Wholly Human
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 7, 2014
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Back in October I shared with you a story from our Unitarian history concerning the potential consequences of revealing one’s sermon topic ahead of time, namely that people might stay home if they’re not interested in or don’t like the topic of the day. Of course it can work the other way as well...and indeed, given the topic of today’s sermon it may have been wise for me to be more revelatory with today’s sermon title ... for today’s topic is lust.
For the benefit of those who may be wondering how or why lust is even a sermon topic at all, today is the third of a seven part series on sin and more specifically, the Seven Deadly Sins we are exploring this church year. If you want to catch up on the first two sins covered, gluttony and envy, you can read them on the church website.
At this point its important to recall how we’ve defined sin in this series....rather than a specific act we might engage or not engage in,
we said sin is an obstruction, a block or blind spot that prevents us from seeing and knowing something essential about ourselves or others.
Lust, as sin, is usually defined as an excessive or inordinate desire for pleasures of the body... which is generally understood as sexual pleasure in a variety of forms.
Human beings are of course sexual beings and part of human sexuality is a desire to explore and express our sexuality in body, mind, and spirit. We do this in innumerable ways which I don’t need to articulate here. There is nothing inherently wrong or “sinful” about this. At its best, human sexuality is a gift.
Our sexuality as human beings is also a source of power and vulnerability for us...and this scares us. This fear is reflected in how we deal both individually and culturally with human desire overall.
Augustine, the early Christian philosopher and theologian whose writings have had an enormous, and some have argued, inordinate, if not harmful, influence on Western attitudes towards human sexuality, wrote of his struggle with sexual desire in his Confessions,
“But, wretched youth that I was-supremely wretched even in the very outset of my youth- I had entreated chastity from you [God] and had prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” For I was afraid lest you should hear me too soon, and too soon cure me of my disease of lust which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished.”
Now, we could limit our understanding of lust to sex and sexual desire, but we might do well to reflect more broadly on lust. For it may manifest itself as an inordinate desire to surround oneself with items of luxury or convenience. It may appear as an all consuming desire to avoid discomfort or pain...including the discomfort or pain of human vulnerability...or it may be manifest as a overwhelming desire to rid oneself of the desires that haunt us in the first place. Understood this way lust would include an inordinate desire to be physically, emotionally or spiritually pure or chaste, as much as it is understood as an an inordinate desire for sexual pleasure.
Poor Augustine, he, like so many of us, seems to have been a person who wanted to have his cake and eat it too and then started to feel guilty, or more likely, shame about it. Though he undoubtedly meant well, he seems to have swapped lust for physical pleasure for a lust for spiritual purity. And in so doing placed body and spirit in direct competition with one another.
Perhaps this is why we in the Western world have such a hard time with pleasure and moderation, sexual and otherwise. The separation of the body from spirit, the temporal from the eternal, the profane from the sacred has led us to a dualistic understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world and others.
This duality has continued and even sharpened with the advent of the concept of the individual during the Enlightenment, which Saul Bellow referred to in our second reading. While undeniably liberating, the concept of the individual as it has evolved within the dualistic paradigm, with its separation of body and spirit has set us adrift in a world where, more than ever, we are able to more freely create, claim and change identities while remaining utterly oblivious to who or what we are. Thus, the individual is more powerful and yet more vulnerable than anytime before...and we are scared... and it shows.
Our fear is manifest in our lust for self-satisfaction... and the pursuit of what Rabbi Howard Cooper calls, “junk pleasures... drip-fed to us within a 24/7 culture of relentlessly trivialized infotainment.” We seek and it it is fed to us on tv, the radio, and the books, newspapers, and magazines we read. We witness it in the halls of power, on campuses, in houses of worship, and on playing fields as well as battlefields.
In our lust for self-satisfaction, really a crisis of identity and meaning, we are running from the spirit, running from the body, trying to escape our humanity but ultimately running in circles...round and round we go and still, we find ourselves with ”hearts that get no real wage...souls that find no nourishment.
