The Five Stones, Pt. V: Choose Hope
Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement
September 3, 2023
The prior 4 weeks, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. Is this the first time you’re hearing about – real briefly – I’ll try to catch you up. He was one of our Unitarian theologians who was physically active in trying to stave off the rise of Nazism in Germany before he moved back to the States. And his teachings from a century ago, are as relevant today. In short regarding the piece about the five stones, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. I’ll paraphrase one last time all five stones – it’ll help you memorize them. ;-)
What does our liberal faith say about living? I will paraphrase the much longer piece, which itself is an edit of a sort, using language that might be more familiar to us: 1. Revelation is not sealed — in the unfolding of the human spirit we continuously experience life in new ways and so too does our experience of truth. 2. Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles 3. We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression 4. Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. Goodness happens in relationships with one another. 5. We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.[1]
Again today’s focus is that fifth stone. “We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.”
Each of these are interdependent with one another, and each is a way to stave off humanity’s totalitarian tendencies.
1) Revelation is not sealed – reminds us that there is no one right way to do all things. Strict adherence to creed is antithetical to the human spirit – and so is following propaganda and groupthink.
2) Mutuality and Consent are ethical and theological principles. Fascism targets consent first – the show of power over, rather than power with, is the point of Fascism.
3) Building the Beloved Community, and the prophethood of all believers. Community transcends Ego and it transcends charlatans and narcissists. Where the protestant reformation made all of us priests in our own faith, JLA is anointing us all prophets to speak truth to power for the wholeness of Community.
4) Each child that’s born is another redeemer. Fascism wants to segregate, separate and scapegoat whatever “other” they can come up with. If Love is truly at our center, and every child is another redeemer, we remember that we need all of us to survive.
Again today’s focus is that fifth stone. “We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.” We’ll be talking about a community vision today, and our individual choices to choose hope. Fascism wants us to feel demoralized, to wonder what the point is, or to forget our own power and agency. We began this series talking a little about science and perception, and our faith teaches about the evolution of our ethics and our expressed religious practice. (Evolution in the scientific sense, of adapting to the current reality, rather than in the sense of better and better for ever and ever. Perpetual growth for the sake of growth is a quirk of a bad take on textbook economics; JLA is teaching us about depth, not expansion.) And we’ll end with another discussion about science and ethics.
There’s a notion – I’m not sure where I first encountered it – that makes a distinction about the evolution of science and the evolution of ethics. It suggests that they differ in one notable way. As science unfolds, it progresses on what came before. Each generation is faced with new learnings that are rooted in old learnings, and the body of scientific knowing gets passed on to the next generation to pick up from where prior scientists left off. Barring catastrophes like the Dark Ages, science isn’t lost, it perennially moves forward. It will likely unfold with experts developing into further and further specializations; so that each area of sub specialty gets more and more nuanced and hopefully advanced.
Ethics is a different creature. Although our scholars in the field may function in the same way, building off what came before – as a people – each generation needs to learn and relearn the same lessons. Why is war the worst solution? Why are basic civil rights a thing each generation needs to fight for over and over? Why do we enter and recreate financial crises that we knew would occur – the proverbial market bubbles that we force upon ourselves again and again? It’s because as human creatures, our communal intellect may be willing to build off the lego blocks of past advancements, but our hearts have to start from the beginning with each new generation. And ethics has the additional challenge that there are bad actors who lie to us, or to themselves, or to both – that they are the good actors and not really the bad. For communities, ethics is learned from the ground up, with an ever changing cultural peer review panel whose rules are written and re-written for every generation… and science starts from the shoulders of past giants; theoretically with a consensus.
Now that statement has a way about it that’s painted in broad strokes. Even if science can give a clear answer – like on the question (or non-question) of climate change – ethics deeply influences our ability to accept it as answer. Likewise, we seem to be able to make the processing power of computers multiple by 1.5 times annually, but ethics seems to stall our improvement of fuel efficiency and our choices to even research renewable resources. But the basic notion is still accurate – we have all the resources to transform the world, but we don’t always choose to do so.
Spiritually, there’s a way in which that feels exhausting. We have all the capacity to affect the changes we need, but we often don’t have the moral courage, or maybe the moral willpower, to pass on the lessons in ways that seem to match. But we can choose to flip that script.
Despair sets in when we think we can’t affect change. That’s either rooted in cynicism, or that’s rooted in facts that paint a bleak picture. Let’s look at both. Staying with the science road, history tells us that the facts of science seem to indicate we have all the capacity we need to affect change in the world. From polio, to penicillin, to the moon landing, to the ozone layer – give us a challenge that we can unite behind, and give us generations to accomplish it, and we can do it. That’s the fact. Cynicism looks at perfect outcomes and pretends that those perfect outcomes are the new benchmark to follow. If we don’t meet the benchmark of perfect, then the solution is flawed and so what’s the point. There’s some interesting blogs out there wrestling with our political situations and the impact of cynicism that I won’t go into here, but there’s a lot of thought out there on this topic of cynicism that you might want to look into on your own.
