Several weeks ago a disheveled young man walked up to the main entrance of a faith community in Houston, Texas. He rang the door buzzer to gain admittance and was queried by the receptionist about the purpose of his visit. He answered, “I’ve come by to see how things are going for you.” This was an odd answer and the receptionist, not knowing what else to do with such an unusual reply, buzzed the minister, who decided he would have to go to the door to discover what the young man sought. The minister came prepared with his list of several agencies to which the young man could be directed once the minister knew the cause of his coming to the door.

“ Hello, my name is Pastor Rick. And your name?”

“Jesus.”

“Of course. Are you hungry, Mr. Jesus?”

“No.”

“Do you have a place to stay?”

“Don’t need one.”

“Any medical issues that require attention?”

“Well, for a dead guy I’m doing pretty well.”

This answer unnerved Pastor Rick a bit and so for the first time he looked into the eyes of the young man. He was startled because he did not see the usual vacant stare of street people.

“So, you said your name was Jesus but I’m having some trouble figuring out how I can help you.”

“I’m glad you want to help. But really, I’m here to see how you’re doing.”

“How we’re doing? Well, I think we’re doing fine. Could you be more specific?”

“Well, I just wanted to know how you’re doing with what I asked you to do.”

“And what exactly would that be?”

“You might recall I asked you to love your enemies. You got that one figured out yet?”

It was at this moment that Pastor Rick began to imagine that perhaps one of his practical joke loving colleagues had paid someone to impersonate Jesus. He looked around at the bushes to see if he could spy anyone with a camera. That’s all he would need, to see himself on YouTube, talking with some guy who claimed to be Jesus. He regretted every intemperate thing he had ever said about his fellow clergy. Still, even though he couldn’t see anyone he decided to play along just in case. But the question about enemies was tricky. Should he lie, or tell the truth? And which, a lie or the truth, would look better on video? Being caught in a lie was generally worse so he went with the truth. “I’m sad to say that we have not yet found the way to love our enemies.”

Jesus did not look surprised. “Well, I’ve always thought that was a bit of a stretch. But how about the two things that I said were the most important, loving God and loving your neighbor? How’s that working for you?”

Pastor Rick brightened considerably. “We are excellent at loving God!”

“And the neighbor part?”

Nuts. Another trick question. Got to go with the truth again. “We love some of our neighbors.”

“Funny, I don’t recall saying, ‘Love your God and love some of your neighbors.’ And frankly, the “love your God” was a throwaway. I figured you would do that anyway. But which neighbors don’t you love? You might recall that I hung out with tax collectors, Samaritans, oil refinery engineers and postal service employees. And you hang out with whom? Who would be welcome in your congregation? Have any Jews in your congregation?”

“Of course not!"

“Careful. Remember—I’m Jewish.”

“Okay, so we’re not doing as well as we could with loving our neighbor. But we all love you!” Pastor Rick beamed as he thought he’d hit a home run.

“I did say a lot of things in my brief career but I never said, “Love me!” To tell you the truth I am not that interested in whether you love me or not. What has always mattered to me is that we learn how to truly love our neighbors. And it saddens me to discover that almost two thousand years have passed and yet you seem no closer to accomplishing this important thing than when I first preached it.”

Jesus at this point did not look very meek and mild and Pastor Rick was feeling annoyed that this guy was taking up so much of his valuable time. Camera or no camera, he was done with this and putting on his best smile, said, “Well, thank you for coming by, Mr. Jesus.” He promptly went back inside the locked door, leaving Mr. Jesus to himself.

*****

Unitarian Universalists have always made a clear distinction between the religion about Jesus, and the religion of Jesus. We have not been focused on loving who Jesus was purported to be but instead concentrated our energies on what Jesus was purported to have said. Of course, that distinction is a far easier thing to say than it is to put into practice. And to be honest, I could not claim that we are better at the religion of Jesus than anyone else. Most any Mennonite congregation is much better mannered than most any Unitarian Universalist congregation. Mennonites do make a practice of treating their neighbors very well. There is something to be said for the purity of heart that resides in the simplicity of their religious life.

Even so, we are not likely to become Mennonites, nor is the entire world likely to become Mennonitish. It is an admirable life but not a particularly emulatable life. While not quite as strict as the Amish, Mennonites none-the-less fare much better in rural settings than in more densely populated areas. There is probably a positive correlation between numbers of grain silos per acre and numbers of Mennonites per acre. But we will not likely become Mennonites, not because there are few active grain silos in Houston; but because the life pathway that brought each of us here must have included some measure of skepticism about religion as it is ordinarily practiced anywhere in contemporary culture. We are all here because we imagine there must be something more, something better, something different. Hang onto to that dream. It is a life saver.