In the Talmud, it is said “On the Day of Judgment, a person will have to give account for every good thing they might have enjoyed and did not.” These words pierce through the conventional understandings of God, sin, and judgment that have become crystalized in our collective conscience. We might ask ourselves how we’d fare if we had to give such an account.
It is not desire nor the objects of our desire, that makes lust a deadly sin, it is the degree to which it prevents us from seeing and accepting our humanity and that of others that makes lust a deadly sin. Ironically, lust keeps us from the good things we might have enjoyed in the pursuit of lesser things. It closes us off from ourselves and others, causing us to view the world with tunnel vision.
There was a time in my life, a long time, when I lusted after perfection. It went far beyond merely wanting to be good at something. I wanted to be perfect in whatever endeavor I pursued...music, painting, writing, martial arts, skiing and in whatever environment I found myself in, family, work, social, etc. This lust so intensified that I came to believe that if I wasn’t completely perfect, I was utterly flawed. I believed, to quote a character in one of Will Ferrel’s goofy movies, Talladega Nights, “If you’re not first, you’re last.”
This lust for perfection created a gap between the people around me and indeed between who I was trying to be and who I really am. This was made worse by the fact that while I was good at a lot of things I pursued, I was not perfect and thus didn’t enjoy them to the degree I might otherwise have. Worse still I came to see myself as woefully mediocre which caused me to intensify efforts to appear perfect outwardly.
With lust nothing else matters except satisfying our craving. “Other people become ways of satisfying our needs. They are merely objects to service us, bring us food, run our business, give us attention, leave us alone, make us comfortable, keep us from pain. Everyone and everything becomes a means to an end, warm bodies to satisfy our desire. Lust perpetuates the illusion of separateness and independence. It is a distortion of freedom and individuality.”
Lust is marked by intensity of desire, but its denial of our wholeness chains us to a shallow existence that, in the words of Howard Cooper, “impoverish and terrify the soul.”
On the other hand, desires which affirm our wholeness free us and allows us to pursue joy, or what Howard Copper calls, “genuine pleasure” which he says, “enhances our sense of well-being, lifts and expresses our spirits, ennobles us so that we can feel a grateful and humble satisfaction in being alive, being human, being ourselves.”
So how do we begin to counter lust, which denies our full humanity and keeps us in pursuit of the superficial?
I’ve mentioned before that Gregory the Great, the man responsible for formulating the Seven Deadly Sins, also came up with Seven Heavenly Virtues to counter each of the seven sins. For lust, he prescribed... anyone want to guess? Chastity. No surprise, I’m sure. Chastity in this case is defined as courage and boldness and the “embracing of moral wholesomeness in order to achieve purity of thought through education and betterment.” (source: freedomoffaith.com)
As we have already noted, the pursuit of “moral wholesomeness or purity of thought” can itself deny our humanity and devolve into lust for moral wholesomeness or purity And let’s face it, it sounds like a drag.
Surely there’s a different way?
In his Divinity School Address, delivered in 1838, our Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said the capital secret of the profession of ministry was to convert life into truth...and though right now I’m lifting his words out of the specific context in which Emerson spoke them, it is abundantly clear to me that what Emerson was saying in a broader sense was, be yourself. Acknowledge the value, the wisdom, the struggle, the pain, the sorrow, joy, mistakes, and accomplishments of your life, learn from them, live from the depth and breadth of those experiences.
Lust denies the value of the depth and breath of our experience as does the kind of perfection alluded to in the pursuit of moral wholesomeness or purity of thought. Both prevent us from seeing who we are by denying very real parts of ourselves and experience as individuals as well as inter-dependent beings.
Perhaps then a more effective way of countering lust is to seek wholeness rather than chaste perfection...to make peace, as our first reading teaches, in the heart. We do this when we embrace rather than deny our humanity. When we devote time to practices and pursuits that help us discover rather than hide from ourselves and our relationship to the world in which we live.
