The Things Death Cannot Overcome

"Work and create things death cannot overcome."

--Gyula Illyes

"The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace. . . ."

I thought of that epitaph again last week, when I found myself quoting from the same passage of Galatians near the end of my sermon on Finding a Spiritual Discipline. What should be the ultimate goal of a spiritual discipline if not the acquisition of such qualities in one's life? And I thought of it again this week when I happened on the quotation that appears on your orders of service, and from which I took my title for this morning: "Work and create things death cannot overcome."

The entire passage in Galatians goes, ". . .The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." I know how far I fall, much of the time, from accomplishing those characteristics in my own life. But it has always seemed to me that this is what the church is really about: it is about helping to create a life where those characteristics are cultivated and brought into full blossom. It is about helping to create a world where those characteristics and not their opposites remain in the ascendant.

Love, joy, peace. These were qualities of a good life as we learned about it in my little Unitarian Sunday School in Castine, Maine. These were qualities that the good man Jesus was supposed to have embodied in his life, as well as the other great religious leaders from every place and every time, and which we were supposed to emulate. We were to live the best lives of which we were capable, and to work to make the world a better, fairer place for all. We were called to leave behind us what Martin Luther King, Jr., one of my earliest heroes, would later call "a committed life." Work and create things death cannot overcome.

Oh, I know all about the faults of the church. And I have my doubts about whether or not religion is always a good thing. (Some of what passes for it, which has been on display this week at the Massachusetts State House during the debates on same-gender marriage, actually disgusts me.) But if not for church, I'm not sure I would have learned those other things in the same way. Serving others, serving the world, seemed like a noble aspiration; could it even be that it was a requirement for living a good life?

I don't know about you, but I have always had the sense that life's ultimate goal is to die with as few regrets as possible. The goal is to become the best people we are capable of being. The goal is to leave some positive mark on the world, to help someone else along the way, to leave the world just a little better than we found it. Even one person better will do.

At its best, the church is there to help us accomplish this goal. The church is there to offer us comfort and company on the journey, and to point us toward those qualities of living which make life better and which make life worthwhile. It's about making our lives and the lives of others more redolent of those qualities: love, joy, peace. It's about creating something which even death cannot overcome.

Working to create things of permanence in a world of change and impermanence is, it seems to me, what the church is ultimately all about. It is, ultimately, the reason that I pledge my financial support to the church. For without our support--and whether we like it or not, that means our financial support as well as our time and talent--the church can accomplish nothing of permanent value.

What do you want to leave behind? What kind of a record do you wish to bequeath to the world when your time on earth is over? What would your personal epitaph have to say about you?

The 16th century Polish Unitarians said, perhaps with unintended humor, "We ought not be ashamed if in some way our church should improve." Life must have some goal beyond the fulfillment of our own needs. "Each good word or deed is a small fire in the dark of the night," wrote the Transylvanian Unitarian minister and martyr Imre Gellert. Indeed, it is only when I become so engrossed in something that I forget about my own needs that I am truly happy. It is when I am working unselfconsciously toward a goal beyond myself that I find the most satisfaction in living.

There is a beautiful phrase in the catechism of the Transylvanian Unitarian church. It says that the purpose of our lives on earth is "to refine our souls through love." As one of the ministers there has written, God wants us "to devote our lives to make the earth more beautiful--to grow in the power of peace and soul, to become richer in love and life. . . ." [Karoly Kiss]

In the sermon from which I have quoted ["I Bring You News of Great Joy"], Imre Gellert wrote,

Do not fail to utter the redeeming word. . . . Do not withhold praise when someone deserves it. One word of praise from you may be redemption for your child, your grandchild, your colleague, a person suffering from an inferiority complex, for a person suffering spiritual misery. So let us never fail to utter the redemptive word of praise. . . . Everybody, in his or her own way, in a given moment, may be a redeemer for somebody.

It had given me a place where I felt safe and secure, and where I and my questions were valued. It provided a community. It gave me a sense of the importance of having a place of sanctuary, and of the necessity for silence and solitude in one's life. It provided a place to explore the mystery of my existence, and to ask ultimate questions about life and death and why I was here in the first place and what I should do about it. It offered me friendship, and it offered me values by which to live my life and to understand the issues of the day. It offered me positive role models, and it made me think about the brevity of life and the reality of death. Ultimately, it would give me a vocation, though that did not come until many years later.

The church has also offered countless opportunities for frustration and disappointment, but that has been overshadowed by the wonderful people and friends I have met because of my work in the church, and by the many places I have traveled to do that work. It has given me access to the most profound moments in the lives of other human beings: birth, death, and all that stands between. I have celebrated new partnerships and new lives and I have stood by the bedsides of the dying. I have touched and been touched by all of this. I have been invited into the lives of whole communities of people. I can truly say that in a very real sense the church has given me my life: that part of my life which is most important because it has made me appreciate all the gifts I have received of family, of friends, and of life itself.

When I consider my church pledge, all of these things come to mind. How could I possibly put a value on my life? Oh, I know that much of my pledge will go to fulfilling mundane institutional needs: upkeep and utilities for the buildings, salaries for the minister and staff, office machines and supplies, dues to our District and to our greater Unitarian Universalist Association. I know that there won't be enough money for all the programs I would like to see or for the outreach that is so desperately needed to those beyond these walls. It is an imperfect world as yet, one very much still in the making, and I know that part of the reason for that is my own lack of generosity and commitment, my own selfishness, my own want of vision. The church will never do enough until I am willing to help make it happen. I know that.

But it is those intangibles of the church that keep me coming back and keep me supporting it. It is the sense of being part of great story, of an ongoing narrative of religious tradition, of people who have made a difference, of beauty and art, of the highest aspirations of the human spirit. When I am in the churches of New England I am touching that heritage and its various liberation movements from the Puritans on down through the Transcendentalists and even to our own day. When I am in the churches of far-off Transylvania, literally "the land beyond the forest," I am touching the heritage of the Reformation times, and of the great epic of those heretics and martyrs throughout all the ages who have worked for truth and freedom and who believed that religious toleration was a necessity in a pluralistic world and that conscience was all in all. In both places, I am moved by the memory of those who have been willing to die for what they believed.

The building is only the visible sign of all of this. I hope you will forgive when I say that for me, the building is not very important at all. Oh, I happen to love this particular building, but I have served as a minister and worshipped in a lot of different buildings, and I can say that all of them were beautiful for what they contained. All of them contained the spirit which some of us choose to call God. From a little neo-Gothic building on the Minnesota prairie, to a modern building on a busy suburban street, to this magnificent example of a third generation New England meeting house in the middle of an old seafaring town, the building is simply the vessel for our hopes and dreams of a better world. The church, on the other hand, is the people and the ideas, the great liberal religious tradition and all it has stood for across the centuries and stands for still, and which will outlive us and transcend the death that each of us is fated to die. It is the place we are called to live out the highest and best that we know, to be the best people we can be.

It is simply the place where we begin the work to create those things that death cannot overcome. Much as we might wish it, the building may not last forever, but our words and deeds will. As Sandor Kolcsar has written, ". . .As the seeds die out one by one in the parched fields, all of us shall die; we shall fall back into God's embrace, back to the dust." Karoly Kiss reminds us that "Our ancestors prayed like this, those whose bodies now nourish the flowers."

When I hear the human situation spoken of with such passion and poetry, I know that I am home, and I am reminded again of what I must do in the brief time that I am here on this beautiful green spinning planet Earth. Work and create things death cannot overcome.

I hope that you will think on these things as you consider your support for our church this year, and give generously to all that we already stand for, and, more importantly, to all that we still might be.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock