Galen has quoted from some of his favorite poetry in his last two sermons. By and large, you will continue to be unwittingly grateful that I generally do not quote my favorite poetry in sermons. Not that it is off color or inappropriate. It is simply long, often very long. Paradise Lost, for instance.
When I was a chaplain at Stanford, I invited my followers to dinner one night. As I remember I had two followers. One was actually still a student. I invited them to dinner once a month. We had dinner early so that I could advance their education either by lavishing them with an entire Mahler symphony, or by reading, say, Milton's Paradise Lost from beginning to end.
Now why would an incipient Unitarian minister be so fascinated by Paradise Lost? Perhaps because of its passion, drama, or exquisite language. But more likely because John Milton was above all a champion of freedom, and also seemed in his very soul to recognize that it was not quite as easy to draw a hard line between good and evil as some preachers were willing to do, even back then. Of course, that was a long time ago. Centuries ago.
Without quoting from a single one of my favorite poets, this morning I am going to speak about centuries of centuries of centuries of poetry, about poetry in motion.
Lets begin with the centuries. As I alluded to last month in a sermon, the millennial virus is going to infect almost every aspect of our lives over the coming eleven months. Not only computers, but culture, religion, television programming, magazine covers, and basement conventicles. Even sermons, for goodness sake. This is understandable, given the parochial nature of our vision. Since most of us live less than one hundred years, a thousand years seems like a very long and potentially quite significant period of time.
That makes sense, doesn't it? One thousand years. Most of us cannot trace our own genealogies even a third that far.
To peak the millennial lust, since our calendar is predicated on a monk's calculation of the birth of Jesus, it is completely understandable that all manner of apocalyptic musings should attend the turning of the millennial clock.
By the way, it turns out that Jesus probably was not born two thousand years ago. As far as most scholars can tell, Jesus Christ was born four years Before Christ. So the promised and long awaited end times came and passed three years ago. The good news is that most of us didn't notice.
By the way, millenarianism is an archly rational notion. It adds numbers up until it finds meaning in them. It is also an understandably but undeniably narcissistic notion. Just think about it. Given how many people have lived and died before us, how privileged we are to be the only ones to actually be alive when the world comes to an end.
This morning, and reverently, not in the least perversely, I want to change the millennial frame somewhat, expand it if you will from Western Christian time not to Cosmic time -- that is far too forbidding even to contemplate -- but to earth time, to life time.
As you may know, my own faith is powered first and foremost by the linked emotions of humility and awe. Looking at ourselves in terms of earth time rather than through the narrow confines of Western Christian time serves both the cause of humility (a reminder that everything does not turn on our own little fulcrum of history) and the possibility of awe (the "wow," or "isn't that amazing" that puts everything else in perspective).
Not so very long ago, about half a century, biologist H. J. Muller sketched out an earth based time-line. One of our congregates adapted this for my amusement, and I was amused, but also humbled and awe-struck. It is the perfect antidote to millennial madness.
Before I share the time line with you, I must note that this particular parishioner is somewhat penmanship challenged. I know something about this, being penmanship challenged myself. After pondering a hieroglyphic that gave every indication of being his or her name, when I finished I couldn't be sure about a single letter. The name could have been John, Sara or Dick. All I am sure of is that whoever sent me this fascinating time line is clearly a doctor.
So if you are here, Doctor, let me know, because I would like to thank you. And also because I would love to get your permission to adapt this for my next book!
I should add, that twenty-one years ago I came to All Souls from Harvard University, where I had just completed my doctorate. So, as you will recognize in just a moment, for me this time line has particular existential relevance.
Picture this in your mind. All life on earth from the beginning until now is connected on a string leading from Harvard's Widener library to the chancel of All Souls Church. We're talking about some three or four billion years plotted on a time line that runs a couple of hundred miles, or about two hundred fifty years an inch.
We start in Cambridge, on the library steps, with the ur-paramicium, the first primeval protoplasm. Because my sermons tend to be short let me fast forward. I'm going to skip the rest of Massachusetts, and all of Rhode Island and Connecticut. Those of us who have lived both in Boston and New York City will understand. In fact, I'm going to skip everything from Harvard Yard to Yankee Stadium. Some of you may understand this as well. In Yankee Stadium, somewhere between second base and the pitcher's mound, the first four footed animals finally emerge from the creative cauldron of waters. Not until we get to Harlem do birds and mammals appear, little flying mutant dinosaurs and tiny furry land dwellers who give birth live and suckle their young. These co-exist for a time with dinosaurs who enter the picture in mid-Harlem and disappear by about 125th street.
Monkeys show up on 96th street. That's a long way from Cambridge. But for us it's also a long way from All Souls Church, for even when we get to the front steps, having come all the way from Massachusetts, even having come from the mound of Yankee Stadium, on the steps of All Souls the cleverest creature we will encounter is a chimpanzee.
I invite you to enter the sanctuary. As you do you will greet a Neanderthal -- our usher -- perhaps no more an ancestor than the chimp but slightly more co-pathetic, larger, less hairy, somehow more familiar.
