Sermon for March 8, 2009: “As Yourself”
Scripture Lessons: Geneis 2:7 “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”
Acts 17:28 “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’”
Galatians 5:14 “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The … great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; [is] that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.” (The Over-Soul, 1841)
Today I want to show the nature of our relationship to one another, and then based upon that relationship, I want to show our responsibility to one another.
Do you know what is the world’s largest creature? We may think of elephants, giant squids, or whales, perhaps we’ll even think of a dinosaur. But we’d be wrong on every count. It depends upon how you measure it, but by some measures, the world’s largest living organism is the Populus tremuloides (trem u low id eez). It is 80,000 years old and weighs 12 million pounds. Imagine that! Of course this creature is not an animal at all, but a giant grove of quaking aspen trees in the Rocky Mountains of Utah. Extensive DNA testing has shown that the entire grove is in fact one vast male aspen tree with a huge interconnected root system. This forest, which covers many acres of land, appears as many individual trees, but in fact it is only one giant organism.
I believe that the entire human race is connected in a way something like this. We are one vast organism – in our case, not merely a biological organism, but a spiritual organism. We all share the same life… we are animated by the same spirit.
The Source of our life is a Unitary Spirit. It is a single Life Force, a single Creating Energy, a single Over-Soul (as Emerson called it). In the language of the Bible, this creating, animating, life giving Source is called Elohim: the Divine One. The Jewish name for Elohim is Yahweh, “I Am.” In common parlance we call it God.
Imagine vast, unbounded Being, not “a” being, but Being itself. We find it difficult adequately to think of this Principle of Life, this infinitely conscious, aware, good, and self-giving Essence. But that unlimited Life-giving Life is what we mean by God. When we think of God as “a” being, we usually end up thinking of a big “man” in the sky. Admittedly some of the language of the Bible leads us to think this way, but it will not do. God is not a really big, really smart, really powerful, really good being. Not even the “Supreme Being.” God is Being itself, and following our analogy of the Aspen tree, God is both the root system of all being and the nourishing soil in which every being is rooted. The analogy, like all analogies, breaks down, but is still useful. A better image has God a the fountainhead, the eternal spring from which flows the water of life. This living water flows into all beings and by it all beings are sustained. As the Bible says. “In God we live and move and have our being.”
So, from this point of view, it is not as though we each have an individual, separate soul. Even though we speak of “my soul” or “your soul,” of “his soul” and “her soul;” there is actually only one “soul” of which we all partake. That is, we take part in a single human soul, which is not separate from or even different than the Life that is God. God is not the collective human soul. I am not saying that. God is more than that. God is the Life without limit of which each human life may be seen as a particular, limited instance. As a Buddhist might say, “A wave on the ocean is not the ocean, but the water that is the wave is not other than or separate from the ocean.” If we think of it in this way, God is the ocean and we are the waves, and every wave is connected to every other wave because all waves are part of the same ocean. The ocean has dark and unfathomed depths that the waves do not know, but the waves are no less one with the ocean because of this. Being has depths which no particular beings can know, but they are no less one with Being because of this. To use Biblical language, there is “one God, [the parents] of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”
It is clear then, that the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is not using metaphorical language when it says “as yourself.” The individual, separate and autonomous self is an illusion as far as this teaching is concerned. There is no such thing. This is underscored by the great image of the Christian Community; “The Body of Christ”, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Cor. 12:9)
The command to love our neighbor as ourselves recognizes that the self and the neighbor are one, since they are completely connected at the source. To love the neighbor is actually and not metaphorically to love the self. Furthermore, since it is God who is the animating principle present in the neighbor as in the self, when we love God, we must love each other, and when we love each other, we, in fact, are loving God. That’s what the Bible says.
Jesus was once teaching on the commandment that we must love our neighbor as ourselves, when a clever man tried to trip him up. “Ah!” said the man, “but just who is my neighbor?” In response Jesus told him a story, the great parable of the Good Samaritan. The point of the story is that the neighbor is the one who is in need. Or rather, the one who helps, makes himself or herself a neighbor to anyone whom he or she chooses. When we see somebody in need, we are called upon to love that person as ourselves, for the need that I see is my own need as well. The Good Samaritan didn’t say to himself, “Not my problem.” His understanding was that whatever human problem he encountered was his problem since, as part of the human race, he is one soul with all other humans.
The first people whom we must love as ourselves are those who are closest to ourselves. As the old saying goes, “Charity begins at home.” It doesn’t end there, but it begins there. The people we encounter every day are the ones we must attend to first. There are many, many needs right across the breakfast table from us, right next door, right in the pew beside us. There are people here who feel ignored, who are suffering alone, who have real needs going unmet. These needs are part of me, they are my needs as surely as any. Let us pay attention to the people near to us, for through familiarity, they are too easily overlooked.
But we must also become aware of the needs beyond the range of our immediate vision. There are needs in our world, which belong to us as well. There are many millions who suffer from sheer neglect. There are millions who are not powerful, who have no voice, whose tears are shed in secret. They cannot command anybody’s attention. And for the want of attention, they suffer and die. It is our responsibility to these, who are no less a part of us, to pay attention. It is our responsibility to raise our awareness, to look and to listen and then to feel with them and to do what we can. As a church, we need to do better in looking beyond ourselves. We need to pay greater attention and find ways to do more.
Beloved, if we can acknowledge that as humans we are one soul with all humans, that we are connected at our source, if we can attend to the real needs that are all around us, and if we can resolve to act, to do whatever we can, then we will be doing all that true religion requires. “For all the law [of God, and all true religion] is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” May it be so with us.
