Sermons

July 20, 2008
Eternal Life: The Wrong Question?

Eternal Life:
The Wrong Question?
A sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From the Bible, John 5:39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.

2. From Charlotte Perkins Gillman, The Forerunner, 1909
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

3. From Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story, Little, Brown and Company, New York NY, 2007
“I don’t want to live forever,” one of my seminary classmates proclaimed, “I’m sick of myself already.” I know just what she means. Spend forever with myself? I mean, really Look, I have my quirks. I have eccentricities. I’ve learned, over the years, to tolerate myself well enough, but eternity is a long time to spend with somebody who, for all her good qualities, talks a lot, is a compulsive knitter, and can’t keep track of her car keys...
Of course, maybe in heaven it will be given unto me to stop jabbering... Maybe in heaven I will be perfect and perfectly happy...
But if I’m perfect and perfectly happy, I won’t be me. And if I’m not me in heaven, not Kate Braestrup, the same Kate Braestrup presently writing these words, then Kate Braestrup will be dead.


THE SERMON
It is good to hear from an old friend, even if that friend is on the radio and you are in your car driving on Interstate 95. That’s what happened last week when I was on my way to Portsmouth, NH. I was listening to public radio, because it helps keep me alert. And on a nationally broadcast radio program (“Speaking of Faith”) was the Rev. Kate Braestrup.
Kate was a student of mine for a course in Unitarian Universalist History that I taught at Bangor Theological Seminary. I wish I could say, “I taught her everything she knows,” but of course that would not be true
Quite a few of you know Kate, because she has been a guest preacher here for time to time. We would like to bring her back here, but since the publication of her best-selling book, Here If You Need Me, she’s been in big demand, and her schedule has been full.
Google Here If You Need Me and you will find a glowing review from The Washington Post, which calls it “a superbly crafted memoir.” Bookselling This Week calls it “A moving memoir from Maine’s unlikeliest chaplain.” After noting that Kate is a chaplain for search-and-rescue missions for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the Christian Science Monitor says the book is “one search-and-rescue you won’t want to miss.” Our own Unitarian Universalist Association gave Kate the annual Melcher Book Award, and she has been profiled in our denominational magazine, the UUWorld. She was awarded Barnes & Noble’s 15th annual “Discover Great New Writers Award,” winning 1st place for non-fiction. Oprah Magazine has featured Kate’s book. And Time magazine picked her book as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2007.
Not surprisingly, Little, Brown & Co. has decided to give Kate and her book an extra year of publicity. So we understand why it is hard for us to get Kate to return to our pulpit. She might be just a little busy.

The unlikely chaplain:
Central to Here If You Need Me is the story of Kate’s husband, Drew, a Maine State Trooper – who was planning to become a Unitarian Universalist minister – and his sudden death in an accident when his squad car was hit by a truck. Her book, which can move you to tears in one paragraph and then make you laugh out loud in the next, recounts how Kate moved from grief to faith to happiness. It also tells of her own journey to seminary and becoming a chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, involved in search-and-rescue and body recovery operations when people are lost or accidents or homicides occur in the Maine woods.
Kate is the chaplain. Yes, she is a Unitarian Universalist, but her job is to be a chaplain to anyone who needs a chaplain. No, she doesn’t look like a typical UU minister – she wears a Game Warden’s uniform and a clerical collar. The collar can be off-putting to UUs and to religious liberals and skeptics, but it has the advantage of immediately identifying her as the chaplain. People sometimes say to her, “I’m not a church-goer,” and she replies, “That’s okay, I’m not a church minister.”
A child is lost in the woods. A grandmother, suffering from dementia, has wandered away. A snowmobile and driver have disappeared through the ice. A search-and -rescue operation is begun by the Wardens, and the chaplain is called in to comfort the family. The world she inhabits and writes about is a world where bad things sometimes happen, but it is also inhabited by beauty and decency. This is where the rubber hits the road theologically, and Kate’s sense of life, death and God is formed by what happens between and among people.
“If nothing else, and that’s a big if,” Kate says, “God is that force which drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other. And for me that is actually enough.”
Kate and her husband Drew found Unitarian Universalism after they moved to the Maine coast and began to attend the First Universalist Church of Rockland. Harold Babcock, who grew up in this church, was the minister in Rockland at the time.
Speaking of Drew’s sudden death she says, “I was confronted with an unbearable loss, and at the same time by the realization that there were people and a community that were there to help me bear it. In fact, the morning that he died I was getting ready to leave with the kids, and I looked out through the back window ‘cause I heard a siren and I saw an ambulance go by, and I remember actually thinking ‘Oh, I wonder who that’s for,’ and then realizing at the same time – I’ve been living in this community long enough – so that I probably do know who
it’s for. And I was saying this sort of prayer and, you know I hope they’re all right, and that I’d be thinking about it through the day. And as I was putting my shoes on I was thinking about how much I loved Drew and how nice it was to still be in love with him after eleven years of marriage – and that was actually when he died. The ambulance was for him. So that was a very profound moment. I mean it was a terrible moment, that whole day, the day of losing him, but it was a very revelatory day as well. Revelatory of things it will continue to take me years to unpack, but as a kind of religious experience – that day really was one.”
Within a year Kate had decided to fulfill Drew’s dream, and she had enrolled in seminary – that’s where I met her when I was teaching a class for UU students. Kate had put together a “field experience,” an independent study in which she rode up and down the east coast with police officers in patrol cars. She told me, “I had an automatic in with the police, as the widow of a state trooper who was killed while on duty.” After graduation, she was ordained by the First Universalist Church of Rockland.

