Reading:

It’s not easy for any of us, in fact, to believe that our lives have any transcendent meaning or worth when so much that happens seems to negate this. It requires a huge commitment of hope and trust if you’re going to claim, against all the ugly evidence to the contrary, that the loving human effort is worth making. It is all but impossible to know what one should try to strive for, and what one must settle for. Patient vigilance and constant, daily work so as to believe in and hope for the triumph of life over death – these are the ingredients in the necessary (though not sufficient) spiritual exercise. Every great faith knows this, and every great faith recommends practices and prayerful habit to encourage people’s commitments to the enterprise. (from The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, by Elisabeth Sifton)

 

Sermon:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is the famous Serenity Prayer, as made famous by its use in Alcoholics Anonymous but the popularity of which extends far beyond AA. While for ten years I was minister in Mendon and Uxbridge, Massachusetts, that rural congregation had a beloved tradition of holding hands at the end of every service and reciting its words.

 

It’s funny that, in those ten years, I never preached on the Serenity Prayer or – to tell you the truth – even thought about it much at all. As I think about it now, I suspect that holding hands was at least as popular as the words of the prayer. I have spoken with people familiar with AA and they too say that, whatever its words, the prayer as spoken together at the beginning of each meeting is itself a kind of reassurance that one is not alone in one’s struggles.

 

The Serenity Prayer has found its way into our culture and, for many people, has acquired a kind of feel-good familiarity that – when imprinted on key-chains, posters, coffee mugs and bric-a-brac – is also kitsch incarnate. It has, therefore, inspired variations: For a while on the door of my office, I had the quotation: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know that I really can’t do either.”

 

Then also there is: “God grant me serenity…courage…and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to get rid of because they made me angry.” And also: “God grant me the Senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones that I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.” I’ll actually come back to these trivialities later.

 

The Serenity Prayer has been misattributed to a variety of people from St. Francis to an 18^th century German Swabian mystic named Friedrich Oetinger, but it was in fact written in 1943 by the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It was first spoken in the summer of that year to a handful of people gathered in an unpretentious country church in – of all places – Heath, Massachusetts in the Berkshires where Niebuhr and his family had a little stone cottage.

 

Under the title The Serenity Prayer, Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, Niebuhr’s daughter Elisabeth Sifton has recently published an elegant and insightful memoir of her family’s life in Heath that provides the social and global context of her father’s work that was the true inspiration of the prayer.

 

Some background: Reinhold Niebuhr, born in 1892 in Missouri, was raised in the German Evangelical Church in America, a denomination that eventually merged into the United Church of Christ. His father, Gustav, was a minister – more liberal and progressive than most evangelicals – who left Germany and came to America because of a disagreement about German military service. Reinhold followed his father’s footsteps into ministry, served a pastorate of 14 years in Detroit, then in 1928 became a professor of Christian ethics at New York’s Union Seminary where he taught for nearly 30 years. He was a prolific author and some of his books, such as Moral Man and Immoral Society, are classics in theological circles. Reinhold Niebuhr died in 1971.

 

Niebuhr was actively involved in the social issues of his day: war and peace, civil rights, labor relations and economic democracy, civil liberties. In the days when you could say so without being shouted down – and afterwards as well – he was a Christian socialist. But he was no dewy-eyed utopian: he was a serious, hard-headed and complex realist whose principal concern was that the progressive ideals of Christianity not be wasted in airy, other-worldly, selfish or trivial pursuits but that these ideals ought instead be applied to the inequities, injustices and human needs of this world. He decried “the self-congratulatory piety which is phony religion’s basic fragrance.” “The present tense was his natural habitat,” his daughter recalls; he was not nostalgic for the past nor did her build castles in the air. Not a pacifist, he was prophetic in encouraging allied military force against the Nazis, and he was also so fiercely critical of Soviet communism that some might consider him a cold warrior. He opposed tyrannies of left and right. He was a pragmatic democratic liberal; Niebuhr was – with Walter Ruether, Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger – a founder of Americans for Democratic Action (the ADA) – a progressive thorn to the not-so-liberal Democratic Party. The second A in ADA was vitally important to him in every aspect of his life: actions mattered more than words.

 

It should be noted that the original prayer (it’s printed at the top of your order of service) is slightly but significantly different from the popular adaptation:

 

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

 

This was not the prayer of someone wrestling with purely individual problems – struggling with bad habits or weaknesses or discovering the limits of his personal strengths – though of these he was surely aware. This instead was the prayer of a man engaged and struggling with the great social issues of his day.

 

The “us” is hugely significant for it assumes that we as a religious community are engaged together in prayer. Again, Niebuhr was primarily interested in religion as a social force that is of equal or greater significance than religion’s private and personal application.

