Homecoming Sunday 2008
                                                                    “A Spiritual Home”

                                                   Sermon Delivered at All Souls Community Church
                                                       Grand Rapids, Michigan September 7, 2008

                                                                      Copyright © 2008

                                                         The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith




READING

"[O]ur doctrine of [human nature], as I understand it, states that each of us is born with potential, a potential that will be developed for good or for ill. . . . Our will is free; we can and do make our own choices; what education can do for us is to help us in the making of wiser choices. It is, indeed the triumph of the Arminian Heresy, and to me one of the most exciting aspects of our faith… We need to regain our vision of the power of all-conquering love and apply it to the social problems of today as well as to the acts of our individual living. . . . Choose this day life, and the salvation of all [persons] through the power of men [and women] of goodwill and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil."
-A 1972 Address by Rev. Dorothy Spoerl




SERMON

She clicks the heels of her ruby slippers and repeats like a mantra, “There’s no place like home.” It is high school age Judy Garland in the 1939 movie classic, “The Wizard of Oz,” filmed while Nazi Germany threatened Europe and the world with war, Tolkien was composing a completely opposite view of human existence in the dark and ominous, Lord of the Rings, and Unitarians Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp traveled to Czechoslovakia to help refugees escape persecution. It is also the last year of the existence of All Souls Universalist Church in Grand Rapids, and it is a twist of fate that the liturgy Rev. Sharp developed would be heard over 60 years later when All Souls Community Church first gathered and brought Unitarian Universalist back to this city. Sharp’s liturgy is still used today by All Souls!

History has both a public and a personal dimension, and personally I grew up in the 1950’s and ‘60’s watching The Wizard of Oz as it became a Christmas holiday tradition along with It’s a Wonderful Life. Like what film critic Roger Ebert confessed, until I saw the movie it did not occur to me either that all films were in black and white. Dorothy begins in flat and dustbowl, black and white Kansas, and after a tornado lifts her over the rainbow, she opens the door of her transplanted farm house and the colorful and bountiful world of Oz sits before her. It is an utterly new and diverse and hitherto unseen world.

“It seems religious and important in a way most movies don’t,” commented Ebert, and its mytho-poetic quality is verified in odd ways. Sixty-one year old novelist Salman Rushdie saw it at age 10 in Bombay, India, and the narrative’s transcendent quality, “made a writer of me,” he said. And half a world away Port Huron native Terry McMillan, author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back, was equally moved by the journey to the Emerald City, chuckling at the screenplay’s irrational absurdity: “The land of Oz wasn’t such a bad place to be stuck in. It beats the farm in Kansas.” What kind of home could Dorothy click her heels to depart to? What could now contain the Dorothy who had traveled all the way from Kansas through Oz to an Emerald City, banished tyranny and oppression, summoned her emotional and intellectual energies to help liberate a small company from their peculiar deficiencies, and discovered who she was as a human being? What kind of home could be hers after that kind of change?

While black and white, dustbowl Kansas hadn’t changed upon Dorothy’s return, so much of it and the world has ever since. Now Tolkkien’s foreboding vision is up on IMAX screens along with this summer’s bleak parable of living in terrorized times, Batman: The Dark Knight. The Wizard of Oz seems quaint and can be viewed so many times on so many different TV channels, or downloaded to be seen at your convenience. Yet, its mythic elements transcend time and culture, consumer preferences and individual cravings, and can be understood by boys in Bombay and girls in Port Huron in the 20th century, and men and women in Grand Rapids in the 21st.

Of course there are the materialists who deny mythic elements to any story as well as spiritual layers to human existence. A TV listing in Marin, California a few years back illustrates this with the flat dust of 20th century Kansas: “Transported to a surreal landscape a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.” To the cynical eye Oz is no country for young women.

But spirituality, and seeing and understanding more to human existence than the flat dust of a 20th century Kansas farm, requires the exercise of the human imagination, that brilliantly created part of us where the reason of the head merges with the sentiment of the heart to create larger sight and wider view. The human voice, whether Garland’s or a choir’s, can liberate the spirit to higher sentiments and loftier reasons to the heart. We can learn how to see hopeful things in a weary world when our eyes are trained by the free and creative mind. And human diversity and difference masks a unity of the spirit, of scarecrows and tin men and lions as amongst men and women.

There are deeper, unseen truths that hold in the Land of Oz as surely as in our world, although horses changing colors and supernatural flying do not. There are facets to human nature that lie buried within us, kept hidden by our own ignorance of who we are and the Divine image in which we have been created. The bonds of affection in community can enliven an individual as the self cannot be when alone. And humanity is always susceptible to creating wizards of imagined salvation, giving weight and influence and power away to others to fulfill us, thereby creating authoritarian oppression in the name of beneficence. We imagine some magical individual exists to save us. But even with this inclination, the slightest creature’s dissent exposes the tyrannical propensities beneath it, like a small dog pulling a curtain aside to reveal that wizards are mortal men.

* * *

There are no palace guards or talking and flying monkeys in a Kansas farm family anymore than there is in mine. The bonds of family are first produced by romantic attraction, and the children that are its fruit are born of two entities conjoined. The love of family can give stability and strength of identity when family is at its best. But even in the best of families deep parts of the self are left buried and hidden. It’s inevitable. Even family stability and longevity yields a kind of rigidity because parents will always be parents, and their children, children. I remember having a discussion in the living room of a parishioner, a mother and her child, and the conversation recalled conversations between my mother and my sister when we were growing up; except that the parishioner was 102 years old and her daughter 74! Parts of a “child” remain frozen and latent and unrecognized, and in some instances even disvalued and dismissed. “Stay close to the farm,” stability cautions, “because the world is frightening and will bruise the eager mind and soft, vulnerable heart.” The bonds of family affection and family values in the best of circumstance are meant foremost for survival. But in truth, they are roots from which the branches of affection are be extended to others of different lineage, of different composition and circumstance, along the road of our lives. It is a demand that was long ago said more directly and better: “Love God and neighbor as yourself,” a larger affection than what blood-family values. A spiritual home is more than a family’s home.

