from On Being Human Religiously, James Luther Adams

[Dr. James Luther Adams was one of the great Unitarian theologians of the 20^{th century. He was well known as the translator of Paul Tillich, a fine scholar, author, and teacher in his own right, and the most famous religious social ethicist of his age. He was in Germany in the 1930’s and experienced firsthand the Nazification of the country and its slide into barbarism and national hatred. He barely escaped unharmed, and returned after the war to lead in educating the occupying American forces about the effects of Nazism on Germany. He wrote extensively on religion, democracy, and what he regarded as the liberal religious spirit. In this most famous theological treatise, called “The Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism,” which our BRANCHES small groups study, he proposed these five points as characteristics of our faith tradition:]}

[Dr. Adams commented about optimism:]

I once had a visitor to my church in Milwaukee in the 1980’s tell me that my sermons were useless because they weren’t instructional. Other preachers helped people with advice concerning practical problems, like marriage, raising kids, how to manage stress, what to do with aging, and how to find a successful career or find spirituality in the workplace. I offered no solutions. I thought about what he said a long time, as I do many comments. I even tried preaching a couple of sermons like that, and concluded his critique was accurate. I couldn’t give people advice, let alone good advice. And how could someone with so few solutions to life’s problems offer them to others? But there are plenty of places in the culture to find them.

The Solutions Catalog offers "products that make life easier."  Better Homes and Gardens features a section called "Home Solutions."  Micro Solutions calls itself "the pioneer and industry leader of mass storage parallel port products," whatever those are… National Public Radio commentator Geoff Nunberg quipped that he's surprised Smuckers has yet to bill itself as "your toast-coating solutions provider…”

[Solutions orientations permeate modern religion.]  The author of a book called Devotions for Debtors tells Beliefnet.com that "I felt God was with me in the effort to get out of debt, offering me solutions to things and reminding me that I didn't really need something."  A men's magazine tells the story of a man who joined a support group that was formed "to help homosexuals find Christ centered solutions."  A women's magazine runs the testimony of a parent who struggled with her temper when disciplining her child, but soon found that God "led me to new solutions and steps to take with my child."

…"Solution" used to be the opposite of "problem"; now it's the opposite of "need" (which, in a consumer culture, usually means "want")…. Brown asks, "Have we become so enamored with the idea of solving (and thereby eliminating) the challenges of faith and life that we have lost a vision for how we can be transformed through those challenges?”

-“Solutions,” from Sightings, 12/9/04, by Nathan Bierma, editorial assistant at Books&Culture magazine and writer for the Chicago Tribune.

Spirituality is not about advice and religion is not about solutions. That’s the domain of Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers, even though I guess I swim upstream again. I view with envy preacher Joel Osteen whose book “Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential,” is number one on Publisher’s Weekly’s list of top ten religious best sellers. I wish I could devise a solution and advice book to cash in on this modern view of God as the ultimate advice columnist. I read how other preachers craft sermon series like “The Nine Tasks of the Good Marriage,” which one of my fellow clergymen did recently. I just can’t do it, and visitors today looking for advice or solutions from a preacher might just as well abandon this place as a spiritual destination until this church gets a wiser spiritual leader. I think religion and spirituality are about something other than that, something more powerful and enduring, pragmatic yet elusive. It’s about a “life giving Spirit,” whatever that is!

Religion is about how one understands human nature, the meaning of human existence, all within the human predicament. And spirituality is about whatever is the kind of Spirit that upholds and strengthens one’s hold on life, lifts up one’s love of life, one’s sense of gratitude and grounding and connection to the Source of Life.

The human predicament? We individually are conscious and alive in this world for such a short, short span of time. The difference between life and death is a moment in time, and we are heading towards the moment of death even as we are alive. Human nature? We desire and yearn for that limited time to be as substantial and significant as is possible. The meaning of human existence? How is our short span of time on this earth meaningful, in the largest, most complete, ultimate sense? You and I live such a short time. What is the meaningful difference our lives can make? What is the nature of a Spirit that can take hold of us or that we can feel whereby this living becomes a fullness and glory in and of itself, and the world better and the future more promising? Can the world even be made better and does the future of this world, immediate or long term, hold any promise?