 

The right wing and the New Age movements, though they may seem strange bedfellows, have hornswoggled a lot of us into believing that religion is primarily a matter of our own private comfort and peace of mind, and it is a little hard to believe the truth that biblical religion was and is far more concerned with social salvation and with social justice that it was or is with the question of your personal salvation or even your domestic tranquility.

 

Eloquently, Niebuhr’s daughter gets worked up about this: “Ministers all over America might have been pounding their lecterns and delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons, but their social conformism was pretty complete. Little changed in their privileged lives. They pussyfooted around feel-good mega-preachers like Norman Vincent Peale or Billy Graham – who like so many of their successors never risked their tremendous personal popularity by broaching a difficult spiritual subject, and rarely lifted a finger to help a social cause. They checked up on their pension funds and ignored their parishioners’ lives….Freedom and democracy, meanwhile, were being traduced or betrayed.”

 

Niebuhr was a serious Christian, more serious perhaps than I or most of us will ever be; but there are insights implicit in his Serenity Prayer that we all need to know about.

 

But I get ahead of myself. I suppose for all of us to be somewhat on the same page here, I need - with some trepidation - to say a bit about God and prayer.

 

In her memoir, Niebuhr’s daughter recalls a childhood lesson about prayer when she and her father were taking a taxi to the Radio City Music Hall to see Singin’ in the Rain. They were late, stuck in Manhattan traffic, and fearful of missing the show she wailed: “O God, please let the light turn green.” Her father’s rebuke, she says, “was gentle but instantaneous. That’s not what prayer was for.”

 

Prayer for Niebuhr was not a begging for favors but much more akin to listening, to being aware, to discerning, to being fully present, to being in awe of the present reality – the wonder, terror and perplexity of life.

 

And as for God, well, I sometimes lament that we Unitarian Universalists bristle so at the mention of realities beyond our knowing. I too bristle at sanctimonious pieties but I honor – and envy – those that arise from humility. Listen to these words of Niebuhr’s: “We live our life in various realms of meaning which do not quite cohere rationally. Our meanings are surrounded by a penumbra of mystery which is not penetrated by reason….All known existence points beyond itself. To realize that it points beyond itself to God is to assert that the mystery of life does not resolve life into meaninglessness.”

 

In other words, God for Niebuhr is our awareness that we will never know the end of the story; there is always something around the next corner; and the act of prayer is our humble attempt to acknowledge and attempt to discern that which we don’t yet know or which ultimately to us may be unknowable.

 

My intent this morning, however, is not so much to sway your thoughts about God or prayer but rather to hold up essential insights of the Serenity Prayer that speak to humanists and theists alike.

 

“To accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.”

 

Serenity. Interesting word. Now I suspect that some of you – you perhaps who have been influenced by, let us say, the ministry of Jack Mendelsohn – you may think we should aspire more to outrage or a holy discontent than we should aspire to serenity. I don’t disagree. I think of Elma Lewis, Boston’s pre-eminent and often fiery African-American activist and cultural figure, who died last Thursday. In her obituary she was quoted as answering her critics, “If you’re black and you’re not angry, you belong in a mental institution.”

 

Serenity and anger can coexist. Serenity for Niebuhr does not mean some tranquil quietude: It is the serenity of a Nelson Mandela who from the solitude of his jail cell said with serene confidence, “I abound in hope. Our cause is just and the people will be free.” Serenity is a rock-solid understanding of faith, hope and charity even in the darkest time of despair.

 

“The things that cannot be changed.” For Niebuhr, I think, this is a recognition that human beings must live within our limitations. Prior to Niebuhr, there were liberal theologians – probably some Unitarians and Universalists among them – who fancied the essential goodness of human nature, the perfectibility of society, “the progress of humankind onward and upward forever.” (A quotation which you’ll find on an old Unitarian poster that is framed in the stairwell that leads up to our Blinn Room). To those optimists who think that progress is inevitable or that “the universe bends toward love or justice”, Niebuhr said “Nonsense.”

 

The harsh reality in our individual lives as well as in our social and political lives is that power, greed, fear and despair constantly contend with higher virtues of love, justice, compassion, pity and hope. Not progress, not love, not justice are unfailingly assured without our action.

 

The foremost thing that cannot be changed – thought Niebuhr – is our humanity, our capacity for nobility and depravity. While decrying the evils of Nazi Germany, Niebuhr also said “Hitler is a brother to all of us in so far as his movement explicitly avows certain evils which are implicit in the life of every nation,” a statement of shocking spiritual candor.

