First Parish Sermon

There was a great tolerance expressed in the ancient Sufi teachings, as witnessed, for example in these lines from the 13th Century mystical poet, Rumi. Listen to what he said:

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not form the East or the West.My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know first, last, outer, inner only that breath breathing human being.Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the lute. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The Sufis, understandably, were, highly revered as saints and holy men by the common folk, and their teachings were taken to heart. The Sufis still exist today. They represent the best that Islamic jspirituality has to offer the world. If we find ourselves not able to appreciate islamic religious and political practices because of the fanaticism, abuses, and violence of some muslim adherents, let us recall the the bloody history of Christianity in ages past, and in our own time, and let us seek instead to judge what is best in one religious tradition by what is best in the other. The Sufis are best known for their chants and religious dances (the whirling dervishes) and also for their stories. This morning I want to share with you some of my favorite Sufi stories from a collection by Idries Shah a contemporary Sufi teacher. Many of these stories are hundreds of years old in terms of their derivation and go back many centuries.

The first one, "The Perfect Master", has a perfect reverse or flip ending. Here's a guy who spends 20 years looking for the Perfect Fully Enlightened Spiritual Master. He does an awful lot of guru hopping, moving from sage to supposed sage, and then one day he thinks he's found the Perfect Master and begs to be accepted as a disciple, only to have the Master turn the tables on him and say, "Sorry Jack, no can do, as the Perfect Master I require only the Perfect Pupil." Touche! My friends, if you're looking for the perfect church with the perfect minister you've come to the right place. We have only one stipulation for those who would join our fellowship. We only accept perfect parishioners. 

My friend and colleague, Clarke Wells, once wrote a column about a new 12-Step group called, "Competents Anonymous", which is for people who really have got their lives together, are in touch with their inner resources, know how good they are and can accomplish anything they set their minds to, but are ashamed to admit it to others. Here at last in Competents Anonymous they can say how great they are and have others applaud them for it. Membership in C.A. is rather small and select and you have to be pretty darn competent to be accepted into the group. But "when you're ready for C.A., C.A. will be ready for you." Are you ready?

What about Jesus' famous teaching, "Be ye perfect even as your Heavenly Father is perfect"? Did he really mean perfect? Some translators say that the word in Greek is better translated into English as "whole", W-H-O-L-E. Be whole, even as God is Whole. To be whole means to be in touch with your shadow side as well as your capacity for good, to know good and evil in oneself and to choose the good. That is what it means to be whole in a human sense. So Jesus' admonition could be read to say, "Seek your own wholeness rather than someone else's supposed perfection." The poet Kahlil Gibran once said, "The perfect teacher leads you not to himself, but to the threshold of your own mind." After all, guru is spelled "G-U-R-U", meaning, "Gee, you are you", and once you discover that you will have found the Perfect Master.

A second story, "The Idiot in the Great City", relates rather nicely to the first. 
An idiot came to a huge city, and he was confused by the number of people in the streets. Fearing that if he slept and woke again he would not be able to find himself among so many people, he tied a gourd to his ankle for identification. A practical joker knowing what he had done, waited until he was asleep, then removed the gourd and tied it around his own leg. He, too, lay down on the floor to sleep. The fool woke first, and saw the gourd. At first he thought that this other man must be him. Then he attached the other, shouting, "If you are me: then who, for heaven's sake, who and where am I?"

Rumi, the 13th Century Sufi mystic put it well, "I thought I knew who I was, but I was you." The truth of the matter is we can only know ourselves in relation to others who hold up a mirror in which we see a reflection of ourselves in their eyes. Out of the many mirrors reflecting various images of who we are we weave a sense of self. Eventually we choose which of those images we wish to claim as our authentic self. Buddhists say that the belief in a separate self or ego is ultimately an illusion that we will finally let go of when we achieve enlightenment and a comprehensive consciousness of compassion for all living things. 

The quest for the self is kind of like the dog chasing its own tail. We go round in circles and get nowhere. Or we tie a gourd on our foot and think we've lost ourselves in others when we discover that they also have a gourd on their foot. Jesus, you may recall, implied that those who try to find themselves will lose themselves, while those who would lose themselves for something greater than self will find themselves. Come into this fellowship of seekers in quest of that which is within and beyond the self. Come into this hall of mirrors and discover who you are. Teachers of the Great Mystery say there is only one Self, the Self of the Universe, manifesting in many forms. "I thought I knew who I was, but I was you." I am me and you are you, and so we are all together.

A third story is called "Isa and the Doubters." 

