SERMON:



SERMON: Girl Scout Sunday

DATE: March 9, 2008

SPEAKER: Rev. Tim Ashton

TRANSCRIBER: David Irvin

As I read the brief biography of Juliet Gordon Low, the founder of Girl Scouts, I don’t think she would have been someone we would have picked out to have led this movement. Other than a difficulty with deafness from childhood illness, she appeared to have lived the life of an upper-class lady from Savannah, Georgia, who married an upper-class man from England. Thereafter she was a globe-trotter by ocean liner. And then at 51, she came back to Savannah, Georgia, and started a Girl Scout troop. Doing something simple, but profound, she took girls out of the seclusion of the home and the kitchen and brought them into the outdoors, where they could learn self-reliance and resourcefulness.

It doesn’t sound very revolutionary to us today to have started a Girl Scout troop, but it was relatively radical for its time. And when I tell you one more piece of Juliet Gordon Low’s biography, the pieces will fall into place. This was her situation. She was, at age 51, a widowed woman from an estranged marriage, looking around, trying to figure out what to do with her life. During this time of searching she was in England where she heard about the idea of Girl Scouts from Robert Baden-Powell who founded Boy Scouts. She learned about the idea of getting young people into a different environment where they could learn resourcefulness and self-reliance. Could this be what went through her mind? “Had I had a bigger view, a different view, a larger view of the world than the narrow upper-class life I was given as an upper-class woman in Savannah, Georgia, would I have used those first 51 years in a way that would have made me feel more effective?” But whatever it was, she had a moment of insight, I think, and, thereafter, threw herself into the leadership of the Girl Scouts and began what is today is an organization of almost 4,000,000 people.

Now there’s an extension of these truths which will be the philosophical focus of this morning: The way a person experiences the world and the way he or she is taught to understand the world has a great deal to do with the possibilities one sees in the world for one’s self and for others. An interesting confluence, isn’t it?

Another dimension of Girl Scouts is this: it has always had a little edge of liberal thinking about it. Girl Scouts may seem quite conventional, but down in its beginning, it was a part of the Women’s Liberation movement; and it is always just a little bit edgy. For example, Juliet Gordon Low founded early on a troop for disabled girls. Girl Scouts were early into the racial integration movement. Intriguing.

Another intriguing feature is the kind of comparability of our Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles and the Girl Scout Law. You don’t notice it because one is written in a more intellectual vocabulary, and the other is written in kind of the day-to-day language. Now take a moment to read the Girl Scout Law, it’s printed in your program. While you look at the Law, I’m going to read our Principles and help you compare them.

Our 1st Principle is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Girl Scouts say “I will respect myself and I will respect others. I will be friendly and helpful”. Our principles speak of justice, equity and compass in human relations and Girl Scouts talk of being “friendly and fair.” Acceptance and mutual encouragement for our spiritual growth: a Girl Scout says “I will be a sister to all other Girl Scouts. I will be considerate and caring”. Our 4th Principle, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The Girl Scout says “I will be responsible for what I do and what I say”. The importance of conscience and the democratic process I compare to “to be courageous and strong”. The goal of world community? The Girl Scouts say, “I will try to make the world a better place by my having been here”. And finally, Principle 7: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which I am a part. That’s the scout’s “respect for self and others and the wise use of resources.”

I always get excited by the happy convergence of the liberal vision. Of course, there are many divergences, but I think it is important to keep our focus on the convergence. Think of the other convergences this morning:

Whitman in his Song of the Open Road says, “There is the world before us, to find, to discover, to live in, to enjoy”.

The Girl Scout “Thinking Day” topic was water this year. And immediately I think of the words of Emerson that I love:

“We are from a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The great Nature in which we rest, just as the Earth lies in the soft arms of its atmosphere is that unity, the Oversoul. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius. When it breathes through our will, it is virtue. When it flows through our affections, it is love.”

Or St. Francis’s Creation Theology (so parallel to Matthew Fox): Since God made every single thing and creature and plant, the saint now considered the saint of ecology addresses everything, even the Sun and the Moon, the inanimate objects as well as plants and animals, as brother and sister.

And one more example, I was reading in the Harvard Divinity Journal about “mystical revolution” in Mexico among Mexican Catholic Women. This mystical revolution is based on a change in how women understand who God is. Gradually they are changing their concept of God from the punishing god in the sky to the loving presence that walks with them. They have come to see God supporting them as they make their reproductive choices. What a different way to go at that issue? It puts aside the church’s teaching in the most gentle and effective way, affirming a woman’s choice, walking with God. Isn’t it great?

But unfortunately there is such a thing as what happened on Thursday. I’ll read you a few sad lines from the News:

A gunman entered the library of a rabbinical seminary and opened fire on a quiet study session Thursday night, killing eight people and wounding nine others before he was slain in Jerusalem. One of the seminary students said, having carried his gun with him, he shot the attacker twice in the head, quote “I lay on the roof of the study hall, cocked my gun and waited for him”. Following the incident, hundreds of seminarians demonstrated outside the building, screaming for revenge and chanting “Death to the Arabs”. Hamas stopped just short of claiming responsibility and said “We bless this operation.”

