“Taking Care of Unfinished Business”

Rev. Forrest Church

Sunday 6 May 2007

Rev. Shana Lynngood:  This morning, I am pleased to introduce someone who, for those of us who grew up Unitarian Universalists, needs no introduction.  The Reverend Dr. Forrest Church has been serving All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Manhattan for the past 29 years and, at that All Souls, he’s just changed his title from Senior Minister to Minister of Public Theology.  He holds degrees from Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard University.  He has written or edited 22 books, including an edited book of the works of A. Powell Davies, one of our formative people here, entitled “Without Apology.”  His latest book, which will come out in September is entitled, and I love this title, “So Help Me God:  The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State.”  Reverend Dr. Church is married to Carolyn Luce who is here with us this morning and he has four children ranging in age from 28 to 21.  He’s also a guest of us this morning thanks to the A. Powell Davies Memorial Committee.  So I hope you will help me in welcoming Reverend Dr. Forrest Church.

[Applause]

Rev. Forrest Church:  I first worshipped in this sanctuary 50 years ago I realized as I walked through the door this morning, 50 years ago this spring, as a child, and I’ve had the great pleasure over the years, a number of times – five or six times – to preach.  I must say that, under Rob’s and Shana’s leadership and the leadership of this great lay group, you have revitalized this congregation.  I want to congratulate you; that is a great, great tribute to you and to the history and memory of Powell Davies, and to the thrust and witness of this important congregation.  You have done a splendid job; I am very, very proud of you.  [Applause]

Inspired by yesterday’s Kentucky Derby, I’m going to change not the subject of my sermon, but its thrust.  I am not nor ever have I been a betting man.  Gambling claims no purchase on my soul.  I say this not to boast.  There is no virtue in abstaining from something that holds no fascination for you.  [Laughter]  Teetotalers who hate the taste of alcohol, non-smokers who are allergic to smoke and non-bettors who get no rush from games of chance do nothing to establish their virtue by not drinking, smoking or gambling.  [Laughter]  I demonstrated my lack of appetite for high-stakes gambling early.  I was nine years old when I went with my parents to my one and only horse race – to the Kentucky Derby.  My father gave me ten dollars, a goodly sum back then, to bet until I lost it.  At $2 a race, I would be in the game for at least five of the nine races.  He carefully pointed out to me that, unless I made some of it back, if I squandered, say, my stake on long-shots that performed as expected, I would have nothing left in my pocket with which to place a bet on the Kentucky Derby itself, slated to take place at the end of the day’s card. 

I learned the lesson that my father taught me that morning too well, perhaps.  To limit my exposure, as I recall, I would place a “show” bet on the horse that was favored to win.  This far-from-daring strategy [Laughter] taught me one lesson that I have never forgotten:  Even the most cautious gambler can lose.  Some of the favoreds staggered in out of the money, and even when they did perform as expected, each “show” bet on a low-odds winner earned me a slim dime or two on my two-dollar investment.  No matter, by the time the Kentucky Derby rolled around, I still had five dollars in my pocket.  Ready to do something daring, I put it all on Silky Sullivan. 

Silky Sullivan was a western phenom; he stopped hearts in every race he entered by spotting his opponents a thirty-length lead.  Halfway around the track, with the bunched contenders throwing up a great cloud of dust, two city blocks ahead of him, Silky Sullivan loped along in solitary splendor, quixotic, romantic and, by every dint of racing logic, doomed.  Then, to the amazement of all and delight of anyone who dared to dream the impossible dream, with a burst of awe-inspiring speed, he would close on the pack, catch it at the final turn, blow past one flagging pretender after another, pull up beside the leader and win by a nose.  That was on western tracks, of course, not eastern ones.  [Laughter]  Silky would now be running against the best thoroughbreds in the world, not a bunch of pretty Californians.  [Laughter]  Even so, my young heart told me, win or lose, this was a horse worth every cent of my precious grub stake, so I place five dollars on the long-shot, Silky Sullivan, not to win, of course – I wasn’t that daring – but to show. 

True to form, Silky ambled out of the gate and spotted a quarter furlong to the competition.  Prancing along in solitary splendor until, like magic and flying like the wind, he closed the gap, dancing to the pack toward the flag.  She’s going to win, I screamed.  This prophecy proved premature.  Three horses crossed the finish line together; valiant Silky, as I recall, closed on the leaders, but just enough to eat their dust.  Silky Sullivan didn’t break my heart that day; he made it beat faster.  I’ll never forget that cocky little horse. I can tell you who won the 1958 Kentucky Derby; I did look it up this morning – I cheated – it was Tim Tam.  But Silky Sullivan won a home in my personal hall of fame.

Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about life’s odds.  Six months ago I was diagnosed with what turned out to be a particularly fierce form of esophageal cancer.  Odds were, my doctor told me, that I had, at the outset, about six months to live.  Going onto the internet which does nothing, I might caution you, to boost the spirits of positive thinkers [Laughter], confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis in mind-numbing detail.  Entering all of my variables as we knew them back then into the relevant actuarial tables, the odds were twenty to one against me.  My father died of cancer at the age of 59; his father died at 59 as well, of a heart attack.  I’m 58.  The chapter I found myself opening offered compelling reason to believe that it would be the last one in my book.

And then, I started beating the odds.  Against all expectation, the cancer, though the tumor was large, had not metastasized; overnight my odds leapt from twenty to one to fifty-fifty.  A talented surgeon removed my esophagus, replacing it conveniently with my stomach; I now have an estomagus.  [Laughter]  The post-op pathology brought us more good news:  The margins were clear, the lymph nodes negative, the tumor right on the cusp between Stage I and Stage II had barely penetrated the esophageal wall.  Now the odds, new odds:  four-to-one that I’m cured.

Now there’s a moral to this story, beyond the obvious one that I might usefully have quit drinking and smoking decades before I did some seven years ago.  It doesn’t lie on the shifting surface of these odds.  They are mere accidents, happy ones, it seems in my case, but accidents nonetheless.  If my cancer returns to kill me, it won’t be unfair, only unlucky, in the same sense that I was lucky to beat the odds that seemed, at first, to make survival a chancy bet.  Beating the odds, I slowly began to realize, had nothing to do with the stakes on the mortality table.  The truth of the matter struck me with tremendous force.  I’d beaten the odds already.  One house on a zillions-to-one wager, 58 years before, the moment I was born.

Think about it and then translate this unaccountable triumph to your own precious life.  Whether the odds that I’ll die now at 59 stand at twenty-to-one, one-to-one, or one-to-four is incidental given how astronomically long the odds were against my being alive in the first place to reckon them.  My definition of religion is simple and inclusive:  Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing we must die.  We humans are not the animal with tools, or the animal with advanced language; we are the religious animal.  Knowing we must die, we question what life means.  Who are we?  Where did we come from?  Where are we going?  And most important of all, in part because we can answer it directly, in deeds of love and in works of praise, how can I live in such a way that my life will prove worth dying for?  As many of you know from personal experience, a scrape with death makes our hearts beat not only faster but also more insistently.  Aware of life’s limit and fragility, we truly mean it when we say, “This is the day that we are given; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Much of the time, almost inevitably, we drift through our days; life lives us who stand on watch as it runs through our glass.  Death threats are wakeup calls.  No longer able to take life for granted, we can seize the day, and receive it as a gift.  We unwrap the present and offer up a prayer of heartfelt thanks.  There’s a theological point here, one that gets lost in the haze of most salvation history.  At its roots, religion stems from two fundamental responses to life:  awe and humility.  Because we take our lives for granted, neither awe nor humility comes naturally to us. 

What did I do to deserve this, we ask when things turn against us, forgetting that we did nothing to be placed in the way of trouble and joy in the first place.  The odds against each one of us being here this morning are so mind-staggering that they cannot be computed.  And I’ve been paying more reverent attention.  Even a five percent chance that I might live, not to mention outlive my father and grandfather, should have found me dancing on the field.  We’re talking miracles here, not an imagined miracle, like God parting the Red Sea for Moses to escape the Egyptians.  Or stopping the sun for Joshua to win a battle.  But the miracle of water itself in which living organisms can incubate and just enough warmth and light from the sun to establish ideal conditions for life to be nurtured and developed here on Earth.

Consider the odds more intimately.  Your parents had to couple at precisely the right moment for the one possible sperm to fertilize the one possible egg that would result in your conception.  Right then, the odds were still three million-to-one against your being the answer to the question that your biological parents were consciously or unconsciously posing.  And that is just the beginning of the miracle.  The same unlikely happenstance must repeat itself throughout the generations. 

Going back ten generations, this miracle must repeat itself one thousand times; one million, two hundred and fifty thousand times, going back only twenty generations.  That’s right.  From the turn of the 13^th Century, say, until today, we each have, mathematically speaking, approximately two and a half million direct ancestors.  This remarkable pyramid turns in upon itself, of course, with individual ancestors participating in multiple lines of generation, until we trace ourselves back to our ur- ancestors, the founding couple with whom we all are related, who each one of us carries in our bones, the ones who began the inexorable process that finally gave birth to us all, kith and kin, blood brothers and sisters in the same mighty mystery.