A ministry of presence:
Even more than the pastor or priest who serves a congregation, Kate Braestrup’s ministry is “a ministry of presence” to the wounded, to the game wardens who must respond, and to family and friends in the agony of waiting or grief.
How is Unitarian Universalism suited to the “ministry of presence” that Kate talks about? On “Speaking of Faith,” Kate told host Krista Tippett, “Unitarian Universalism at its best is a way of looking at religious questions without requiring that the answer be found for everybody – without requiring that your answer be imposed on everybody else. There’s a humble acceptance that I am not God. I am not the arbiter of these things. The best I can be is a window through which the person that I am with can get a glimpse of something. And I can only do that by being as completely loving as I can be. The place where it is most directly useful,” she says, “is where I am dealing with people who aren’t religious at all. UUs are very comfortable with people who aren’t religious at all. It really is trickier with people who are very strongly Christian, for example, because many of their prayers and many of their claims are exclusive.”
Kate’s book – which is a personal memoir, not a theological treatise – raises questions about life, death, and our place in the world. The Rev. Forrest Church of All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City, says that religion is our human response to the reality of being alive and having, some day, to die. Buddhism says that we prepare, all our lives, for our death. Kate says that all our lives we are in training for one big test – how we will face our own death and/or the loss of those we love – and we don’t really know just what that test will be.

Change is the only constant:
Wayne Dyer in his book on Daoism (Taoism), Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life, says, “When you see change as the only constant there really is, you start to recognize it as an expression of ongoing life that’s a welcome clue to your own purpose and meaning. In this way you’re returned to the experience of your Source and the peace of an impartial perspective...
“There’s an immutable cycle of ‘no life, life, no life’ that we’re part of. All things come, and then they go. Life materializes in a variety of forms – it’s here, and then at some point it ends in what we call death. This coming and going might seem to be a temporary condition, but it’s actually the ultimate constant because it never ceases. Embrace this nature of cyclical change and you’ll thrive...
“An ending may feel like a reason to mourn... But Lao-tzu invites you to realize that...a sense of inner peace comes with returning to the Source, where all cycles begin and end.”
Everything we know is in the process of going or coming. There are no exceptions. The changing seasons remind us of the cycles of life, from the dark of December to the bright sunlight of July and back to December again. We all experiences the endings of school, youth, jobs, careers, relationships, and the ending of lives. When endings come we do mourn. Although we know that change is constant, and that the cycles of existence always bring life and death and life again, our sense of loss can be profound.
These endings, which can also be beginnings, are the “hinges” of people’s lives, when lives are altered, and those left behind find that their lives are swinging in new, completely unpredicted directions.