But it can also be a trap. How? I would like to introduce you to a difficult to grasp concept, “recursion.” It is most frequently found in mathematics theory, but think of the word “recurrence” or “recurring” as a way of getting at the concept. Occurrence is something happening. Recurrence is the same thing happening. And recursion is the same thing happening again, again, and again, etc.

What I want to acquaint you with is the fact that religion can very easily become recursive. Another way of putting this, religion can very easily become pre-occupied with itself. When the practice of religion becomes primarily about the practice of religion it becomes recursive.

Is that a problem? Perhaps it is easier, and less confrontational, to see how recursion can be not only a curse for religion, but also a common problem in corporate America. Not too long ago I attended the annual shareholders’ meeting of Sara Lee Corporation. A historical note for the chronologically impaired: several decades ago Sara Lee became very successful by creating palatable frozen desserts. They had created something that people wanted because it solved a real problem, namely, that people did not have time to make dessert. But their success in that project was accomplished a while ago and people today are not nearly so keen on dessert as had been the case. When I attended their meeting it was clear to me that the biggest problem they were trying to solve was not, what human need are we committed to address; but what can be done to make Sara Lee Corporation profitable? It was not hard to suspect that the corporate cart was put before the product horse. Theoretically, if you come up with a slam dunk product, one that generates real excitement, your corporation will be fine. But no amount of corporate tweaking will ever create a slam dunk product.

Recursion is like a virus, which, when it infects an organization, is very difficult to eradicate. Recursion can be very seductive because it seems like such a natural thing to do. When any of us feel that things are not going as well as we hoped we almost instinctively look inward. We search for ways by which some change in how we do things will lead to a better outcome. To a certain extent some level of introspection makes sense, but never as much sense as we wish it would; particularly when the introspection becomes a substitute for making real progress at solving real problems in the world outside your doors.

And as I said, I believe that recursion is a virus with which religion has become entirely too comfortable. Ask yourself, how much of religion in general is focused upon itself instead of upon creating an outcome such as discovering how we can each learn how to truly love our neighbor? Do you wonder if the religion about Jesus recursively displaces the religion of Jesus?

I have little interest in addressing how other religious communities can come to terms with the virus of recursion. I doubt my advice will be sought, and besides which, we’ve got our own recursion to worry about. Unitarian Universalist recursive? How? Well we do spend an awful lot of our effort reforming ourselves. And it is not unusual for individuals in the congregation to think, “If only we did worship this way, or did religious education that way, or social justice this way—then things would be better. And perhaps they might be. But that focus can be recursive when our practice of Unitarian Universalism is only about creating a better Unitarian Universalism. We should all ask ourselves, is the great purpose of a Unitarian Universalist congregation to be a better Unitarian Universalist congregation? If that is our sole purpose I personally have a hard time justifying our existence.

But that potentially suffocating institutional recursion is not the real subject of my sermon this morning. No, I would like us to think about the possibility that we become recursive when we adopt a position of endless skepticism. Of course, skepticism can be amazingly helpful in that it prevents us from making poor or uninformed choices. But skepticism as a way of life prevents us from making any choices. We may impulsively regard any suggestion solely with a critical eye and end up endlessly repeating, nope, not me, not going to go there, not going to embrace that, not going to buy that, not going to buy that, not going to buy that.... Our talents for critical disagreement greatly out perform our talents for critical agreement—on anything.

Are we just unusually indecisive? No. We have all given up on the easy answers to big questions. But what are we left with after we have given up those reassuring answers? The sheer difficulty of naming some positive thing provides, I believe, more than ample motivation among us for our recursion. Robert Sutton, Professor at Stanford University and author of Weird Ideas that Work, coined the phrase “vuja, de.” You are familiar with “deja vu,” that subtle feeling of “I don’t know why but I feel like I’ve been here before.” Vuja de is the opposite in which you have the unsettling feeling that, “I have never been here before.” I would suggest that in our case the place where we, and I mean “we” in general, have never been comes across to us as rather like the archetypal house in a horror film. Our problem is that we would rather not recognize that we are in this scary place which we know we have never been in before. So I believe we get recursive instead. And after all the recursion is kind of fun. It’s a very “free” way to live, unencumbered by some compelling task or devotion to something that is unquestionably important.

I have been for several years burdened by a sense of vuja de. For me it has been the oppressive feeling that we are running out of room and that we have no time to waste. I claim that we are running out of room in the sense that success in our human culture everywhere has always been very dependent upon some place called “away.” “Away” is the place that we send everything we don’t want. The refuse from our manufacturing processes and our personal lives all go “away.” People we did not like are sent “away.” People in any country who are harmed by foreign corporations are “away” as far as the corporate leadership is concerned.