And that’s only the egg and the sperm part of the miracle.  Remember, each of these ancestors had to live to puberty.  For those whose blood line twines through Europe, and there were like tragedies around the globe, not one of your millions of direct forbearers died as children during the Great Plague, for instance, which mowed down half of Europe with its mighty scythe. 

There’s a new book out on the Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick – it’s quite a good book, telling a lively, unlikely tale.  Five of my direct ancestors, weirdly, happened to be on that tiny boat which brought the first band of doughty Pilgrims to our shores in 1620.  Early in the book, I was brought up short when one of the five – now remember, I wouldn’t be here this morning without the unwitting assistance of all of them – one of the five, 24-year-old John Howland, an unmarried servant, fell off the Mayflower into the ocean, halfway across the Atlantic.  Miraculously, he caught the rope his fellow Pilgrims threw overboard in their desperate attempt to save him and he lived.  Had John Howland drowned, you might have been hearing a better sermon this morning, but I assuredly would not be preaching it.

During their first winter in America, some fifty of the 102 original Pilgrims died.  Among those who succumbed were my ancestors, John and Elizabeth Kelly.  But not their 13-year-old daughter, also named Elizabeth, or her ten-year-old friend, Elizabeth Warren.  Elizabeth Kelly went on to marry John Howland which established my mother’s American line; Elizabeth Warren married Richard Church and established my father’s.  Two little girls made it through the winter, without whom I would not be here this morning.  These accidents of survival are nothing when compared to the almost infinite odds against our winning billions of crapshoots in the sperm and egg stakes,  but are at least somewhat easier to grasp and existentially more meaningful to find. 

By the way, and this is truly awesome – so awesome that it makes every salvation story in the world’s great scriptures seem trivial in comparison – not only did all our human ancestors survive puberty to mate at the one and only instant that the requisite egg and sperm might connect to keep our tiny odds for arrival alive, but their pre-human ancestors did the same, on a yearly basis.  Then we have to go back further, to our pre-mammalian ancestors and back from there all the way to the ur-paramecium.  And then beyond that, to the pinball of planets and stars, playing out their agon to diurnal courses, spinning back through time to the big bang itself.  Mathematically, our death is a simple inevitability whereas our life hinges on an almost infinite sequence of perfect accidents.  First a visible, and then an invisible thread connects every one of us, in unbroken line, to the instant of creation.  Think about it.  The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.

So what did we do to deserve this, whatever this might happen to be, at any given moment in our life’s unfolding saga?  Please, the odds against our being here to ask that impertinent question almost beg a reckoning.  Which is where the second element in the fundamental religious equation kicks into play:  humility.  Let me share with you my favorite etymology.  Human, humane, humanitarian, humility, humble, humus.  Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes.  And in between, erupting into consciousness, into pain and hope and trust and fear and grief and love, the miracle of life.

Do you find yourself this morning out of the race?  So far behind the pack you can hardly see its dust?  If the odds are against you, the odds against happiness returning to fill your days with joy, the seemingly overwhelming odds that you will never recover from whatever is bearing or beating you down, take a moment to ponder life’s cosmic odds and how you’ve already beaten them.  You, I, each one of us here this morning, or here anywhere this morning, have miraculously run our courses from the instant of creation to the advent of life on Earth, and on through billions of generations to reckon the privilege of looking out upon this magnificent morn. 

And then, when you’re blinking in the sun, pause one moment further and remember Silky Sullivan.  A valiant stretch run may not make you a winner, but I can promise you this:  It will make your heart and the hearts of those who love you beat faster.  Believe me, there’s nothing like a kick toward the flag to get the old blood pumping and the crowd off their duffs, cheering.  Besides, without even trying, you’ve already won the only race that really matters.  Unconsciously, yet omnipresent, you ran the gauntlet of stars and genomes to assume your full, nothing-less-than-miraculous place in the creation. 

Being alive to love and hurt, to fail and recover, to prove your gifts and show compassion – that is life’s true secret.  Life’s abiding opportunity, bequeathed against all odds to each and every one of us, is much the same – to live in such a way, with works of love and deeds of grace, that our lives too will prove to be worth dying for.  It is to live and also to die, for the multitude of brothers and sisters who beat the odds with us, who labored with our ancestors’ hands and wept tears of grief and joy from our ancestors’ eyes, connecting us as kin to God and each other.  Blessed together, together always, with the privilege of running from gate to flag in life’s glorious race.

Amen.  I love you.  And may God bless us all.   [Applause]