Broader exposure to and reflection on religious philosophies and writings, particularly Buddhism, Unitarian and Universalism and Christian mysticism, in my UU church and with a spiritual director helped me come to appreciate and affirm the totality of my humanity. Our Unitarian forbear, James Luther Adams said, “Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human.” An insight so dear to me I put on our new wayside pulpit out front, but I also believe church is not only a place to practice what it means to be human, it is a place to discover the depth and breadth of our own humanity that we might know and be who we are.
Those of you who have been part of the “Living a Life that Matters” adult RE (religious education) groups this year may echoes of the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, a struggle from which he emerges with a greater sense of who he is and how to be himself.
A Hasidic story also highlights the significance of knowing and being who we are:
Rabbi Zusya failed one day, failed to arrive as usual at his study house. His students went to his home, where they found him ill in bed, trembling, with blankets pulled over his shoulders...I am dying, he said, and I’m very frightened. Why are you afraid, asked his favorite student. Surely you of all people can’t be worried that God will find fault with you? All you life you kept the commandments as faithfully as Moses. All your life you prayed as steadily as Abraham. Why then should you fear to face God? You don’t understand, replied Zusya, for if God asks me why I didn’t act like Moses, I can tell him I was not Moses. If God asks me why I didn’t behave like Abraham, I can tell him I wasn’t Abraham. But when God says, Zusya, how can you account for those times when you failed to be Zusya- what can I tell him?
What about you? What would your response be?
Lust would have us believe ourselves to be one dimensional, a partial self. Conventional approaches to counter lust by and large ask us to be someone or something we’re not, deny the complexity of who we are, and sometimes ask us to swap one single dimensional identity for another.
Let us instead, as people of faith, rooted in reason, receptive to awe and mystery and seeking of peace within ourselves and throughout the world support and encourage one another to explore, struggle with, and celebrate our humanity that we may know ourselves to be and live wholly human.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 7, 2014
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Back in October I shared with you a story from our Unitarian history concerning the potential consequences of revealing one’s sermon topic ahead of time, namely that people might stay home if they’re not interested in or don’t like the topic of the day. Of course it can work the other way as well...and indeed, given the topic of today’s sermon it may have been wise for me to be more revelatory with today’s sermon title ... for today’s topic is lust.
For the benefit of those who may be wondering how or why lust is even a sermon topic at all, today is the third of a seven part series on sin and more specifically, the Seven Deadly Sins we are exploring this church year. If you want to catch up on the first two sins covered, gluttony and envy, you can read them on the church website.
At this point its important to recall how we’ve defined sin in this series....rather than a specific act we might engage or not engage in,
we said sin is an obstruction, a block or blind spot that prevents us from seeing and knowing something essential about ourselves or others.
Lust, as sin, is usually defined as an excessive or inordinate desire for pleasures of the body... which is generally understood as sexual pleasure in a variety of forms.
Human beings are of course sexual beings and part of human sexuality is a desire to explore and express our sexuality in body, mind, and spirit. We do this in innumerable ways which I don’t need to articulate here. There is nothing inherently wrong or “sinful” about this. At its best, human sexuality is a gift.
Our sexuality as human beings is also a source of power and vulnerability for us...and this scares us. This fear is reflected in how we deal both individually and culturally with human desire overall.
Augustine, the early Christian philosopher and theologian whose writings have had an enormous, and some have argued, inordinate, if not harmful, influence on Western attitudes towards human sexuality, wrote of his struggle with sexual desire in his Confessions,
“But, wretched youth that I was-supremely wretched even in the very outset of my youth- I had entreated chastity from you [God] and had prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” For I was afraid lest you should hear me too soon, and too soon cure me of my disease of lust which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished.”
