The angel of death comes for a rich man. He informs the man that it’s time to go. The rich man becomes very much aggrieved because he had worked very hard for his money, and he wanted to be able to take it with him to Heaven. He pleaded to the angel to let him take it with him.
The angel replied. “Sorry, but you can’t take your wealth with you.” The man implored the angel to speak to God to see if He might make an exception. The angel goes off and then reappears. He announces God has agreed to let the man bring one suitcase with him.
The man gathered his largest suitcase, and filled it with bars of pure gold. He tells the angel he is ready to go. Soon the man died and found himself at the pearly gates. St. Peter, seeing the suitcase, said, “Hold on, you can’t bring that in here!”
The man explained to St. Peter that he had permission and asked him to verify his story with the Lord. Sure enough, St. Peter returned, saying, “You’re right. You were permitted one carry-on bag. I must check its contents before letting it through.”
St. Peter opened the suitcase to inspect the worldly items that the man found too precious to leave behind and exclaimed, “You brought pavement?”
Maybe its not the best joke ever, but it was made for church. And I like it. It has classic heaven folk lore features. It says that we can’t imagine the treasure that awaits us, and our attempts to get an advantage, to get ahead in heaven- our laughable. I don’t need to tell most of you that here at UUCHC we’re not operating on an assumption that we all believe the same things. Neither do we claim to be operating from perfect instructions literally given by G*d in antiquity. We draw inspiration from a multitude of religious books and stories, noting elements common to some of them. We draw on, are challenged and inspired by scholarship and literary criticism. Scholarship helps us approach the worldviews of people at the time the books were written. Viewing scriptures as literature doesn’t mean we assume that it’s entirely fictional. We tend to treat religious books and writings as poetry. Poetry is often written in response to actual events. Poetry is a fitting way to express important things that are difficult to understand or articulate. Matters pertaining to death fall in this category.
Personally, I am fascinated by the volume and depth of literature dedicated to what happens after we die. It excites me to learn some of the many ways that people make sense of death and life. I cherish that people have shared with me tender and often extraordinary experiences related to death and dying.
I’ve studied accounts of near death experiences and communication from those who have died. I want to thank Skye Alexander for bringing us to the frontiers of spirituality today. Of all the people who have shared stories regarding death, near death and communication with those that have died, Skye is the first I’ve known to stand before her congregation and shared her experience.
In this congregation we enjoy profound freedom, support and encouragement to reflect on and share our experiences and thoughts about things that are important to us. We want to be a place where you don’t need to pretend to believe things that you don’t believe or pretend not to believe what you actually do.
We value courtesy and consideration, listening and talking respectfully but not constraint that keeps us from being true to ourselves. We want to be able to have difficult conversations.
Let’s acknowledge that some waters are difficult to navigate. Suppose you share something that is important, meaningful even sacred to you. You don’t want it treated as if it were garbage. We want what you treasure to be valued and never ridiculed.
It is hard to share far out things with people knowing they might resonate. In this religious tradition, we honor the value of doing the work it takes for us to find and keep our integrity. We value honesty about what we do and do not believe. We understand how valuable it is to support people to reach their own conclusions.
I think it helps that to us truth is not something that was revealed in totality to ancestors. Trying to get people to fall in line, that’s the UU way. However, if we are honest and capable of self-examination, we will admit that UUs can be hypocrites just like everyone else.
When I was in seminary taking a class at the Buddhist institute, a Buddhist classmate told me that he thought UUs were the most dogmatic. I was shocked. I said “We don’t have dogma, how could you say that about us?!” It took me a while to understand and realize that indeed, we sometimes speak and act as if truth is obvious, that we have it and others don’t. If you are UU, but you “just don’t get it,” then well maybe you’re not really one of us.
And who are we? We are the ones that are better than the other religious groups who discriminate because they think they have the truth and are better than others. We are the ones who are inclusive of everyone. And if you don’t match our sense of inclusivity, we might meet you with contempt.
Do you know what a dogmatic agnostic is? A DA says I don’t know if G*d exists, … and neither do you! If we don’t even know precisely what each of us means by the word “god,” how can we know what someone believes and if their beliefs are similar or extricably different from ours?