There are no scarecrows seeking wisdom, nor tin men seeking affection, nor lions struggling against cowardice in Kansas towns anymore than in Grand Rapids. But without bonds established amongst those seeking knowledge, love, the courage to be hopeful about human existence, what awakens and enlivens human individuality will remain muted. There is a spirit created by human fellowship beneath the creeds and political partisanship that we have allowed to divide the human community. And all of us have been stunted by the divisiveness born of a fraternal affection that we extend only to people like ourselves. There is a part of human being that loves itself and thereby gathers friends about it like unto itself. This is a deep and abiding good. Fraternal affection builds a network of mutuality, a neighborhood of sameness, of those who look like us, think like us, believe like us. But, fraternal fellowship favors affections extended towards some, over being a means for the affection deserved by all. There are capacities within the broadness of human connection that are only discovered when we step into a larger fellowship, not of sameness but diversity of thought; not of narrowness of orientation but wideness of mercy; not of fear that cowers people together against the world, but of faith and trust in human agency and the providence seen in Love. “Charity,” wrote one cultural observer, “requires… a care for other human beings whether or not those human beings reciprocate that care or provide some personal gratification.” (Bonds of Affection, Matthew S. Holland) Or, more directly stated thousands of years before, and which could become the mission of the odd community heading down the yellow brick road: “What doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8) And not end with what your circle of friends and your neighborhood of friends give to you for your personal satisfaction and your emotional safety. In this world as in Oz strangers can become saints to one another. A spiritual home is larger than a neighborhood in Kansas.

And there are no supernatural wizards here or in Oz either. What does exist in both lands is the human inclination to give others the authority that belongs to the self. Most religions and all political parties bind human beings together in a unity of belief, in religion by theology and in politics by partisan position. It is easy for each to extract loyalty at the cost of the sacredness of your own mind and the holiness of your own consent. Too easily each can prize orthodoxy over individuality, and in the name of what is good for humanity become authoritarian and tyrannous over the hearts and minds of individuals. And we are so susceptible to this tendency in our social arrangements because there is something inside us that needs the prospect that a magical wizard in a far-off city holds the key human destiny and the final destination of us all. There is a basic fear abiding in human being that seeks someone to defer to, to be accepted by, to give us an absolute truth we are incapable of experiencing in our finite and limited human ways. The roots of oppression are in our own longings to know rightly, love properly, and be courageous unfailingly, and we will defer to another whom we are certain possesses these which we cannot. The true home for the human spirit is more than a religion holding a particular creed as the only truth, or a political party that ridicules competing views. The true home for the spirit is not in far off Oz or in Kansas of the past, but in the nearness of this world today and making of tomorrow “for all its calamity, to be an hospitable home for the human spirit.” (William James) The true home for the spirit, like the kingdom of God, is inside of you and at hand.

At the end of her quest Dorothy has become every girl, every boy, every woman and every man, the longing and hope that makes the human spirit what it is. “What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched,” wrote 19th century Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson. But what kind of home is she fitted for now?

It’s here that the movie sounds its only false note, though the book strikes the true chord. The writer of the movie’s screenplay ties Dorothy’s return to flat and dustbowl, black and white Kansas, to the human longing to go back, the human spirit’s nostalgic tie to yesterday over seeing hope in tomorrow. “There’s no place like home,” she chants through Oz is a pretty good place to be and larger and wider, with more opportunities for spiritual growth than her home. But in the book, authored by Frank Baum at the beginning of the 20th century, Dorothy is whisked back by silver slippers not because there is no place like home, but out of her love – her affection and concern - for Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. It is not nostalgia that calls her home. It is Love. She has found a new home in the promise of tomorrow and a new day, as one of our Unitarian forbears wrote: The bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom. (Napoleon Lovely) And Baum’s Wizard of Oz is just one book in a whole series of adventures of Dorothy in Oz, like Harry Potter in our day. And in a subsequent book she takes Auntie Em and Uncle Henry to live with her to Oz, to depart Kansas by another way.

Spiritual homes are different than homes created by families, or those created by fraternal fellowship like neighborhoods. Spiritual homes are created differently than holding as dear people who believe like you, look like you, or love like you, hold the same theology and creed and political affiliation, for those are only fellowships of your own projections. Spiritual homes are not the product of politics or religion when they hold commonality of belief as more dear than broadening the bonds of human affection. Spiritual homes require a different effort by those who seek them; a different way of seeing and being, and trusting and hoping. Spiritual homes require a devotion to the freedom of the mind for all, an affection this life holds for all, and a freedom and justice that is the heritage of all. In spiritual homes persons find their intellectual capabilities to be more than they thought, formed as they previously were by the opinions and beliefs of others. In spiritual homes persons, when they find their personal affections to be too narrow and safe, seek to have their hearts broadened, even though it will mean bearing the pain of the sufferings of others; for when our heart breaks because of the connection we have established with others, Love become more redemptive too. In spiritual homes men and women find the courage to see beyond fear to trust and hope for this world. There is a truth that abides in Oz as it does in our world, but it requires persons like Dorothy, dedicated to its demonstration and its real embodiment: There abides a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed through a love for all souls. Welcome home.
Amen.