I know, throwing the water right on my own shining parade. But, it must be taken into account. We must think about these things. When I read a news article like the one above, I can see how people are repelled by religion. Religion often seems to make the horrors of this world even worse.

However, other conclusions can be drawn. Also in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, they reviewed Martha Nussbaum’s The Clash Within. In this book she offers us a differ paradigm for thinking about how religions function in society. She believes that there is no such thing as a good or a bad religion, because religions can function in at least two divergent and opposite ways and be the same religion. She sets up a polarity of religious expression. On the one side she describes religion that functions as a moral community in a cosmopolitan multi-cultural world. And on the other side, she sees religion that functions as an identity-based community centered on the myth of purity, as she names it. Now, of course, you know which side she stands upon – the side we have been standing on all morning, the side of religion as a moral community in a cosmopolitan society.

Such religious community is essentially reverence-based. If you were here last Sunday, you know we spent a lot of time on reverence.

To review, reverence (following Paul Woodruff’s model) is a feeling inside us that we are a part of something greater or larger. And not only are we a part of it, we depend on it; and it depends on us. Whether you call it God or the starry heavens or the biosphere or the Over-soul or the Creator Divinity or the family of humanity or the Seventh Principle, we stand in awe before something that is greater than us. And therefore, we offer it and everything around us respect. We are all part of this, so everything deserves our respect, consideration and thoughtfulness. And finally, Paul Woodruff, in his book Reverence, spoke of shame, the definitely moral dimension: when we do not do our part for that great shining web of human and creative reality around us and beyond us into the infinite reaches of the universe, we feel shame and it calls us to moral reconstruction.

Now over on the other side, is identity-based community, with the myth of purity and the primacy of that identity. It is centered on the idea that we need a defining identity, for without that defining identity, we will fly apart into directionless chaos. We will be set adrift and rudderless.

I often hear about this concern in a gentler way when people speak of interfaith marriages. “Oh, dear!” they puzzle. “Oh, dear, what will happen to the children? You know, they won’t know who they are. They won’t know if they are Jewish or Catholic or Christian or Hindu or whatever is going on in this family!” And of course, sometimes it’s not just two. Will they know who they are?

Now paradigms are only models. In reality there are no perfect polar opposites. People have identities and communities; and these things get mixed up. But for the purpose of getting our brains to think more expansively, we set up paradigms like this one in front of us. With the paradigm in mind, we then have to deal with the fuzziness of it all.

However, this paradigm does help us to counter an alarming trend in our society: let’s just go hunt down the bad guys and get rid of them. And especially if we could just get rid of fundamentalist Islamic people, we’d all be safe. How often do people fall into that hideous stereotype? Yes, there is a fundamentalist Islam out there and it’s done ugly things. Not only to the “nice” people in the West; but it does ugly things other Moslems, as well.

The Nussbaum paradigm reminds us that this negative picture can only be one part of the religion of Islam. We must think of other Islamic expressions historically.

For example, we can reflect on the seven hundred years of Islamic rule in Spain. The longest period ever, I think, in European history of continuous tolerance. Jews, Christians, and Moslems lived together in comparative tolerance, unparalleled of its own time and often in our own.

And another Islamic example, and I was actually there. Mogul India. Who thinks of the Moguls? All you think of is Genghis Khan, right? They were relatives, not direct. Mogul India was another tolerant Islamic empire and the ruler, Akbar, in the 2nd half of the sixteenth century, created his Faith of God, the court religion that mixed together Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. He had a wife of high standing from each religion.

In 1995 I was there in India at the great fort outside Agra, Akbar’s abandoned capital. I was very excited to look at a sculpture that combined the essential symbols of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. But of course, this was significantly before 9/11, 2001. My interest seemed almost academic from this standpoint more than a decade later.

The point is that there is no simple and final decision about the meaning and purpose of religion. Any religion can and does function constructively or destructively personally, socially and internationally. All of us need some sense of identity and some sense of community. And I want to remind us so we don’t get too perfect-feeling as Unitarian Universalists that the paradigm includes Unitarian Universalism as well. So let me offer this example from our own history.

Around the time that we were discovering and then adopting our Principles and Purposes and for many years thereafter (and even now you sometimes hear it yet again): “How will the Unitarian Universalist Association stay together if it doesn’t have a center? How can we affirm six different sources and have any identity? How can we stay together and affirm religions ideas from the pagan to every world religion to whatever goes on inside your head? We will fall apart!”

I said things like this, too since I didn’t catch on in the beginning either. It took me a while to catch on, because the idea of multi-cultural living is comparatively new. And then I began to think: oh, hey, a multi-cultural world is growing up around me. I began to see a growing opportunity for Unitarian Universalist ministry: Oh, multi-cultural world, we are the church you can come to that already fits who you are! Come try us out!

Of course, this picture is both hopeful and presents a dilemma. Religions can be very constructive and also very destructive. But the good thing to hang on to is that there are no categorically good or bad religions. Every religion of some breadth has the capacity to draw its adherents into the experience of reverence, the moral feeling of shared community.

There is something bigger than us that calls us together and reminds us: we do not want to die alone, but live together. We feel within us a call to care for each other and this planet and to pass it on. Life is gift that we did not make and that we briefly share. The response is gratitude.

Amen.

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