For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive. So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny. But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

We tend to be blind about our mental lives. We open our eyes, and familiar articles presents themselves; we will our limbs to move, and objects and bodies float into place; we awaken from a dream, and return to a comfortingly predictable world; Cupid draws back his bow, and lets his arrow go. But think of what it takes for a hunk of matter to accomplish these improbable outcomes, and you begin to see through the illusion. Sight and action and common sense and violence and morality and love are no accident, no inextricable ingredients of an intelligent essence, no inevitability of information processings. Each is a tour de force, wrought by a high level of targeted design. Hidden behind the panels of consciousness must lie fantastically complex machinery – optical analyzers, motion guidance systems, simulations of the world, databases on people and things, goal-schedulers, conflict-resolvers, and many others. Any explanation of how the mind works that alludes hopefully to some single master force or mind-bestowing elixir like "culture," "learning," or "self-organization" begins to sound hollow, just not up to the demands of the pitiless universe we negotiate so successfully.

When Hamlet says, "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!" we should direct our awe not at Shakespeare or Mozart or Einstein or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar but at a four-year old carrying out a request to put a toy on a shelf.

Since it is the end of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, which is involved with repenting, turning away from sin, wiping the slate clean to begin life anew, we will engage this in, hopefully, a unique way. Not by talking about what is or isn’t sin, but by addressing the process in human nature of starting anew; to repent, to turn, and to begin again.

We read the world wrong and say it deceives us, said poet Rabindranath Tagore. It is subtle and complex, this wrong reading of ours, which is why we say the world deceives us. We want it simple, in categories we understand because we have created them. I got a mailing at home this week from a new church starting up in Cascade which promised that the Gospel will be presented in easy to understand ways. We read the world wrong and say it deceives us. There is no easy way to understand life or any Gospel purporting to be a true reading of it.

I was having lunch this week with Geoff Fields from the congregation. He and I are part of a group in the Forest Hills School District working to bring a deeper understanding of the relationship between church and state that is the genius of our democratic Republic, and one of the core ideas from our faith tradition. More on that as the months pass by. Geoff talked about a show that was on PBS this past week, about God, which the day before Keith Johnson had also talked with me about. I did not see the show, but Geoff’s described a speaker who talked about Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. These two historical personages represent two different modern views of human nature and religion. Freud represents the understanding that religion is a purely internal human phenomenon, a product of a certain moment in the history of an individual when he encounters forces larger than the self, usually represented by his mother or father. Sin and repentance are forms of adjustment the internal self initiates and undergoes to deal religiously with its own neuroses. This is the religion of preachers who confine themselves largely, if not exclusively, to the internal self’s dealings with its world, whether Pentecostal or Unitarian Universalist. Lewis, on the other hand, represents the part of modern, Western human being, that perceives religion to be about the way the "out there" is really structured; that is, religion concerns what is called metaphysical truth. Existence is ordered this way – in Lewis’ case, structured as orthodox Christian Truth maps it all out. Perceive the immovable Truth about reality and adjust yourself to it, regardless of whether you are a Unitarian Universalist searching for truth or, like Lewis, an Orthodox Christian who found it. In Freud’s representation religion is an internal adjustment that the individual makes to order reality in ways that the self can then maneuver through the world. In Lewis’ representation, religion is about the truth of how the "out there" is really organized, and the self adjusts or doesn’t, is saved or isn’t.

These are the two competing views of human nature’s fascination with and attempt to understand its place in existence. But, what if both representations are sorely incomplete? That religion really isn’t about internal processes only, or about external truth? What if religious understanding and spirituality is the willingness to turn towards, in the words of Monty Python, "something completely different?" Like the parable offered this morning?

Organized religion hates this parable because the last get as much as the first, the faithless as much as the faithful, that it isn’t fair or deserving or right or just or anyway to run a universe. This is all a true reading of the world. The cultured despisers of religion dismiss this parable because it doesn’t make sense to the fully realized self that has adjusted to a world of labor unions, fair treatment, working towards goals and getting rewarded for what is deserved. This is also all a true reading of the world. Yet, despite organized religion and its cultured despisers Jesus announces the kingdom of heaven to be just such a vineyard newly conceived and understood.