I remember a one hundred year-old woman in a church I served admit to me she didn’t know why the generations younger than her, mine included, were so nostalgic about the past. The 1970’s, 60’s, 50’s, 40’s, 30’s, 20’s, teens, even the nineteen-ought, “I lived through them all,” she bluntly stated. “And the best time of all is tomorrow.” She told me of having to endure the threat of polio and smallpox, nuclear annihilation, growing old with no social security net, and the threat of poison-laced bathtub gin. She remembered not being able to vote legally. She remembered the warehousing of the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped in prisons. She remembered when her older sister left home with her new husband and, because of the crude forms of transportation and her destination being a country across the Pacific Ocean, there was no prospect they would ever see her again. She remembered deaths from medical conditions that are commonly cured today. She remembered her girlfriend who died from a back alley abortion, and another friend who killed himself because his love was for someone of his own gender. She remembered when gravity chained us to the earth and we pondered whether the moon was made of cheese.

When she went into the hospital at age one hundred to have her gall bladder removed, I gave a tongue lashing to the doctor for his foolishness in putting her fragile life at risk for the sake of a probable few more months that weren’t exactly promised to someone her age. After she recovered, about a year and a half later, when she was certain I would understand time a little better, she took me to task for scolding a doctor who was willing to assist in giving her more years to live than she would have otherwise. “I’ve got so much more to do,” she said, as I bowed my head in shame!

We see advancements in science. This morning’s paper announces a medical breakthrough in eliminating mother to child transmission of AIDS. We see advancements in well-being, like the recently concluded summit where world leaders agreed to seek ways to eliminate poverty in Africa in the beginning decades of the 21st century. We see improvements in the quality of life, and in a deeper understanding of the vast variety and kinds of human beings. But there is a disconnect between these evidences, and historic religious perspectives.

In Hinduism and Buddhism all existence is maya, illusion. So, advancements and betterments are illusion. Existence is suffering because human beings are yoked to the conviction that the world is real, a confusion from which the Buddhist escapes through attaining Nirvana, enlightenment, and the Hindu eludes by successive birthings until one needs no rebirth into this illusory existence.

Islam looks to the life of the Prophet Mohammed and the creation of the Qur’an some 1500 years ago as the last moment Allah communicated directly to this world, a kind of frozen measurement of prophecy for the modern world. After three hundred years of vitality and growth, Christianity ensconced itself in the doctrine that Jesus was the sole life in which God was made manifest, was the center of time from which the world, including today, has been deteriorating towards its disintegration. Judaism offers something more mixed over against the evidence of advancement, with the message of Ecclesiastes, “nothing new under the sun,” balanced off against the Hebrew prophets, “Behold, [saith the Lord] I will create new heavens and a new earth.” (Is 65:17)

But I think the message from religion is clear and fairly consistent. If you think life has advanced, has evolved, is more complex, in some ways even better adapted, surpasses yesterday and might even be better tomorrow, abandon religion. You can’t be a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or Jew and hold the conviction that things are better than they were, and can progress even more tomorrow. Either religions claim this existence is illusory, and thus the betterments, too. Or, they claim the present and the future can never live up to the glories of the past and the individuals who lived back then; until all the world is destroyed and things are then made better again. Why is it so difficult to possess hope as something related to existence at this moment and its prospects tomorrow? Why do we take in these advancements and live in a world made better by the struggles and achievements of those in the past, and religiously turn our back and believe the opposite?

