Garage Sale 
August 5, 2004

God is alive and well in my garage, and God is perplexed about sin. A terrible thing has happened to sin; it's not as popular as it used to be. It's used in very limited circles these days, and it's too bad. It seems to me a very useful concept. It has to do with falling short, which surely is a universal human experience. The words in Hebrew scripture are "to miss," as in "to miss the mark." Another word "to revolt or to rebel" alienation from God. Now, that lets all the atheist and non-theists off the hook, so many of you can breathe a sigh of relief. Sin doesn't apply to you. (Laughter) Would that it were so easy!

There are several ways of thinking of sin. One of them is that it has to do with violating a taboo. That is, perhaps, the reason that sin is so closely linked with sexuality in our culture, but I suggest there's a more profound notion--that sin is cutting us off from our highest inner relationships. It's part of the web that forgets, or denies, that we're part of the web, a presumption of independence and autonomy rather than interdependence and cooperation.

We are, after all, social beings. We realize our highest potential in relationship with others. Consequences are bad for the individual and society when we stop doing that. Individuals get isolated, and people pursue their individual gain at the expense of the long-term effect on other people.

One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, says this about sin: "The power of sin is centrifugal. When at work in human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end, nothing at all is left...

"Other people and (if you happen to believe in God) God, or (if you happen not to) the World, Society, Nature whatever you call the greater whole of which you're a part, sin is whatever you do, or fail to do, that pushes them away, that widens the gap between you and them and also the gaps within yourself...

"Religion and unreligion are both sinful to the degree that they widen the gap between you and the people who don't share your views.

"The word charity illustrates the insidiousness of sin. From meaning a free and loving gift, it has come to mean a demeaning handout.

"Original Sin means that we all originate out of a sinful world which taints us from the word go. We all tend to make ourselves the center of the universe, pushing away centrifugally from that center everything that seems to impede its freewheeling. More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, it is what Jesus said he came to save the world from." (Frederick Buechener, Wishful Thinking, pp 88-89)

So I champion the restoration of some idea of sin, not particularly associated with sex but the way we honor or defy our inter-relationship with one another. Are widespread economic disparities more sinful than personal moral lapses? I tend to think they are. So I'm in favor of salvaging sin and honoring the guilt that sinful action engenders, the guilt that calls people to teshuvah, turning away from those behaviors that miss the mark, that isolate people, that widen the gap between them.

God is alive and well in my garage. And God is perplexed about sex. We couldn't really mention sin without sex popping in. As a matter of fact, in this quote from Buechner he had one other thing to say about sin and sex: "Sex is sinful to the degree that, instead of drawing you closer to another human being in his human- ness, it unites bodies but leaves the lives inside them hungrier and more alone than before." (Buechner, op cit, p 89)

I could wish that our culture weren't so mixed up about sex. On the one hand there is sexual suggestion used mercilessly and relentlessly to sell all sorts of products, perfumes to hot dogs. There's more and more blatantly sexualizing of media images; nothing is left to the imagination. There's a thriving pornography industry in this country, and the problem with pornography from my point of view is that it blunts the human imagination. Sexuality depends on a keen and inventive imagination. But that's enough about sex.

God is alive and well in my garage, and God is perplexed about civility. God and I are both deeply distressed about the erosion of common civility. Now my mother--and many of you who know my mother know this to be true--is a stickler for manners courtesy, politeness, etiquette, even sort of an Emily Post kind of lady. This may seem trivial to some, but somehow these things do help to preserve an atmosphere of civility. They're not called "social graces" for nothing!

In this country we are deeply polarized politically, religiously, economically, spiritually. It's hard to assess whether it's greater now than at other times. Probably not. I think of the times of the Civil War or the Revolutionary War, when the country was also deeply polarized, but it's certainly serious enough now to give us pause.