Now, we could limit our understanding of lust to sex and sexual desire, but we might do well to reflect more broadly on lust. For it may manifest itself as an inordinate desire to surround oneself with items of luxury or convenience. It may appear as an all consuming desire to avoid discomfort or pain...including the discomfort or pain of human vulnerability...or it may be manifest as a overwhelming desire to rid oneself of the desires that haunt us in the first place. Understood this way lust would include an inordinate desire to be physically, emotionally or spiritually pure or chaste, as much as it is understood as an an inordinate desire for sexual pleasure.
Poor Augustine, he, like so many of us, seems to have been a person who wanted to have his cake and eat it too and then started to feel guilty, or more likely, shame about it. Though he undoubtedly meant well, he seems to have swapped lust for physical pleasure for a lust for spiritual purity. And in so doing placed body and spirit in direct competition with one another.
Perhaps this is why we in the Western world have such a hard time with pleasure and moderation, sexual and otherwise. The separation of the body from spirit, the temporal from the eternal, the profane from the sacred has led us to a dualistic understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world and others.
This duality has continued and even sharpened with the advent of the concept of the individual during the Enlightenment, which Saul Bellow referred to in our second reading. While undeniably liberating, the concept of the individual as it has evolved within the dualistic paradigm, with its separation of body and spirit has set us adrift in a world where, more than ever, we are able to more freely create, claim and change identities while remaining utterly oblivious to who or what we are. Thus, the individual is more powerful and yet more vulnerable than anytime before...and we are scared... and it shows.
Our fear is manifest in our lust for self-satisfaction... and the pursuit of what Rabbi Howard Cooper calls, “junk pleasures... drip-fed to us within a 24/7 culture of relentlessly trivialized infotainment.” We seek and it it is fed to us on tv, the radio, and the books, newspapers, and magazines we read. We witness it in the halls of power, on campuses, in houses of worship, and on playing fields as well as battlefields.
In our lust for self-satisfaction, really a crisis of identity and meaning, we are running from the spirit, running from the body, trying to escape our humanity but ultimately running in circles...round and round we go and still, we find ourselves with ”hearts that get no real wage...souls that find no nourishment.
In the Talmud, it is said “On the Day of Judgment, a person will have to give account for every good thing they might have enjoyed and did not.” These words pierce through the conventional understandings of God, sin, and judgment that have become crystalized in our collective conscience. We might ask ourselves how we’d fare if we had to give such an account.
It is not desire nor the objects of our desire, that makes lust a deadly sin, it is the degree to which it prevents us from seeing and accepting our humanity and that of others that makes lust a deadly sin. Ironically, lust keeps us from the good things we might have enjoyed in the pursuit of lesser things. It closes us off from ourselves and others, causing us to view the world with tunnel vision.
There was a time in my life, a long time, when I lusted after perfection. It went far beyond merely wanting to be good at something. I wanted to be perfect in whatever endeavor I pursued...music, painting, writing, martial arts, skiing and in whatever environment I found myself in, family, work, social, etc. This lust so intensified that I came to believe that if I wasn’t completely perfect, I was utterly flawed. I believed, to quote a character in one of Will Ferrel’s goofy movies, Talladega Nights, “If you’re not first, you’re last.”
This lust for perfection created a gap between the people around me and indeed between who I was trying to be and who I really am. This was made worse by the fact that while I was good at a lot of things I pursued, I was not perfect and thus didn’t enjoy them to the degree I might otherwise have. Worse still I came to see myself as woefully mediocre which caused me to intensify efforts to appear perfect outwardly.
With lust nothing else matters except satisfying our craving. “Other people become ways of satisfying our needs. They are merely objects to service us, bring us food, run our business, give us attention, leave us alone, make us comfortable, keep us from pain. Everyone and everything becomes a means to an end, warm bodies to satisfy our desire. Lust perpetuates the illusion of separateness and independence. It is a distortion of freedom and individuality.”
Lust is marked by intensity of desire, but its denial of our wholeness chains us to a shallow existence that, in the words of Howard Cooper, “impoverish and terrify the soul.”