Now we walk the aisle. The whole aisle. It is not until the first pew -- the foremost pew -- that our own species, Homo Sapiens, shows up. As an aside, this is perhaps the first and last time that any human has chosen to sit in the first pew of an empty church.
Now how about civilization, the great storied history of humankind? In unrecorded yet slightly remembered form, say 14,000 years ago, civilization begins at the bottom step leading to the chancel. Imagine, as should not be that difficult, that, less than ten minutes from now I am standing on the top step delivering my benediction. Here's what happens in an almost unimaginably short span of time. If we were dealing in time rather than miles, on the basis of a year from the beginning of life on this planet until now, everything I am about to recount would take place during the last two seconds of my benediction.
King Tut is on the lip of the next to the top step. Two inches from my toe America is discovered, and Copernicus suggests that the sun does not circle the earth. One inch away is the declaration of independence. Half an inch away, Darwin's theory of evolution. A third of an inch away, the invention of the airplane. As for that microbe on the edge of my shoe, that microbe is actually Bill Gates.
And the millennium? Well, between here and Cambridge, the first millennium, Christian standard time, is also on the top step. So was the millennium before that, the very birth of Jesus. And this millennium too. All three. Two hundred fifty years an inch. Two thousand years. A little more than half a step. Count back from here all the way to Cambridge. Or wind your clock back 24 hours and wait till the very last seconds. In the saga of life, that is when all human history takes place.
I hope you feel humble right now. I certainly do. Not humiliated. Humiliation is what people do to one another, particularly people who believe that they are so much smarter or wiser or more knowledgeable or pious than the person they believe themselves so fully entitled to humiliate.
Humble is different. Humble is down-home, without pretense or airs. Humble is not "I'm weak and you are strong," Humble is "We know so little; we are one."
I don't know what the apocalyptic seers can divine as they dust the last step on the long journey from Cambridge to All Souls for eternal fingerprints. All I can tell you is what I see. I see a remarkable effluence of the creation, humans climbing steps larger than mountains.
Is this a theology? For me it is. I find it awesome that we -- I mean all civilizations -- have managed to emerge over eons from the swamp, and despite all the climactic and evolutionary towing and froing have done such remarkable things in such a short time. It is absolutely staggering that one step, or maybe two, of millions and millions of steps from the beginning of life until now, carry all the burden and weight of philosophy and theology, even of history. That is awesome.
When Copernicus discovers that we are not the center of the Universe, we are not made weaker; in a strange way we are made stronger. We know that we are smaller, but we found that out for ourselves. What a contrast this is with the triumphalist Christian or Muslim or even Orthodox Jewish theologians who claim that the entire universe exists for and in some strange way because of us, that we are the object of all the orbs, all the hundred billion galaxies, who claim that God is watching very very carefully to determine when to draw the curtain of the cosmic drama on a particular year on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy in order that all of creation will finally either be damned or saved.
I'm embarrassed to repeat this, because it seems like a cheap shot, but he said it, he really did, and it could not more definitively differentiate my theology
from his. Jerry Fallwell -- you can't have missed this -- said that it is self-evident: 1) that the anti-Christ is alive today; and 2) that he is a Jewish man.
I'll tell you something. This guy knows so much more than I know. I confess it. On the other hand, he is right there next to Bill Gates, a microbe on the edge of my shoe -- not my shoe of course -- simply the next tiny foot, literally millions of feet from the first foot, the first tiny step of millions and millions of steps from the beginning of life until now.
Both Jerry Fallwell and I are religious. We are both touched by awe. The difference is that Jerry Falwell finds it awesome that eight inches ago something happened that guarantees that eight inches later the world will end. I find it awesome that two hundred miles ago something happened that permits us, two hundred miles later to sit in this lovely sanctuary and ponder the mystery and majesty of the cosmos.
Poetry in motion. That's what it is. Not science. Not theology. Poetry. The creation is a masterpiece. We are part of what we ponder. And it moves.
Jerry Falwell is certainly religious. I don't doubt that. But when I compare his eight inches with my two hundred miles, I'll tell you this: I got religion! We're not skeptics. We're seers. We're poets. Not only that, we're a living part of the poetry we recite, scan and interpret.
You may interpret it one way, I another. That's fine. That's the way poetry works. And what do you expect? Do you think that just because you've read the best books and thought the best thoughts that you know all that much more than anyone else does, even Jerry Fallwell? Remember we are -- all of us are -- far more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. The only real difference between us is this. When it comes to what all this means, though equally ignorant, those of us with a two-hundred mile parallax vision are far more aware of our ignorance than are those -- equally ignorant -- with eight inch blinders.
I don't know about you, but I am hoping to wake me up before I die. Perhaps that is why I gaze as far as I can into the heart of creation. Perhaps, just perhaps, something there will remind me of what a miracle it was that I even ever lived. And could love and serve, fail and recover, hope and doubt and then love a little more.
Is this religion? By God it is. Copyright AllSouls 1999