Weather or not we save the world…

There is a story David Bumbaugh (who is one of the best preachers ever to grace a pulpit among us) told me once that made me cry.  I’m not even sure if I remember it right.  I probably don’t, but I remember how I heard it anyway and what it meant to me. In my mind, it was a story about blessed irrelevance, a story about doing not because of the expected end result, but because not doing just wasn’t an option.   

You may have heard it before, I think it came from a naturalist named Loren Eisley originally and probably had a completely different point than the one I’m making – but here’s the way it mattered to me, so let me tell you my version of the story of the star thrower.  It’s about a biologist on a working vacation on some distant lovely coast who walked the beach every day when the tide went out, watching as local shell collectors scour the sand picking up the abandoned prizes of the sea, the sand dollars and conch shells and starfish that the receding waters had left behind.   

Knowing that the thriving tourist market in this lovely idyllic place would pay handsomely for these small treasures, the collectors came each day to make their living from the sea, piling the little creatures high in great buckets, carrying them with work-worn arms over to bonfires that would boil away the dirt, the muck, the very life from them, converting the starfish and the sand dollars into a saleable commodity.    

As all of this happened, the biologist watched every day, from little distance away.  He didn’t make any grand pronouncements.  He just watched, as little deaths, the tiniest of deaths, scattered out along the beach in front of him.  Seeing them there, dried and dying, in the early light of morning before the collectors came, this man who had no particular pre-existent love of starfish, no great compulsion to ban the collection of ocean creatures, no nothing except a morning walk, suddenly started to feel an overwhelming sadness, an unnamed sadness, a sadness that might have had something to do with the meaninglessness of things and of people, and the next morning he got up again before the collectors, went out to one tiny portion of a beach which was itself vaster than his imagining, and threw some starfish back into the sea.  He threw them back even as the tide drug them back in. He threw them back even as the collectors gathered their baskets for another day. He threw them back knowing that that he was not their savior, for fate and death and the tides were not his to control.  He threw them back not because he was sure to save them, but because he had arms for throwing and because he could do no other.   

Though that same afternoon would bring with it just as full a beach of little deaths as the afternoon before, the thrower of starfishes, knowing that his work would yield little tangible results, threw those starfishes anyway. Every morning, in defiance of the tides, in defiance of death itself, because he had to, he threw those starfish anyway.   

There’s a reading by Catholic author Henri Nowen which says that “the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.”  Now I know we’re not the Christian leaders of the future, but we are religious practitioners of today, and I cried when I thought about the star thrower because I was aching, aching, for something in our Unitarian Universalist tradition which recognized the deep power of an act of complete, blessed, vulnerable irrelevance.   

I have preached to my congregation that moral acts are purer when they are done without reward or the expectation of reward.  It’s Dick Gilbert’s idea that we should all aspire to be “good for nothing,” people who do good for no reward, but for the thing itself.  In preaching this, I have found it easy to reassure Unitarian Universalsits that their ethical decision making could be purer than that of those who labor under the promise of a final theistic judgment in the form of heaven or hell.  I have found it easy, deceptively so, to communicate that good works done by those who do not expect a heavenly reward are just a little better than those who do the same in order to build an impressive report for St. Peter at the gates.  But Nowen reminded me that, even without the lure of heaven and the stars in our celestial crown, we liberal religious people still have a ways to go before we can claim ourselves as being anything close to “good for nothing.”  For even without heaven, we can find ourselves lured into action not by the purest motivation of the act itself, but by the grand temptation to be relevant, to be spectacular, to be powerful in our wholly temporal game of justification by acts alone.  

For so many of us, it is relevance that we are after rather than heaven.  It is irrelevance that we fear in the place of perdition, and the great reward at the end of it all is not pearly gates, but purpose, not salvation, but success.  Too often, even we liberals, just like our more theologically traditional counterparts, do because we get something out of the doing and not because the doing is right. 

And yet Henri Nowen, grounded in the love of his Christ, musters the courage to stand bare before the world, to work tirelessly for justice in that world, and yet never imagine himself its’ savior.  And yet the thrower of starfishes manages to rise every morning and go about his appointed task, knowing all the while that what he does cannot be measured by achievement, knowing all the while that he will not be celebrated, and yet also knowing all the while that he must do. 

I guess all this is my way of saying that I fear we Unitarian Universalists, in learning again to claim our power in a world so in need, run a dangerous risk of focusing too much on the hoped-for fruits of our own labors and not enough on the motivations behind those labors, motivations which existed and will exist weather or not we find success, weather or not we grow our churches, weather or not we prove ourselves to be so deeply important, so deeply relevant.  

Can a newly empowered liberal religion, so focused on achievement, on advancing the causes and fighting the good fight, so wonderfully intent on getting results for our beloved Walden that’s burning, dare to be irrelevant and bare before the world with nothing to offer but our vulnerable selves?  Or are we so attached to the importance of our own relevance that our actions are only worth only the sum total of their tangible results?I know why Nowen can be so brave.  He says it beautifully.  It’s because the greatest message he has to carry “is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love is the true source of all human life.”He’s held, even in failure, even in irrelevance, by a love that will not let him go. For him this love comes through the birth and redemption of Jesus.  But my heart tells me that Unitarian Universalists such as ourselves can only dare to imagine ourselves as something more than our tangible results if somehow, someway, we feel the presence of an enduring love of our own. 

Weather by Jesus or in sunsets or in the extraordinary wonder of the everyday, we too must be held by something, lest we find ourselves making idols of our newly-found politically, religiously, and culturally relevant selves.  Because the story of the star thrower still makes me cry, because I can’t talk myself out of believing there has to be more in the doing than just the results at the end, and because I want to believe that the end reward is not the measure of the act, I harbor a hope that we can find the face of the holy even in our own irrelevance. 

Could we believe that we are loved and we are worthy of that love not because of what we do or what we accomplish, but because we are held by a love that will not let us go?I think so.  I hope so, and I hope that we as a people can stand together before that ocean of injustice that is vaster than our imaginations.  Some days we might just be spectacular, and some days all of our labors will be washed ashore again at our feet.  Come what may, may we buoyed in the good work not merely by the measure of our own successes, but by the fact that we are loved beyond measure, weather or not we save the world.