Isa (meaning Jesus), the son of Miryam, was walking in the desert with a number of people in whom covetousness was still strong. They begged Isa to tell them the Secret Name by which he restored the dead to life. He said, "If I tell you, you will abuse it." They said, "We are ready and fitted for such knowledge; besides, it will reinforce our faith." "You do no know what you ask," he said, but he told them the Word. Soon afterwards, these people were walking in a deserted place when the saw a heap of whitened bones. "Let us make a trial of the Word," they said to one another, and they did. No sooner had the Word been pronounced than the bones became clothed with flesh and retransformed into a ravening wild beast, which tore them to shreds.

Here we have another version of the Sorcerer's Apprentice who thought he knew how to use the Master's magical powers and when he does so creates chaos and destruction. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" tells a similar tale. A scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, uses his powers of scientific knowledge to create life out of the brain and carcass of a dead human being. What he creates is a monster who destroys other human lives and nearly kills his maker. When we created the Atom Bomb which we dropped on Hiroshoma to hasten the end of W.W. II did we create a Frankenstein monster or ravenous beast that will ultimately destroy its creator? 

The Nazis used scientific knowledge and technology to create the gas ovens and crematoriums at Auschwitz. They put science in the service of absolute evil. The lesson in all this is that intellect and knowledge, science and technology alone, cannot save us, if we have not learned to tame the ravenous beast in our own nature. There are some things we are better off not knowing lest we abuse the powers it represents. Isa, Lord Jesus, take back your Secret Word, and save us from ourselves.

The origins of the story "When Death Came to Baghdad" derive from a Sufi teacher, Fudail ibn Ayad, from the early 9th century. When the Sufi disciple overhears the Angel of Death talking about the number of calls he has to make in Baghdad in the ensuing weeks he flees the city to the distant town of Samarkand believing thereby that he will escape the touch of the dark angel. The Angel of Death is surprised to learn that the disciple is still presumably in the City of Baghdad since he is due to collect him four weeks hence in the distant town of Samarkand. The writer of Ecclesiastes teaches, "For everything there is a season, and a time and purpose for all things under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die...." Are we in fact destined to die at a particular time and place? People say, "I guess it was his time", or "When my time comes..." Some new agers teach that as eternal human souls who have lived before and will live again we in fact chose where and when and to whom we would be born, and how and when we will die. It's all fated, but it is a self-chosen destiny.

I believe that we are all fated to die, but that it is not written in the stars, nor by self-chosen destiny before we were born, how and when and where we will die. We might be able to cheat death in Baghdad, but eventually death will catch up with us in Samarkand or some other town or city. If there is a self-chosen destiny to our death and dying it is more than likely a destiny self-chosen in this lifetime after we are born, not before. Alcohol and drug addiction, overeating, poor diet, lack of exercise, stress and ulcers and high blood 
pressure, are forms of slow suicide, perhaps unconsciously chosen, but self-chosen nonetheless. We may in fact hasten our appointment with the Angel of Death well ahead of schedule by how we live or fail to live. 

One of the TV network's video newsmagazines once had a program about a self-taught health guru, his only formal education being that of a licensed undertaker, who was marketing mega vitamins and other products under the banner of "Life Extension." He teaches and says he believes that we don't ever have to die if we take care of ourselves, eat the right things, supplement our diets with life extension vitamins and herbal remedies. 

As a back up, however, he is also promoting cryonics, the freezing of the body immediately after death, in the hopes that sometime in the future, when science discovers a new miracle treatment or cure, the body can be unfrozen and life can begin again. If they are unable to freeze the body the next best thing is to cut off the head and freeze the brain. Later on the head and brain can be attached to a different body when medical science has perfected the art of head and brain transplants. These people are serious. They really think they can cheat death, head and body, or head without a body. And you thought Frankenstein was only a story! 

I'm reminded of another story about a guy who went into a bar and sat down next to a head, that's right, just a head, a human head. The head began talking and said to him, "Hi, I'm George. I have magical powers and can change myself into anything I want. Just name it and I'll do it." The guy wanted none of it and said to the head, "Look, why don't you change into a fly and buzz off." Poof! The head changed into a fly. Just then the bartender came by, towel in hand, and "Swat!", the fly was dead. Moral of the story--Quit While Your A Head. 

We can joke about death and wonder what's ahead for us at the end of the line, but that there is an end of the line, there can be no doubt, whether we gross out on megavitamins, take the deep freeze, or jump on a fast horse from Baghdad to Samarkand. The lesson is not to flee from or to death, which will come to all of us sooner or later, but, as John Wesley once taught,

             Do all the good you can,
             In all the ways you can,
             To all the People you can,
             In every place you can,
             At all the times you can,
             As long as ever you can.

If we do that then it won't much matter when the Angel of Death touches us, for we will have lived life to its fullest...
             As much as any of us ever can.

It has been said that God is simply too incomprehensible for human beings to understand, so that the Creator of Universe decided to reveal divine truths through stories. I hope you've enjoyed these Sufi stories and that some glimmer of divine truth has touched your souls in the telling thereof. So be it. Amen.