of the plates under your bottom and the other plate under your head. You hold the handle of the one under your head with your left hand and the handle of the one under your butt in your right hand. Then you feel the flow of energy from the plate to your bottom to your head to the plate to your left hand back through your body to your right hand and back through the wire to the plate under your bottom. Feel that flow of energy. It is claimed that you will find yourself calming, centering, focusing on those things that are important and of priority in your life. There are even healing claims made for the plates.


You want to know something interesting? They work !

If I could get you to lie down on the floor and put your mind in that "following the flow" place in your head, you could even do the miracles of the plates with no prahnayama plates.

Samurai swords are famous for being incredibly great swords. They are strong. When you whack that sword against something really, really hard, it does not break. They are sharp. When you whack the edge of that sword against anything, the blade slices incredibly efficiently right through. For years, warriors had difficulty with swords because if they made the metal strong enough not to break, you couldn't keep the thing sharp. If you made it hard enough so that it would hold a nice sharp edge, it was so brittle that when you whacked someone with it, the sword shattered in your hand. The ancient Japanese metallurgists found a way to make the edge of that sword brittle and sharp, and the body of the sword with a little more give to it, and therefore strong.

There was a very meticulous religious ritual for the making of a Samurai sword. If you followed the religious ritual in the process of making the sword, the sword would come out one of those incredibly fine instruments. If you didn't, the odds were good you'd get a bad sword.

Why the religious ritual? All kinds of speculations have been made that this has to do with the fact that the Samurai swords were a part of the religious discipline of the Samurai; it had something to do, perhaps, with Shintoism or Buddhism. Baloney! The detailed religious ritual had to do with the method of remembering the meticulous details of the steps of the creation of the sword in a culture that was non-literate. How many other pieces of ancient technology have we mistaken for religious ritual and dismissed them, or continue to do them without bothering to use any iron, or a forge, and wonder why all they turn out to be is mumbo-jumbo.

Prayer? Meditation? The spiritual disciplines that fall into that general category are devices for transforming our lives, devices for holding our lives up before us, of helping us to center ourselves amidst a world that is so constantly trying to knock us off balance, of focusing our attention on those things that are important, that are of priority in our lives, and letting us find the pieces that are chaff and letting go of them. There is even an appropriateness to the traditional pop-Christian petitionary prayer where you list off all the goodies you want God to give you. It can be a really valuable discipline. Sit down sometime and list off all the things you wish God would give you. Then start paring that list down to what's real.

Prayer, meditation, etc., is a place of practice, learning the state of consciousness that is appropriate to the whole continuing sweep of our lives, not something that is done twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes in the afternoon, or in a church or in front of an altar.

One of the loud electronic preachers happened to get caught in a flood down in the South, a couple of years ago. He was sitting on top of the church, water up to the tops of the windows, when a rowboat came by. The guy in the boat said, "Preacher, you want a ride?"

The preacher said, "No, I have prayed to God. I trust God. God will rescue me." A while later, a helicopter came by. The water was now up to the top of the roof and the preacher was perched on the peak of the roof. The helicopter pilot lowered a rope ladder and yelled down to him, "Mister, would you like a ride?"

The preacher yelled up to the helicopter, "No, I have prayed to God. I trust in God. God will rescue me."

Finally, the preacher had to climb up onto the cross on the top of the steeple. There he clung to the cross in a somewhat appropriate position when along came a Coast Guard cutter -- that's how bad the flood was. The Coast Guard pulls alongside, throws a rope over the side of the boat and says, "Would you like to be taken to safety?"

The preacher again says, "No, I trust in God. I have prayed to God. God will rescue me."

About twenty minutes later a slight break in the dike occurred making the water rise three more feet. The preacher, who didn't swim, was swept to his death and drowned. The next thing he knew he found himself standing before God Himself at the bar of Judgment. He whines, "God, I don't understand it. I believe. I prayed fervently, with faith, and you didn't rescue me."

God looked down at him and said, "What the hell did you want? I sent you three people. You turned them all away!" I still don't know what I'm going to say to the Legislature next month: a legislature that desperately needs to get itself centered, a legislature that needs to get focused on the people that public policy is supposed to serve, a legislature that desperately could use a little -- as my theological school systematic theology professor said it -- "standing naked in the presence of God." As a Unitarian Universalist I'm not real sure how you invoke in that body the awareness that, whether they like it or not, they in fact always stand naked in that presence.

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