But you see, now, there is no more “away.” Everything and everyone is “here” and there is a mad scramble to avoid having to deal with the consequences. Who shall pay for the effects of the strange brews in the water, land, and air? And al-Qaeda just wants us to go “away,” but we will not. And so they’re not away themselves and we have to spend enormous sums of money, entirely new fixed expenses in our economy, resulting from the fact that they are not “away.” And our own increasingly large criminal population, they too are no longer away. Everyone and everything is “here.” Our garbage, our industrial waste, terrorists, and criminals—everything we don’t like is “here.” Our big problem is that we know how to live in a world where there is robust sense of “away.” But we do not yet know how to live in a world where everyone and everything is “here.”

And the feeling that we have no time to waste? Global warming is an extremely serious game changer. Do you know how many millions of people are absolutely dependent upon glacial melt for drinking and agriculture? And when the glaciers are gone—then what? Should those people move here? Sea level rise, drought in areas that are now agriculturally productive... There is a very long list of potential changes wrought by human induced global warming which changes could be devastating.

This feeling of having run out of room and space has been a real horror show for me personally for several years. And all that I could do for years was weep. I did not see where the political will would arise to deal with these issues, nor was there much clarity about what form our “dealing” with these issues might take. I was mostly smart enough to stay away from evincing absolute despair but I am certain that my inner turmoil was readily detectable around the edges. I once addressed a lecture hall at the invitation of a Rice University professor on the subject of science and religion and managed to scare and depress everyone. I gloomed the room. It was a mistake because fear and despair are not reliably helpful in garnering support for getting anything done. So I have tried hard to at least not be obviously morose.

But now I find that I am no longer frightened nor in despair. My change of heart arrived when it became clear to me that there are things that we as a Unitarian Universalist congregation can do. When one senses there is a potential for doing some things that can make a real difference one no longer feels trapped in some house of horrors. And I should point out that these things that I think we can work on do not dislodge the normal projects and efforts which are important in the life of any religious community. The choir must still sing, the religious education classes for all ages must still be held, people must still sign up for Crop Walk. Now don’t be a laggard about that.

But there is one thing which to my mind provides a great deal of clarity about all those and the many other efforts we undertake. They are all instances of helping us all discover the contours of that beloved community of which Becky and I speak. And I must tell you that the creation of such a community is for us not simply a nice idea so that we can all sing, happily, It’s a Small World after All. No, we must learn how to create that beloved community because no matter what other solutions the world’s scientists and political leaders will be able to devise over the coming years, the success of any solution will require a greatly enhanced level of true cooperation among vastly different people. And I would claim that the creation of that community is an intensely spiritual task. It will not come through political agreement. It will not come about by the passage of law. It will not come about by force. It will only come when people understand that truly, there is only one God per planet, that God is unitary and not divided. And it will only come when people truly understand that all must be saved, that salvation is universal. We all must learn these things because—everyone and everything is here.

So, we are not a band of chemists. We do not need to work on finding the solutions to many of the technical problems that vex our world. But we are a religious people who can honestly proclaim a truly spiritual vision for our time.

I would not pretend that creating such a beloved community is easy. It is hard work and thus it requires courage. We have never been here before. It is an unprecedented community. It is vuja de all over the place and our reassurance comes not primarily because we are comforted by familiar sights and sounds, but because we are very intent on making a real and necessary difference. And our reassurance comes from the fact that this community we seek is not impossible to create. All that it requires is a band of people who are willing to explore what it really means to live in this new time and place. Our job here is not to treat the symptoms but to create the community that cures the disease.

A month ago I sat down with some individuals at our Pathways class, which is our introduction to life here at Emerson. One of the participants mentioned that a friend said, “You Unitarian Universalists have it so easy.” And after all, we are not required to believe things which we find hard to believe. So yes, in that sense it is easy. But that’s about all the ease you will get here. After you are done with figuring out what you can keep and what you must leave behind from other faith traditions you are left with what? Here you are left with the spiritually challenging task of discerning how you can embrace, fully embrace, people who are different from you. Here you are left with the task of figuring out how to live with integrity in this world such that there is a future for us all. No one will give you a pass. No one will give you the answers. This is not even remotely easy. But you can do it. It’s not easy. But, it is absolutely necessary to be intent on building this kind of community because if we don’t, who will?

So if anyone mocks you or belittles you for your unitary universal faith just say, “Thank you for sharing” and know—you’ve got more important things to do. For we are truly the people who are trying hard to figure out, okay how do we really love all our neighbors?