Between a Rock and
A Fungible Place

A Sermon by
Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered Sunday, September 27, 1998

At First Parish in Bedford

This is Your Life

When I was growing up, there was a TV show during which they’d bring an unsuspecting soul out of the studio audience and tell his or her life story. It was creatively called, "This Is Your Life." The master of ceremonies would recount part of a story and from offstage you would hear a little old lady say, "I remember the way you used to sit in the back row of my geometry class and throw paper airplanes at the little blonde girl across the aisle." Whereupon the guest of honor would say something like, "Oh my God, it’s Mrs. Connley!" And Mrs. Connley would come out from behind the curtain and they would hug and usually cry. The master of ceremonies would tell a few more stories and introduce a few more mystery guests until the past joined the present and the guest’s life was told. Then, the show was over. It took a half hour.

Deprived of a television program, the rest of us are left instead to review our lives through a hodgepodge of stories that describe what we think we have done and what we think has been done to us. Only rarely does it make sense.

There is a fascinating passage near the end of Deuteronomy: "And not until this day has God given you a heart to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear. I led you through the wilderness forty years and the clothes on you back did not wear out..." In other words, for the four prior decades the children of Israel had wandered clueless around the wilderness and never had to shop for clothes. Sounds odd, if you ask me.

Simcha Bunam, one of the early Hasidic masters, explains that this passage means that the Israelites did not understand what God did during those forty years because everything that happened was unique to that particular time. There had never been anything like it before; there would never be anything like it again. The wandering Israelites of Sinai never figured out what was going on because it never dawned on them that they were players in a sacred story.

At the end of forty years, however, the Jews realized that religious history was about to be clothed in their deeds, made from whatever they had done. Not only from the holy moments, but from the mundane, the wayward, even the sinful moments as well. Imagine, ultimate truth clothed in the stories of your life. (This, indeed, is your life.)

Now if you protest that the deeds of your life are simply too irreligious to be included in such a holy book, take comfort in the behavior of everyone from Adam through Joshua: Murderers, lechers, liars, cheats, thieves. As Hanan Brichto, professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College, used to quip, there’s no one in the Hebrew Bible you’d want your kid to grow up to be like.

And the wilderness generation, that wacky, zany band of irreligious forty-year wanderers—who, with their own eyes, saw the Red Sea split and Moses ascend Mount Sinai, who ate manna for breakfast and quail for supper—these were the ones who built the golden calf, denied God at every opportunity, begged to go back to Egypt and committed adultery with every tribe they met. These exemplary spiritual specimens were privileged to have the serial rights to their life story chosen for the script of the most holy document ever recorded.

So there’s hope for you and me, yet. But alas, for most of us, only at the end of forty years do we begin to understand that even our life stories are sacred, that no television show could possibly comprehend them, and that God has been involved all along. Reverence is the only option.

Recently, when on the floor of the United States Senate Joseph Lieberman became the first prominent Democrat to publicly condemn President Clinton’s behavior in the Lewinsky Affair, he said that such behavior "reinforces one of the worst messages being delivered by our popular culture: that values are fungible." Fungible! he said, and I wondered if this might possibly, plausibly relate to fungi, to mushrooms; but I just wasn’t sure. So I went to the dictionary and learned that "fungible" is a legal term meaning that one thing can be equally substituted or exchanged for another thing. One or the other, it doesn’t matter; whatever. If it doesn’t matter whether we lie or tell the truth, then these values are fungible.

However exploitative I may regard the President’s behavior, and I do, I am not at all sure that I agree with Senator Lieberman’s thesis, or with those who direly suggest that there has been of late a terrible decline in Americans’ personal or public values: whether one does or does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, for but one example, used to be a far more fungible value than it is today. That we are so agitated by this scandal means—yes—that we are prurient, distractable, obsessively sexualized, and it also means that our trust does indeed commendably and appropriately depend upon some consonance of public and private behavior. As Caryl Rivers observed in a recent column in the Boston Globe, inasmuch as our society is less inclined to put up with the abuse of women and minorities or behaving one way in public and another way in private, it is likely that in recent years hypocrisy has declined more than morality.