One of the things I like about near death experiences (NDEs), accounts of visitations from those that have died, and recent advances in bringing people back to life past the point we previously believed possible, is that these suggest how really little we know.
What’s to like about realizing how little we know? Well, have any of you ever part of religious group whose beliefs were stifling to you or worse? Have you been pressured to conform to family or societal beliefs that just did not make sense to you? It took me a long time to realize how powerful it is that UU tradition acknowledges that every culture, every family and every person has stories about reality, and that stories are not the same as reality itself. This isn’t to say that stories are bad. Far from it. It’s that acknowledging how little we know sometimes encourages us to seek more knowledge, wisdom and understanding.
In this sense our religion is like science. We expect our search for truth to continue. We find purpose and joy discovering flaws in our maps and error in our current beliefs. Well, that might not be typical, but it sometimes happens!
Perhaps truth is G*d to us, not G*d as a deity or a being with power over everything, but as the supreme value. Also like common characteristics attributed to G*d, truth is infinite. We can approach it but not possess it.
I believe we can apply this to be more effective in our efforts to build the Beloved Commumnity! Consider that each of us has stories and experiences of life and death that push our own capacity for understanding. Suppose that a fellow UU, a beloved companion who shares with us this religious journey we are on, suppose they share with us something they experience as “far out.” Far out, btw is a technical term in liberal religion.
We might be tempted to believe their story. We might be tempted to disbelieve their story. Ram Dass said that when he was preparing to travel to India to meet his guru, Neem Karoli Baba he knew he was going to a land where people are far more likely to believe and talk about miracles. He wondered how as a western trained psychologist, he would handle this. He decided that he would believe it when people shared miracles. He said “I figured if the miracles weren’t real or true, that was their problem not mine.”
Finding this attitude useful, I’ve tried it many times in the past 40 years.
There is something besides believing and not believing. There is accepting that we don’t exactly know. When people tell me something that is clearly meaningful to them, I know with absolute certainty that something happened. I don’t need to know what it was exactly. I can embrace not knowing, and become curious. I can allow the person sharing educate me. Ego tells me that what I think, my story about their story is what matter most. By letting go of this, I can join them in their sense of “far out!” I can join them in becoming aware that reality is way stranger and bigger than the data and theories that we have accumulated.
Some of you remember how every episode of Star Trek started off with the voice of Captain James T. Kirk’s saying: “Space The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, To seek out new life and new civilizations, To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
As far as going where no man has gone before, there might be a little ego in that. Ego, or maybe male conditioning tells us we must be top dog. What seems more important is that we get to go where we have never gone before. But you know, when someone shares their miracle with us.. Given that each moment is unique and has its own opportunities, we do get to go where no one has gone before.
And space might be what it’s all about. When one of your companions wants to share treasure with you, do you have space to receive it? Are you willing to create space to allow something potentially transformative to emerge? And what about the space between our companions and us? Might this be something holy? What if it is the place from which miracles and revelation arise?
And what about talking to people across space? We do it all the time, right? Let’s consider our desire for connection and our desire to serve life. Can these travel across time and space? How far might these reach? Faith and experience tell me: “Yes, very far.”
Now I’m leary of attempts to ignore or deny loss and grief. The death of a loved one can cause seismic changes in our worlds. I don’t embrace an attitude that says nothing has changed. Death changes things.
However, the assumption of modern Western society that death is the end of the story, this is an anomaly in history. Throughout human history and across the globe, most cultures have known that people remain in relationship to those who have died. Indigenous cultures have acknowledged human connection to ancestors and to those yet to be born.
Modern Western worldview has been trapped in the limited thinking of a mechanistic paradigm. We have been materialists asserting that bodies and people are the same thing. We considered bodies to be mechanisms. We assumed that the totality of who we are can be determined by measuring the composition of chemicals and electromagnetic pulses. When entropy leaves the mechanism of a body worn and broken beyond repair, we called this the end of the story.
The end of the story? Really?
I’ll stop there and create space for us to hear some people’s stories, experiences, ideas, … And we’ll continue to go where we have never gone before.
Let’s do this!
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