As we talked last week this is difficult to conceive of today because religion has largely collapsed into politics, and is so rife with political overtones. To see the spiritual, to gain a wider view of human nature, the divine, and the breadth of meaning to existence, would require Herculean repentance and a turning. It would require we look at the width, depth, and breadth of human nature, instead of considering persons by the categories we hold relative to their politics, perceived or real. It’s difficult if not well nigh impossible to measure human nature as something binding all men and women together, so divided have we made them into categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious background and perspective, all of which are today, politically conceived.

It would require us to see human nature through different eyes than we do currently. It would require new sight, seeing through the eyes of the spirit, one might say; that is, that we are more than just material beings with internal machinations that yield political orientations, and that we are more than just creatures plucked out of a garden and placed into a world of structured truth that we find and adjust to, demanding political conformity by the rest. There is something more when our journey’s destination is seen through the eyes of the spirit.

When we look at human nature it is clear that of all the things that characterize it, there are at least these two: firstly, that we exist in relationship to something, to other people, to a context, to a history, to a body composed of inter-related parts, to a universe, to an "out there," as variously conceived as there are individuals to conceive it; and secondly, that there is within human nature a yearning, a longing for something more, more knowledge, more love, more understanding, more justice, for something larger than what we now conceive ourselves and our world to be. Last week this is what we called the spiritual principle, as 19^th century Unitarian William Ellery Channing did, or the spiritual impulse in human nature. And it is this that we will seek to probe in depth as an exercise in repentance and turning towards something more, perhaps even, towards living in a new vineyard.

* * * * *

To many, the 21^st century’s central issue, which will drive many of the world’s future challenges and discoveries, is the question, "What is human nature?" Steven Pinker, MIT professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, is one who has helped to set the early direction of the culture’s conversation through his explanation of the computational theory of mind.

Traditionally, the mind has been understood to be illuminated by a vapor-like essence called the soul, or a ghost or spirit, or some kind of magical, Pinnochio-like implantation of vitality, or some kind of energy flow that we see is absent when we look into the eyes of the deceased or see as present when we watch an infant lurch and jerk. But new theories of intelligence suggest that the mind is what the brain does. The brain metabolizes fat, does physical functions like other organs and tissue. But the brain’s main function is to create the mind; something I would not hesitate to claim is a divine-like function.

The brain, like all other parts of us and our world, has evolved to receive information about our world in such a manner that we can adapt, adjust, and survive as our ancient, hunting-gathering ancestors did. We need shelter, the mind deduces. The brain goes about receiving information about its surroundings, invigorates muscle and tendon, and we pick up an ax, chop down a tree, and build a home. It is an extraordinarily complex engineering feat both in terms of the necessary internal computations and the external manipulations. But in the process of these internal computations and external manipulations, something new and something more also is created in the "out there," an unimaginable addition to the material existence of the internal brain and the external building.

We look at the stump and pronounce how old the tree was. We look at the home, bask in its beauty, and plot enhancements to that beauty. We ask others over for a gathering where the preacher blesses the new home and there is house-warming fellowship. The brain’s function has been to create the mind, and the mind has operated on its world to process information and create something new. Symbols - called age, beauty, and the spiritual life - arise, which now operate to organize existence in a deeper way.

So the mind not only takes in information about itself and its context, like a probe, but it also processes information in a particular manner that creates an order out of its world. That’s a crucial element in human nature. We connect and relate ourselves, and from that relationship create something new, something more, something in addition to the material fact of the world, and a something more that the emergence of consciousness compels us to perform: Meaning is yielded. But, we also do another thing, too, that is easiest to understand through a very simple-minded act.

After church I am going to watch on TV the Detroit Lions play football at Ford Field.

Actually, that’s not what I’m going to do at all, even though I will. Actually I am going to sit in my den, stare at a piece of glass, and yell and cheer and smile and cry at a piece of glass! Pinker explains this additional, something more. I would add that it is an additional part of the spiritual make-up of human nature as surely as is the meaning that is yielded:

"the brain supplies the missing information, information about the world we evolved in and how it reflects light… When we watch TV, we stare at a shimmering piece of glass, but our surface-perception module tells the rest of our brain that we are seeing real people and places… That cheat-sheet is so deeply embedded in the operation of our visual brain that we cannot erase the assumptions written on it."

-How Does the Mind Work?, Steven Pinker, p 29.

And even though the mind has structured the order out of its world, it takes an additional step and experiences that order as somehow "out there," which in some sense it really is!