Polarization seems to me the result of people staking out positions from which they will not move. It's a form of absolutist thinking and acting, and seems to me contrary to the spirit of compromise that's made our republic function reasonably effectively for the last two hundred and twenty years. A pragmatic approach is valued less than an absolute one. In fact, changing your mind is a worse fault than sticking to your position even when it has been discredited or shown to be flawed. Now, isn't this peculiar? It's a product of too much certainty, too little humility. I think it's time for all of us to admit that, firm as our convictions are, they may be flawed.

Which leads us back to sex. (Laughter.) Civility has gone totally out the window in our current public debate about same-sex marriage. Discussion doesn't ever happen, only slogan shouting matches. Ideas never get explored in any kind of depth. For example, in what ways will recognizing commitments of fidelity from same-sex partners threaten commitments of fidelity between different-sex partners? This is a legitimate question which we should be able to discuss. Is honoring these commitments in law potentially helpful or not helpful for families in America? What's the probable impact on children in this country? What are the actual economic consequences of same-sex marriage? These questions need to be posed, and yet these ideas never get broached and never in a civil way!

But enough about civility! God is alive and well in my garage, and God is perplexed about love. Now I have always been perplexed myself and fascinated by love, the word with its myriad meanings. "I love Bosco! Bosco's good for me!" Remember that song, some of you? I can see those glimmers of recognition and there's also this "Like excuse me. What planet is this guy on?" Bosco was this little chocolate drink that you there was this ad-- well, never mind. t! "Love is a many splendoured thing." You remember that song. "I love your new haircut!" What's love got to do with it?" "Faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of these is love."

So many meanings loaded on the back of one four-letter word! The core has something to do, it seems to me, with positive regard, a feeling and a guide to action. Love is a useful factor to guide ethical action, once you've grown beyond mere obedience to rules.

I grew up with "situation ethics," and I know Carol is an expert on this topic, having spent some time with Mr. Fletcher, who formulated this idea. What would love have me do in a particular situation? This is the kind of ethical decision making you get by posing dilemmas. Suppose your child would starve if you didn't steal a loaf of bread? A dictate of love says that preserving a life might be a higher good than refraining from stealing. Love has always been more complicated, more elusive, than I thought it might be when I was younger. Figuring out the loving thing to do has always been hard for me and, I suspect, for many of us.

Jesus' great commandment, "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself" is endlessly challenging. And one of the hardest parts is to get loving yourself right. When does self-love become self-absorption, self- regard become narcissism, self -esteem become arrogance? How do you deal with a situation where loving another seems to demand violating love of yourself? Is sacrificial love always pathological? I don't think so.

Meditations upon love inevitably bring us back to you guessed it! sex. (Laughter.) What marks a healthy relationship between sex and love? To answer this, I'm afraid we need a new theology, an ethic of human sexuality for the twenty-first century. An ethic grounded only in the literal world view of the Bible is too limited, given all that we know about human sexuality.

Gender is part genetics and part social construct. It's the same with sexual orientation. And there are different proportions with different people. There's a huge range of variability with regard to sexual feelings and attractions and behaviors and a huge range of sexual behaviors that are ethical but not conventional.

This issue was raised for me in a particularly poignant way by a movie I saw last week, Delovely. I don't know how many of you saw that, the movie about Cole Porter--an evocation of the love between Cole Porter and his wife Linda Lee. Now he was a creative genius, open to and hungry for love and its physical expression with many people. His primary emotional loyalty and devotion was to his wife, but theirs was hardly a conventional marriage. Given who he was, could he hope to live a sexually ethical life? I'm on the sexual fringes of society anyway as a gay man. From where I stand, we'd do well to let go of parts of our long-standing taboo-based ethic, and move forward to forge a responsibility-based ethic. But enough about sex!

God is alive and well in my garage, and God is perplexed about the Internet (Laughter) and virtual community. Sometimes even at the not-quite-young age of fifty-seven I feel like a dinosaur, never so much as when I spend time with people who have never known a world without cell-phones, laptops, and the internet. I used to look with jaundiced eye on the cell-phone users in the airport or on the plane: "What is wrong with these people? They are so self- important; they are unable to be alone, to be cut off from their friends or business unless required to do so."

