After Innocence
Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
July 26, 2009


Message: After Innocence

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2009.

This sermon turned out to be more difficult to write than I expected.
I want to confess this at the beginning,
even though my preaching professors
taught me: don’t apologize.
Especially not at the beginning!

But this turned out to be a harder sermon to write,
than when I imagined it some weeks ago.

I imagined a sermon in which
I would counsel us to all avoid the naiveté of easy answers
and wake up the complexity of life.

But the message keeps slipping,
like water through the figures,
out of my control.

The sermon I had in my mind seems too, well,
innocent.

That’s irony for you, right?

Saying to you all, don’t be innocent,
for there are no easy answers,
the world is complicated,
power is real and evil and good are interwoven into every moment,
this message itself feels like an easy answer.

Irony.

So found myself stuck, not sure what to say about this,
what to say that did not itself participate in the too-easy gloss
we put over real life.

What do we do when we wake up from the innocence
that keeps the world sensible and ordered?

Human beings are story-telling animals.
It is what we do.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger said that we were “thrown”
into the world.
Our “throwness” is our defining characteristic.
And we realize that we are between birth and death,
and don’t know what to make of this.

The theologian Paul Tillich, who learned a lot from Heidegger,
described this throwness in terms of our “existential anxiety.”
At some point, we ask ourselves:
why do we exist?
and this question, why do we exist, naturally provokes
another question: what would it be like to not exist?
And this is our existential anxiety.

This question: why do we exist? is one of the two primary questions
that religion tries to answer.
The other question is a deeply related one:
why do bad things happen?

Human beings are story-telling animals,
and so to answer these questions,
we usually tell stories.

The book of Genesis tries to answer:
something to do with the face of the water,
and the tree of knowledge, and its fruit.

The book of Job has another answer,
about God’s unsearchable mystery.
Or maybe, the power of the devil.

The book of Isaiah has another answer:
the joy of creation, the heartbreak of injustice,
the promise of homecoming.

And Jesus of Nazareth seems to have a story too:
about love and sin and forgiveness.

Other religious traditions have stories about these questions, too:
from Animanism to Zorastrianism,
and everything in between,
when you ask, why do we exist, and why do bad things happen,
they can tell you a story.

Not always, but usually,
it seems to me that these stories aim to restore a sense of innocence
to the world.
There is an explanation – perhaps not one we can understand,
but nonetheless, an explanation –
a reason for why we exist instead of not,
and why bad things seem to happen.
And, in the knowledge that there in answer –
maybe one only understood by the high theologians
in their white towers, but an answer
we go on with our lives.

For many liberals, including many Unitarian Universalists,
we’ve replaced those white towers
with white labcoats.

For science, too, has something of a story:
about a singularity, and an explosion,
and the formation of galaxies,
the swirling of dust.
Scientists get closer, all the time,
to identifying the chemicals and the conditions
of the origin of life,
and neurologists have many plausible theories
about the origin’s of consciousness.
And why bad things happen:
for that we have meteorology and plate tectonics,
psychology and sociology, economics,
poverty and mis-wired synapses.

We can explain –
or, we posit that someone smarter than us can explain.

And so, our sense of innocence is restored.

The children – Sam’s classmates, Ms. Peggy’s class –
they tell themselves, and Ms. Peggy,
that surely the pilots must not know that there are children in that land.
And thus, their innocence is protected.

When they get older,
they will learn that, in fact, the pilots do know.
And the generals knew, and the politicians knew,
and the voters knew too.
And they will embrace or invent new stories
to protect themselves from the deep anxiety of true doubt:
stories about the greater good, and collateral damage,
and so on and so forth.

We are story-telling animals, and we’re pretty good at it.

There’s a great old quotation from Winston Churchill:
Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth.
Most jump up, brush themselves off,
and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened.

That’s a little trite, but something in it rings true.

We work hard to keep the hard facts at bay.
Anne Lamott says, when her mother was in the last stages of Alzheimer’s,
she needed so much more to go on than we had:
including hope that it really wasn’t going to be that bad.
But then it was that bad, and then some.
When the time came to know what to do, we did.
It killed something in us, yet we came through.

Here, I guess, is the crux:
or at least one of them:
the choices are not between despair and innocence.
Those are not our only options.
There is something else.
Call it, what, persistence? integrity? grace?

Something along those lines.

In the ancient world, humans told stories
about the gods and their adventures,
and these stories told us about who we were,
and why, and what for, and why it was like that.

And in the medieval world, we created great systems,
Augustine explained how evil was only a privation of being,
and the scholastics wrote chapters after chapter to explain everything;
the sun circled the earth,
heretics were burned at the stake,
and all was right with the world.

In the modern era,
we looked instead to reason and science,
and we looked with hope towards the god of progress,
upward and onward forever –
words still in our liberal, Unitarian, DNA –
and we thought we will figure it all out.

We thought that before the Titanic and the Great War,
and somehow convinced ourselves again,
claimed that the second world war would be the
war to end war,
and when the wall came down,
we celebrated the end of history,
the victory of progress.

We live no longer in a modern world.
Although many of us are still moderns,
although our political discourse still requires the codes of progress,
although science keeps up its quest for Truth,
the modern world is fading out,
like water through fingers in the hand.