We don’t create an imaginary world. The Lions really are playing. We don’t create meaning ourselves alone. The Lions really are playing. But the brain supplies the missing information such that the rest of the brain cannot erase the assumption we are seeing real people in a real place, when we are in actuality looking at glass. We are not actually seeing the Detroit Lions. We are seeing colored dots on a glass screen, but our brain has supplied missing information. Our Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson explains this by noting, "Human beings see an arc, and assume the circle." Or, as one poet wrote, we live in a picture of a place, not the real place. It is a by-product of the brain’s function in creating the mind, and the mind discovering itself in a context, a world it is related with. It is part of the evolution of the brain and consciousness that served us well eons ago when it wasn’t as urgent to perceive and understand it. It is so fundamental to our nature as human beings it escapes our detection and notice. It is a mystery that human nature carries with it as part of the human condition, and is now apparently a condition we forget and refuse to comprehend at our peril.

* * * * *

In an explanation of the difference between Jewish and Catholic understandings of repentance, Rabbi David Blumenthal suggested that it would be best to start out with what Jews don’t believe about repentance that Catholic’s do. His enumeration is enlightening for us as Unitarian Universalists because we stand with the Jews in this interpretation of what repentance is not for us, too:

"[We do] not recognize 1) confession of personal sin to a religious figure as part of the process of sin and repentance; 2) penance as a necessary part of the process of sin and repentance; 3) absolution as part of the process of sin and repentance; 4) reconciliation (the whole-hearted yielding of all inner negative feeling) as a necessary part of the process of sin and repentance."

(REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS by Rabbi David R. Blumenthal, "Cross Currents,"http://www.crosscurrents.org/blumenthal.htm)

Our faith tradition also stands with Judaism in recognizing five elements that form what repentance is: "recognition of one's sins as sins, remorse, desisting from sin, restitution where possible, and confession." (IBID) But there is an additional element to repentance for us, and it is one that characterizes the distinctiveness of our faith tradition’s focus on understanding human nature.

To turn away and start anew, which is the aim of repentance, requires the willingness to pursue a knowledge and understanding that is something more; that is, that we accept it’s part of our nature to receive the information of our world and create a vision of what that world is like, and then consider, respond, and proclaim that picture as a true representation and rendering of existence. To repent and start anew is to know the better part of our nature is to repudiate that picture as truth, and thereby seek something more.

The turning of repentance rings hollow unless there is grasped a something more. It is more than just an internal adjustment because grasping a something more will uncover to us things about our world we did not see before. It is more than just adjusting ourselves to the truth "out there," because we help to create an understanding and misunderstanding of what’s out there by what we seek and what we refuse to pursue! We cannot have completed a turning away from sin without having turned towards evidencing a wider and deeper love for humanity that changes both our world and us because it repudiates our deepest certainties about how things are structured in the first place.

The laborers in the vineyard who worked from the dawn should have gotten paid more than those who came to work near closing time. You should be rewarded only with what you deserve by what you’ve done. Our brain supplies the missing information to complete the picture of this on our internal television screen. We surmise it’s the way of the world that can’t and shouldn’t be otherwise. Our understanding of this has evolved in that way like our brain has evolved. But it’s like sitting in front of a piece of glass and mistaking dots on a screen for the reality of the Lions at Ford Field. The brain supplies the missing information to complete that kind of worldview, and in an instant I think I’m at the game and, likewise, support the early laborers complaint that you should get rewarded only with what you deserve by what you’ve done. It’s common sense and the way of the world, I think. And not only do I think that, I know that.

But repenting requires a turning away from this towards something more that we struggle to comprehend. That the laborers who came last in the day are created as equally as those who came first. That those who bore the sweat of their brow in the vineyard are not different from those who, standing around in silence, bore the anxiety of wondering most of the day whether they would ever find work, ever make even one coin, and ever be able to secure some food and shelter for themselves and their families. That, somehow, whatever created all, loves all, equally, and resists bending to the rules we create out of the television screens our brain insists holds what is right and true. It’s not common sense and it is something more than what we can fully understand. God loves all souls. That’s what it’s like to live inside of the Kingdom of God. It’s counter to the missing information my brain supplies. But, then again, my brain didn’t create all, and only orders the "out there" on, really, scant information at best. The first should get more than the last by the reckonings of most of our brains, which seem so clear through the information the brain supplies. But there is a wider view, a something more, a "kingdom" to live in, inside of the world we occupy. The first and last will all be compensated equally and fully in this "kingdom." In it God loves all souls. And calls us to repent of living just in that world which would deny this, and turn and walk swiftly into a another kingdom inside of this world.

AMEN.