Is it a miracle?
Kate says that people are often looking for an answer. They will ask her, “When a child is lost in the woods, when a snowmobiler goes through the ice, where is God in all this?” When someone is rescued, the family may say something like, “God must have been looking out for my child.” They give credit to God or call it a miracle if someone is saved or rescued.
Well, if that is true, then what about the person who is not rescued? If a tornado misses our town, people might say, “God was looking out for us,” but the tornado hit another town. Was God punishing them? I don’t think that is how the universe works, and neither does Kate.
We call something a “miracle” when it is unlikely and has a happy ending, but Kate says that her husband’s death was also an unlikely ending. Yet we would not call his tragic death a “miracle.”
A young woman was abducted and raped and murdered, and her body was left in the Maine woods. It was a tragic and painful experience for everybody involved. The events were unlikely – Maine is a very safe state that has a very low crime rate. “Christina,” not her real name, had to be in just the right (or wrong) place at a particular time for the rapist to have found her. So many things had to happen in the right (or wrong) way in order for Christina to have met this particular guy in the parking lot at 7:00 in the morning. We would not call it a miracle simply because it did not have a happy ending, but it is as improbable as any “miracle.” So a “miracle” can’t just be something that is providential, where things just have to line up in a certain way, because bad things happen that way, too.
Kate says she does not look for God or God’s work in magic or in tricks, or in saying “this is what I want” and then I get it. She looks for God’s work in how people love each other, in the acts of love that she sees around her.
So where was the love in Christina’s death? Kate finds it in the hearts and the hands of the men and women who did their best to find her, to solve the case, and to make things right for Christina and for her family. They couldn’t turn back time, they couldn’t fix it, but they did everything they could to do their jobs well and to show their love and compassion. The fact that they are willing to respond when they can’t fix it is one of the most beautiful things. Sure, it’s great to get to be Superman. You swoop in and save the day. And it is great when they find the lost child in the woods. But when you can’t fix it, and you still show your love, that’s beautiful.
The primary detective on the case was a woman named Anna Love. She has an improbable name. She looked at the evidence, found the suspect, interviewed him, brought him to the scene of the crime, interviewed him again, and wrapped up the case. And in the midst of all this she was going into the Ladies’ Room with a breast pump, because she had a new-born baby at home, and she was sending bottles of milk home to her husband for the baby.
Kate wrote, “If ours were a sensible culture, little girls would play with Anna Love action figures, badge in one hand and breast pump in the other.”
This is real life. On the one hand there was a terrible event, and no way to fix it. And on the other hand there were all of the men and women who responded, all of them motivated by human love. And one of them is Anna Love, a breast-feeding mother – and she’s the one who caught the guy.

A simple theology
Kate said that the older she gets, the simpler her theology gets. She believes that God is Love, and believes it pretty literally. If you want to find where God is in tragedy, look to the love shown by family, friends, neighbors, communities, synagogues and churches. When our friend Margaret Gregorie was ill, and then died, there was incredible love shown for her in this community. Her memorial service here was standing room only. Since then I’ll bet at least a hundred people have come back to our meeting house to see her fabric art and to be touched by the little narratives she wrote about each piece. I know Dan appreciates all the support he has received.
Twentieth century theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich have reminded us that there is no old man sitting on a cloud in the sky, but that God is to be understood as “Ultimate Reality” or “The Ground of Being.” God is not theology, but poetry. God is not a warrior taking sides between Ossama bin Laden and George W. Bush, but God, very simply, is love.
Christianity, says Kate, is answering a question she wasn’t asking. The answer is eternal life. If you decide that the most important thing, that the highest possible value, is life, then you want eternal life. And Christianity promises that. If you go to heaven you get eternal life in the clouds with harps and wings, or cool drinks at the swimming pool, or some such. And if you go to hell, well, that’s a sort of eternal life, too, isn’t it? It’s eternal life either way.
But if life is your highest value, then you’ve lost, because we’re all going to die. You know, everybody who eats at McDonald’s dies. And the same is true for everyone who eats at Burger King, and for those who shop at Whole Foods. We all die.
So Christianity came up with a place we can’t see and can’t touch. It’s eternal life. Many Unitarian Universalists prefer not to speculate about what might or might not lie after this life. We know we have this life, so we want to make this life count. Eternal life, well that’s something you either believe in or you don’t. There’s no evidence for it. And really, eternity would get boring after a while. As Kate points out, we would have eternity to get sick of our imperfections. But if I am made perfect in heaven, then I really wouldn’t be me any more. And if I’m not me, not this Mark Worth with my faults and imperfections, I will be dead.
But what if your highest value is not life, but is love? Then yes, we have a world that contains suffering and pain – and some really great things, too. And we have something to do. Love. We have something to look for, and something to do. To me that works better. It is of more practical value. And in fact, when Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, most of the time he seemed to be talking about heaven right here on this earth, the kind of heaven we could build if we really loved one another.
We can still wonder, if we wish, about what might lie beyond this world. But to me, we were born in mystery and we die in mystery. We may cease to exist when we die, I don’t know. And if there is something more, then living the most loving life we can in this world is good preparation for the next. I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to stick with Kate’s practical advice: If our highest value is love, we have something to look for, and something to do. ...Amen.