On the other hand, desires which affirm our wholeness free us and allows us to pursue joy, or what Howard Copper calls, “genuine pleasure” which he says, “enhances our sense of well-being, lifts and expresses our spirits, ennobles us so that we can feel a grateful and humble satisfaction in being alive, being human, being ourselves.”
So how do we begin to counter lust, which denies our full humanity and keeps us in pursuit of the superficial?
I’ve mentioned before that Gregory the Great, the man responsible for formulating the Seven Deadly Sins, also came up with Seven Heavenly Virtues to counter each of the seven sins. For lust, he prescribed... anyone want to guess? Chastity. No surprise, I’m sure. Chastity in this case is defined as courage and boldness and the “embracing of moral wholesomeness in order to achieve purity of thought through education and betterment.” (source: freedomoffaith.com)
As we have already noted, the pursuit of “moral wholesomeness or purity of thought” can itself deny our humanity and devolve into lust for moral wholesomeness or purity And let’s face it, it sounds like a drag.
Surely there’s a different way?
In his Divinity School Address, delivered in 1838, our Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said the capital secret of the profession of ministry was to convert life into truth...and though right now I’m lifting his words out of the specific context in which Emerson spoke them, it is abundantly clear to me that what Emerson was saying in a broader sense was, be yourself. Acknowledge the value, the wisdom, the struggle, the pain, the sorrow, joy, mistakes, and accomplishments of your life, learn from them, live from the depth and breadth of those experiences.
Lust denies the value of the depth and breath of our experience as does the kind of perfection alluded to in the pursuit of moral wholesomeness or purity of thought. Both prevent us from seeing who we are by denying very real parts of ourselves and experience as individuals as well as inter-dependent beings.
Perhaps then a more effective way of countering lust is to seek wholeness rather than chaste perfection...to make peace, as our first reading teaches, in the heart. We do this when we embrace rather than deny our humanity. When we devote time to practices and pursuits that help us discover rather than hide from ourselves and our relationship to the world in which we live.
Broader exposure to and reflection on religious philosophies and writings, particularly Buddhism, Unitarian and Universalism and Christian mysticism, in my UU church and with a spiritual director helped me come to appreciate and affirm the totality of my humanity. Our Unitarian forbear, James Luther Adams said, “Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human.” An insight so dear to me I put on our new wayside pulpit out front, but I also believe church is not only a place to practice what it means to be human, it is a place to discover the depth and breadth of our own humanity that we might know and be who we are.
Those of you who have been part of the “Living a Life that Matters” adult RE (religious education) groups this year may echoes of the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, a struggle from which he emerges with a greater sense of who he is and how to be himself.
A Hasidic story also highlights the significance of knowing and being who we are:
Rabbi Zusya failed one day, failed to arrive as usual at his study house. His students went to his home, where they found him ill in bed, trembling, with blankets pulled over his shoulders...I am dying, he said, and I’m very frightened. Why are you afraid, asked his favorite student. Surely you of all people can’t be worried that God will find fault with you? All you life you kept the commandments as faithfully as Moses. All your life you prayed as steadily as Abraham. Why then should you fear to face God? You don’t understand, replied Zusya, for if God asks me why I didn’t act like Moses, I can tell him I was not Moses. If God asks me why I didn’t behave like Abraham, I can tell him I wasn’t Abraham. But when God says, Zusya, how can you account for those times when you failed to be Zusya- what can I tell him?
What about you? What would your response be?
Lust would have us believe ourselves to be one dimensional, a partial self. Conventional approaches to counter lust by and large ask us to be someone or something we’re not, deny the complexity of who we are, and sometimes ask us to swap one single dimensional identity for another.
Let us instead, as people of faith, rooted in reason, receptive to awe and mystery and seeking of peace within ourselves and throughout the world support and encourage one another to explore, struggle with, and celebrate our humanity that we may know ourselves to be and live wholly human.
Amen and Blessed Be
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