We are entering another world,
we don’t know what to call it,
so we call it “post-modern”, which is an almost useless word.
It is a world after innocence.

It is world of the Heisenberg principle,
which tells you that when you measure the speed of a particle,
you change its direction,
and when you measure its direction, you change its speed.
In a world after innocence,
you realize that all is interwoven,
the so-called observer is always a participant,
and there is no such thing as “that’s the way it is.”

The questions don’t go away.
Why do we exist?
Why do bad things happen?

One could say, we exist because we exist.
Bad things happen because they do.

There are other things we could say.
Vladimir, in Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot,
asks:

Was I sleeping, with the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?
Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.
Down the hole, lingeringly,
the grave-digger puts on the forceps.
We have time to grow old.
The air is full of our cries.
But habit is a great deadener.
At me too someone is looking,
of me too someone is saying,
He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.

Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth.
Most jump up, brush themselves off,
and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened.

Certainty, Vladimir does, he goes on waiting for Godot.
But what of us who see the play?

What of us who, gingerly, with caution,
put aside innocence?
Who acknowledge that progress is not our savior,
who recognize that it is all jumbled up?

The choices are not between despair and innocence.
There are other choices.
Not Vladimir’s, perhaps.

Adam Zagajewski says try to praise the mutilated world.
Leaves eddied in the earth’s scars.

On Thursday afternoon, here at the church,
we had this massive rainstorm.
The sky turned dark – it was about 1 pm –
two families of wild turkeys – four adults, and about 8 little ones –
hurried across the grass back here –
and there was thunder,
and then hail,
and rain loud and pounding.

And 30 minutes or so later,
bright sun and vibrant green.

I don’t want to make too much of this moment.
I don’t want to say that this was Easter over against Good Friday,
I don’t want to extrapolate from meteorology
some cosmic truth.

I just want to say, this happened.
It was powerful and ominous, then it was lovely.

“When despair for the world grows in me,
and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life
and my children's lives may be –
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

For a time, says Berry.
For a time, he rests in the grace of the world.

For a time – there is no permanence.
There is no war to end all wars,
and there is no state of mind which will lead you
to a life of forever clarity,
there is no existence without peril,
there is no answer which precludes all other answers,
no answer which does not raise more questions,
if we decide to wake up.

There is no permanence,
but that doesn’t mean there is no grace.
Subatomic physics, and process theology, and Buddhist philosophy,
all teach us that life is a series of moments.
Grace exists not as a state,
but as a movement.
It is water through the hand.

I remember a sermon I heard once,
preached by Rob Hardies, the minister of our church in Washington DC.
He talked about how Unitarians often consider themselves
what William James called the “once-born.”
You’ve seen that bumper sticker – born right the first time.
That’s what we often think,
over against those who think a person must be born again in Christ.
But Rob said we’ve got it wrong
if we think we only need to be born once.

We need to be born again, and again, and again, and again.

Like fire, every moment transforming itself,
we live in a series of moments,
and grace, wonder, meaning, is not a destination arrived at.
It is not even a journey, as that popular phrase goes.
It is an experience – temporary, fragile,
like our own lives,
but real nonetheless.

Augustine said that evil was only a privation of being,
an absence,
and he said that because he thought,
as everyone influence by Plato has thought,
that being is the supreme reality.
The more being something has, said Augustine,
the more it is like God.

But maybe – maybe – that’s not right.
Maybe being isn’t ultimate.
Maybe it is the river, not the lake,
Maybe it is flowing experience that is most real.

I emphasis these words, Maybe,
out of an appreciation for the irony of such claims;
out of a humbleness about grand claims,
a humbleness necessary for survival in an age after innocence.

This isn’t exactly the sermon I thought I would write for today,
and maybe it isn’t exactly the sermon you thought you would hear today.
Maybe I’ll take it all back on some future date.
That’s the postmodern world for you.

Except for this part:
this part I won’t take back:
After innocence,
after we put aside our fantasies and misplaced concreteness,
as we begin to live into a new world,
we will need one another more than ever.

One of the defining hallmarks of the modern era
is its individualism – the sense that each is for themselves.
But when we put aside our misconceptions
about the permanence of being,
then we know we are all living in a set of moments,
and we are living there together.

Why do we exist?
Why is there evil?

I don’t know, but,
but, when we sit by the waters of Babylon and weep,
we should sit together.

When we find ourselves mired in existential anxiety,
it is time for communion – the presence of others.
The most profound grace is in these moments of connection,
when someone is there for us to lean on,
when we are one with the wood drake and the day-blind stars.

Look:
you are not innocent,
but you do not have to walk through the desert on your knees,
repenting.
You have a place in the family of things.
It isn’t permanent, but in this moment,
you are part of everything.
You will always be part of everything,
even when you change and everything else changes.

But in this moment, you participate,
and that is grace,
and so let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

We are not innocent.
We are not perfect, and we do what we wish we did not.
We are implicated in powers beyond our control,
but our choices are not innocence or wickedness:
there are other choices:
presence to the moment.
The communion of living saints.
Mutuality.
Laughter.
Staying calm and sharing your bananas.
Let the beauty that surrounds you be enough for this moment in time.
Praise the world, mutilated as it is,
praise persistence, joyfulness in the face of tragedy,
sympathy and love,
praise it, as it is,
and let that be enough.

Amen. Blessed Be.