But then I kept seeing their numbers growing. It's a very strange etiquette, talking in a clearly audible voice to an invisible someone as if the visible people weren't there at all. I began to realize that they belong to a virtual community that is more relevant and real to them than the spatial one in which their body is located.

Well, I find that this form of communication makes powerful, engaging virtual community or communities not only possible but in many cases preferable. There is, after all, lots of messiness in face-to- face, fully embodied communities such as we have here at Summit. Nuances of body-language and facial expressions and tone of voice are missing partially or completely in some form of electronic communication--all these ways in which we get extra information. The chances for misconstruing what people say electronically are enormous!

But these technologies are here to stay. I have a laptop, e- mail, a cell-phone, even! I'm still sparring with them, appreciating their convenience and speed, resenting their demands on my time. Two to three hours a day still won't be enough to catch up, and I fall behind whenever I go out of town. It's an on-going challenge for all of us to figure out how the internet might be made for us, not us for the internet. It's a challenge to preserve the fullness of embodied, flesh-and-blood, sensory community. Which bring us back to sex. (Laughter.)

Nowhere is the challenge of virtual reality through the Internet greater than in the realm of sex. Pornography, as I mentioned before, is a huge, profitable segment of the internet. If you doubt this, you can see how much SPAM you get on your system or how much your filters eliminate. We have a huge appetite for graphic imagery, still or moving, readily accessible, easy to view or download in the privacy of your own home, office, or whatever.

There are opportunities for people to make connection anonymously through their screen names, so you never have to divulge your real identity. You can easily invent a persona to be "you" on the net that is significantly different from the "you" that you might be in person.

Where will all these virtual identities lead us? What kind of society will thrive and what will die if we continue to promote false representations of self as an acceptable alternative to true ones? What will happen to real, live, full-embodied human sexuality if virtual sex proliferates more and more? Will Gresham's Law kick in? "Bad currency drives good currency out; bad sex drives good sex out?" Has it already done do?

But enough about sex. (Laughter.) God is alive and well in my garage, and God is perplexed about simplicity. So at 12:28 a.m. this morning I returned from the 10:30 wedding the wedding at 10:30 and then the reception. Earlier I'd driven back from a district board meeting in Palm Springs. My desk is strewn with piles of snail-mail. My computer is awash in unread e-mails. My cat cowers as I walk purposefully through my apartment trying to get some things done. Is something wrong with this picture? Or is it the picture I really want to draw with my life? Is this level of complexity my ideal of simplicity? How do we know that? I expect that I've still got a distance to go to simplify my life in ways that will enrich how I experience time and relationships.

Time and relationships. That's how we chart our lives. What will we do with our time? What will you do with the one wild and precious life that you have? And in relationship with whom will you do it?

Which brings us back to that familiar three-letter word God. (Laughter. We expected a different one.) Where is God in all these musings? Sin. God is the cosmic coach on the sidelines urging us to close the gap. To own that we've missed the mark. To try again, this time with better aim. The coach with seemingly infinite patience, who believes that we can and will, in fact, get it right. Civility. God is the cosmic sage calling us to deeper humility and urging us to keep on talking to one another, even across what seems to be an unbridgeable divide. Love. God is the cosmic power that can sustain our positive regard, not only for people we like, but for people we don't even know or for people we don't like. And, most challenging of all, for ourselves.

Virtual reality and the Internet? God is the cosmic web- master, sending us reminder e-mail urging us to log off from time to time, so that we might risk discovering the real felt frustrations and joys of fully-embodied human community. Simplicity. God is the cosmic consultant gently but persistently urging us to let go of things that weigh us down, frustrate us, sap our creative energy, that keep us from savoring the deliciousness of life. And sex. God is the cosmic trickster who delights in the madness and ecstasy of human sexual experience, who is constantly amazed by its startling variety, and who wants us to see that playfulness is reverence in disguise.

God is alive and well in my garage. So may God be in yours as well. Thus may it be always. Shalom. Blessed be. Inshah' Allah. Aho! Namaste. Amen.

--Rev. Ned Wight
August 5, 2004
(Transcribed by Dolores Moore)