 

Nations, like individuals, need be aware of their limits and when we brand our enemies as evil and ourselves as righteous, we are in grave spiritual error.

 

Decrying also the nuclear arms race, Niebuhr said, “We might remember the prophetic warnings to the nations of old, that nations which become proud because they were divine instruments must in turn stand under the divine judgment and be destroyed.”

 

Niebuhr saw the dangerous paradoxes of American history: “…this young, idealistic, generous, headstrong, and inexperienced nation has risen to global eminence, this nation that boasts of its religious commitments yet has taken secular materialism to new heights, this nation that is so grossly self-confident yet has such an unstable and insecure sense of itself.”

Last Friday, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said of our President: “The Lord has just blessed him, I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn’t make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he’s a man of prayer and God’s blessing him.”

This is as blasphemous as are worrisome the recent remarks of Howard Dean who recently asserted that his religion has nothing whatsoever to do with his politics and that politics ought steer altogether clear of “guns, God, and gays.” An inclusive religion of humility, compassion, and justice, Niebuhr would contend, has everything to do with politics. What kind of faith is a private faith? Where would America be if Martin Luther King, Jr. – or Abigail Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln, or Elma Lewis – had kept their faith to themselves?

“The courage to change the things that should be changed.” Niebuhr considered the abbreviated form “the courage to change the things that can be changed” to be nonsensical: lots of things can be changed but of course shouldn’t be. In any case, the vital point is that we must translate our good intentions and flowery or fiery words into positive action.

Consider the context of 1943: Today we are only somewhat justified in being proud of “our greatest generation” because until Pearl Harbor that same generation was isolationist, uninterested in international affairs, placid bystanders to fascism, mass murder and the destruction of democracy. We were self-satisfied, removed, and highly resistant to intervention in Europe. We wavered and shrank for more than seven years after Hitler had destroyed democracy in Germany; we did nothing for 5 years after Jews were robbed of German citizenship; we diddled for 2 years after the fall of Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries; we proclaimed our neutrality long after England was at war.

Our tendency to inaction weighed heavily on Niebuhr who had many friends in the German resistance and in concentration camps. In the lives of individuals and of nations, Niebuhr was keenly aware of our huge tendency to do nothing, to be trivial and irrelevant, and to meanwhile cloak our inaction in pious self-justification.

He was, as well, appalled by the trivialization of the Serenity Prayer. Many people seem to find the saying of the prayer to be in itself a reassuring, pleasant and soothing thing. Prayer as reassurance was abhorrent to Niebuhr; prayer for reassurance and strength was meaningful.

In the year before his death, Niebuhr saw an ad in a newspaper: Amazing Embroidery Offer. Beautiful ‘Silent Majority’ Serenity Prayer Now Yours in Fabulous Crewel Stitchery. For his work to be transformed into a Nixonian afghan was, indeed, cruel irony. He was nearly apoplectic to see his prayer trivialized.

And finally, “the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” It isn’t easy. I recall the man famous for his wisdom. “How did you become wise?” he was asked. He replied, “I learned to consistently do the right thing.” And how did you learn to consistently do the right thing? “I learned,” he replied, “by consistently doing the wrong thing.” Wisdom is an art, the art of living, gained by risk, failure, intuition, study, experimentation, dumb luck, and occasional success. Those who have experienced adversity, loss, and despair are perhaps the likelier ones to achieve wisdom.

I don’t know how better to summarize this – and to conclude – than by the injunction of the prophet Micah. “What is required of you? To act justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Active verbs, mind you: act, love, walk. Niebuhr counseled humility; he also counseled action.

Recall as well the words of Elisabeth Sifton, Niebuhr’s daughter, earlier read by Roger: “It’s not easy for any of us, in fact, to believe that our lives have any transcendent meaning or worth when so much that happens seems to negate this. It requires a huge commitment of hope and trust if you’re going to claim, against all the ugly evidence to the contrary, that the loving human effort is worth making. It is all but impossible to know what one should try to strive for, and what one must settle for. Patient vigilance and constant, daily work so as to believe in and hope for the triumph of life over death – these are the ingredients in the necessary (though not sufficient) spiritual exercise. Every great faith knows this, and every great faith recommends practices and prayerful habit to encourage people’s commitments to the enterprise.”

Niebuhr’s daughter ends her memoir, saying “So we must persevere under all trials. We shall probably never have enough courage to change what must be changed. The grace to accept with serenity that which cannot be changed will not easily come to us. And the wisdom to discern the one from the other takes more than our lifetime to acquire.”

So together let us conclude by reading responsively the wise, activist, serene and humble words of Reinhold Niebuhr that are in our own hymnal at number 461, “We Must Be Saved.”

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;

Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;

Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;

Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;

Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.