Dr. James Luther Adams thought it was a result of how we deal with time. We live and die by our philosophies of history was something he used to say, and he was always counseling that it was characteristic of the liberal religious spirit to “take time seriously.” We think our brief time on this earth is therefore also insignificant, and we seek an elevation of it “out of time,” as it were, in some better heavenly realm after this one or in a state that is better and more real than this one. God will love me forever when loves in this life come and go. Or, we fear the brevity of our days and clamp our grasp upon something in the past as if in the dust of old Scriptures or in the foggy outlines of old customs, ways, beliefs, or out of the mouths of dead people there will emerge some wisdom that is an elixir of immortality better than these mortal chains. What would Jesus do? Or, we want to control time, and the only way we can control time with a master’s proficiency is to conceive of the past as better and preferable to today or tomorrow. We’ve always done things that way, believed that way, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Or time’s uncertainty - the doubt, disquiet, uneasiness, and anxiety about what tomorrow might bring, for it can bring disaster and destruction, symbolically to the spirit or literally to the body - weighs so heavy upon the soul that living in the certainty of the past’s triumphs is a balm that soothes consciousness into submission. We’ve got to get back to the Garden, to a simpler time, when things were black and white. How can you think tomorrow might be better? Why would you think tomorrow might be better? Religions of all brands and kinds ally themselves with human nature’s reckonings of time to thwart perspectives of prospect, promise, and progress. And smother our capacity to live freely, generously, and liberally within the nourishment of a life giving Spirit.

Dr. Adams thought religions are rarely pragmatic and practical, and that the liberal religious spirit must be so in dealing with time and the question of whether existence improves. The pragmatic man or woman stops not at only considering the evidence of things seen. Otherwise the folly of men and nations would govern the Spirit. The contentious gloominess of the daily news would smother the Spirit. The rancor of political partisanship would veto the Spirit. The evil of terrorists would consume in fire the Spirit. Faith demands something more. Not surrender to the depravity of human injustice and evil doings, or naïve denial of what human beings are capable. The liberal religious spirit is pragmatic. Hope will be seen where and when it is sought. Faith demands that I be hopeful and realistic, despite my own protest and inclination. Look towards a better tomorrow with hope, and the Spirit of hope will guide.

But, Dr. Adams also cautioned that while it is characteristic of the liberal religious spirit to conceive of the world and all of existence as evolving and possessing a capacity to be improved, the world made better, it does not happen inevitably. In fact, existence is created such that human beings co-create its quality. Life may become more complex whether we give our contribution or not. But, it only becomes better through humanity’s active creativity, shaping tomorrow as something more just. That’s why my one hundred year-old former parishioner scolded me about my fears for her survival threatening the hope that she lived by and with and through. She had remembered when she could not vote, had a friend die of a back alley abortion, and another who took his life because of the shame he felt at the persons he came to love. She knew time. She was pragmatic and practical. She knew progress and betterment came through struggle. And she knew the enduring and abiding Spirit that moves in and amongst us, and gave her hope.

Dr. Adams told the story once of a Board of Trustees meeting at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, which our 9th graders visited in the fall. Dr. Adams was a Board member there in the middle part of the 20th century, and this particular meeting had lasted long into the night and into the wee hours of pre-dawn. The topic was recommending to the congregation a by-law change that would eliminate the racial restrictions on membership. You could not be African American and be a member. Justice is a function of time and human effort. Injustice changes into justice in time and through human struggle. There is no religious community that possesses immaculately conceived virtue. There was one Board holdout, and though the Board was taking the recommendation to the congregation for its action, it would do so unanimously. Dr. Adams argued passionately with the holdout, until frustrated beyond measure, asked the holdout what he thought the church was for? What did it exist to do? And the Board holdout delivered the word of judgment unto all religious perspectives and religious communities, concerning time and the effects of practical human spiritual effort: “The purpose of this church is to change people like me.” The purpose of the liberal religious church is to hold up as enduring and lasting, a freedom and unity of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls. Therein doth lie hope.

If this religious community ever worships the past, flee, as fast as you can. If any religious community ever offers the past as the source of advice for the present and the future, flee away. If a religious community ever becomes a monument to the past, ever becomes a tomb adorned by idols fashioned to look like the living, flee towards something else, towards tomorrow. Flee as fast as you can before you, too, are entombed in a past that cannot ever be relived or redeemed by the living. Flee to a well that serves up not dead flesh for sustenance, but living water! Flee to wherein there abides and can be found a Spirit that upholds life and invigorates the promise of creation. It can be found in real places, in this world. It’s all around. And dwell there in that place, in that land where the world and all of existence always possesses the capacity and prospect of becoming better. And drink from that well, and fill you canteens for the journey from that well wherein is contained living water.

AMEN.