This is not, however, a sermon that will dwell directly upon our President’s and nation’s dilemmas. Rather I intend to do my part to initiate our year-long theme for services at First Parish, the theme of values. If we may make a value continuum from those that are rock-solid and absolute to those that are, well, fungible, where are we? What are our values? How do we make value judgments? And what, if anything, is there about a Unitarian Universalist perspective that is helpful to our consideration of values?

The truth is that (like the President’s uncertainty about the definition of the word "is") I not only had to look up the word fungible, but I also looked up the word "value." Just for the record, the dictionary says that a value is "a principle, standard, or quality considered worthwhile or desirable." Also for the record, on that Mission and Covenant Statement that hangs on that back wall and occasionally is read, we say that one of our goals is to "harmonize our practices with our values" in all that we do. "Among our values (it says) are love, honesty, humility, individual responsibility and respect for mystery. These values are essential to our understanding, appreciating, and changing our lives."

We will have done a very good thing if, at the end of this discombobulated year, we can say that we have achieved a greater understanding or actual embodiment of what all this means.

I want to think first about our Unitarian Universalist perspective of values. What unique, distinctive and particular view do we bring to the table—unlike the perspective of any other religious tradition? And for the answer to that question, I turn to a story from the Jewish Talmud:

A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?"

God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says this, but Rabbi Yochanan says that, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says such-and-such…"

In other words, there is not a unique Unitarian Universalist perspective just as there is not a Unitarian Universalist theology—we have many theologies and many perspectives—and that indeed is a unique stance among religious traditions.

This leads many, including too many of us, to conclude that Unitarian Universalism is a tradition that is, well, fungible. Recently, my son Eric who is studying yoga in western Massachusetts, said that when he told his teacher that he is the son of a UU minister, the teacher asked him seriously, "Oh, aren’t they the ones that believe in the 10 Suggestions, not the 10 Commandments?" Seriously, the teacher asked this; he was not making a banal joke. This saddens me.

While we all know the obvious that this church and tradition is not a place of authoritarian, arbitrary, God-imposed rules where values are thrown and swallowed like rocks, neither is this a place of nihilism, of no values.

Here it is important to know our history. Unitarianism and Universalism, though they have evolved into a yet more inclusive movement, are heirs to what Paul Tillich called "the Protestant principle." "Protestantism has a principle," he said, "that stands beyond all its realizations…the Protestant principle, in name derived from the protest of the ‘protestants’ against decisions of the Catholic majority, contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, even if this claim is made by a Protestant church. The Protestant principle is the judge of every religious and cultural reality, including the religion and culture which calls itself ‘Protestant.’" This principle, Tillich discerned, is "a living, moving, restless power."

The Protestant principle is not some abstract theologism. Historically for our forbears, it meant that the Bible could be understood as an inspired but surely human document. It meant that nature could be the subject of our study and wonder, not just the object of our fear and propitiation. It meant that when it comes to the divine right of kings, our forbears could say, Who says? It meant—when it comes to people—that we are not merely "sinners in the hands of an angry God," but human beings with capacities and potential, as well as limits.

That we are heirs to the Protestant principle means not that we have no values but that we must maintain a self-critical awareness that even our most cherished values ought be applied like magic amulets. Living in the dust and heat of reality leads every one of us to very human flesh-and-blood dilemmas, conundrums, and—especially—choices.

For example, as another commentator asked last week, "Do we want a government to be overthrown by those dead-set on proving that Clinton lied about whether he had ‘physical contact with those areas of the body with the specific intent to arouse or gratify?’" Except to the most rock-ribbed and fanatical, the answer is not simply self-evident.