Our resources, both sublime and mundane, hold all the capacity we need to transform the world. History presents both an onerous and a hopeful record. Each generation must imprint humanity’s moral progress upon the tablets of our hearts anew. We can choose to look at that with despair for the effort, or we can choose to look upon that with awe. We have the capacity to impress humanity’s moral progress anew!!! It’s a matter of will; it’s a matter of personal and communal choice. That’s our spiritual charge as a religious community.
In a few short weeks, we will be entering the High Holy Days in the Jewish liturgical calendar - how do we begin again in hope after seasons of hardship? As we are come upon these days of awe, can we bear witness to their lessons and apply them to the choice for hope? Do we look upon past choices with despair, or do we choose to look upon them with awe? For the month of September, our sermons and services, we will be imagining what it would mean to be a People of Renewal. How do our choices impact that imagination?
I once heard our regional lead for the Central East Region, the Rev. Megan Foley, was leading worship for 40+ clergy and she had a metaphor that’s really helpful here. She spoke of earlobes and nostrils. I’m going from memory, so I’ll get the gist, rather than quote – but I thank her for getting me to think in this direction. In the body of life, we all have a role. If you’re an earlobe, your role is to be the best earlobe you can be. It’s not to create more earlobes; it’s not to make the nostril over there act more like an earlobe. You may want to put in some effort to help the nostril be the best nostril it can be, but that’s as far as you should go from your role as earlobe – because the world still needs someone to be an earlobe.
That metaphor got me thinking a lot about our mission as a religious community in the face of hardship and hope. We function as a group of individuals; but we also function as a group of groups. There are bodies (committees) that help move forward our social justice work and our anti-racism work; who help to maintain our men’s refugee shelter; who create and curate art, who offer communal pastoral care, and on and on. We don’t need our membership team to take over our shelter, but maybe our membership team can help identify folks who are well suited for direct service work. Our Church Council doesn’t need to figure out the solutions to a better office system, but it can help us all to identify when something isn’t working, or something is working fabulously! In a community as large as ours, the minutia matters if we want to achieve our common purpose. The earlobes and nostrils of fellowship-work, lead to a common purpose.
In religious community, we nurture our individual spirits through caring for one another and helping to heal the world. Those are just words, but the impact is larger. We care for our members in times of crisis as best we can, when we know of the challenge; we offer a shelter in the cold weather months and collect and distribute food to those in need. We partner with non-profits the world over, our denomination and other local groups and intake shelters, to offer funds, or organizing, or marching (like on Sept 17), or simply following their lead; and on and on - and that list takes a ton of minutia to happen. We need earlobes and nostrils – as unexciting as that work sometimes sounds – makes the life-saving and life-affirming ministries happen. In these days of renewal, and the coming days of Awe in the Jewish calendar, it’s not just the sublime sunset, or the quiet of the garden that affirm our spirits, it’s the mundane everyday task that takes 30 years to build or rebuild– that also affirms our spirits and blesses our hands to do the work ahead.
In religious community, we nurture our individual spirits through caring for one another and helping to heal the world. If I were to whittle that down to three words, what would they be? Community, Individual and World? If that were it, it would mean community draws the individual into the world. That’s true – and that’s one of our goals. Maybe, Nurture, Caring and Healing. In a too often broken-feeling world, healing can only come when people choose the path of compassion and support. That’s true too. What I see as central to our religious purpose is the reality that we need to be drawn out of our individual concerns into an accountable community that chooses to heal these corners of the world through care and justice. Sometimes that will be hard; sometimes that will be uncomfortable; sometimes that means that our individual opinions will be in conflict with another’s views, but we do so together.
I’ll close with a matched theological demand to James Luther Adam’s 5th stone. I see the matching demand of progressive faith to be this questions: Does it remind me to live with hope? When we are faced with a belief that challenges us, or leads us to despair, our faith tells us that it’s misleading. If our faith truly teaches us that – Our resources, both sublime and mundane, hold all the capacity we need to transform the world -(and it does) – then any theology that seeks to cause us to forget hope is a theology that is misleading. Hope doesn’t mean easy; it doesn’t mean perfect; it doesn’t protect us from having to endure through periods of exhaustion or boredom or minutia – but it does make sure we face the world with a healthy sense of awe and possibility. Awe and possibility.