While I doubt that morality has declined, I do believe that the questions are getting more difficult, particularly due to the rise of pluralism. The sociologist Peter Berger has observed that through most of human history human beings lived in general consensus on the nature of reality and the norms by which one should lead one’s life, but that as we have become more radically inclusive and pluralistic, as we acknowledge that there are lots of ways for children to grow up and for adults to relate, we no longer have the same consensus of norms or even reality.

"Certainty is harder to come by," Berger says. "People may still hold the same beliefs and values that were held by their predecessors…but they will hold them in a different manner: what before was given through the accident of birth now becomes a matter of choice. Pluralism brings on an era of many choices and, by the same token, an era of uncertainty."

Ours is very much an era of uncertainty.

I appreciate your patience through this somewhat-dry theological/sociological background for what I wish to suggest next is that this place—this First Parish, this wacky, zany Unitarian Universalist band of wanderers—is ideally suited to journey in this era of uncertainty. The Protestant principle is an uncertainty principle; but I urge you to resist the banal and appreciate the subtlety: ours is not a temple to uncertainty but necessarily a temple of uncertainty: a sanctuary where the reality of uncertainty is known and the significance and consequence of choice is appreciated.

Neither fanatics nor nihilists, we are pragmatic idealists: we may not know what the truth is; we may only get glimpses of it here and there; but—truly—in faith we can never give up on the truth. We—you and I—may some days look anything but loving—we may only rarely feel loved or loving; but here we know we must never give up on love. Here we know that human beings are as capable of miracle as madness, and that we must not give up on one another, or on ourselves, or on those realities beyond ourselves that are as real as stone and as mysterious.

We are, it seems from a lot of the peak experience stories I've heard from you, nature worshippers as much as anything else. These stones are here as reminders that nature can comfort and chastise and teach us much.

I have trouble being more articulate on the subject of values and nature-as-our-teacher than was Robert Frost in his poem, "There Are Roughly Zones" in which he describes a peach tree that he had planted in his native New Hampshire and, now in winter, Frost says:

Neither peach trees nor values are fungible: there are always choices and consequences to what we do. "What comes over a man, is it soul or mind—/That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?/You would say his ambition was to extend the reach/Clear to the Arctic of every living kind./Why is his nature forever so hard to teach/That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,/There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?"

I wonder if the peach made it?

Here too, First Parish is a place of valuable learning, where lives turn and change. Alben W. Barkley from Kentucky was the Senate’s majority leader in the 1940s and he liked to quote an old hillbilly he called Uncle Zeke who was famous for his wisdom. Asked why he was so wise, according to Barkley, Uncle Zeke responded: "Waal, I’ve got good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience; and experience… waal, that comes from bad judgment." Ours may be a temple of uncertainty; it is also a temple of values and experience born of joy and sorrow.

Or, as Nelson Mandela more eloquently expressed it last week at the White House, "If our expectations, if our fondest prayers are not realized, then we should all bear in mind that the greatest glory of living lies not in never falling but in rising every time you fall."

There is but one more thing I need to say in describing this temple—and welcoming you to this temple—that is between a rock and a fungible place; and that is that our Unitarian Universalist perspective on values can be corrupted: by banal whatever, anything-goes, skeptical fungibility to be sure, but even more corrupting I believe is the corrosion of arrogance. If there is nothing in our values that is rock-solid and absolute under every circumstance, it is tempting to deceive ourselves into believing that it is our judgments and our perceptions that are rock-solid and absolute.

I believe, with Rabbi Kushner, that this wilderness generation of wacky, zany irreligious wanderers—we are players in a sacred story: our life stories are sacred, no television show can possibly comprehend us, and that God or some living, moving restless power has been involved all along; and therefore, reverence—or humbleness, humility, however-infrequently glimpsed awareness that we are in the presence of the Most High—reverence is the only option.

Between a rock and a fungible place, my blood and flesh friends, may we be awake and aware of uncertainty, and choices and consequences, and all that that is of value that we are in the presence of.