Lee Barker, Senior Minister of the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church, led the morning service and preached the homily, "It Only Adds."

My father is 91 years old. I am amazed by the length of his life. When I ask him what its like to have lived for nearly a century, he says "Well, unlike before, it now feels like I have breakfast every 10 minutes."

Sometimes I can coax him into making larger observations and he will marvel over the scientific and technological changes he has witnessed, how in the arc of his life he has seen the span from gas lamps and horse-buggies to cyberspace and biotechnology. Such talk prompts me to speculate on what the world will look like 90 years from today. And I wonder if artificial intelligence will ever come to be or if space docking stations will ever evolve into settled space colonies. They are terribly moot questions. Just as my father could never know what changes he would see in his lifetime, I can never know those that will come during the remainder of my own - or beyond.

I do know this, however: I know that if religion is to serve us in those future days, if it is to live up to its promise of establishing wholeness in the self and in the world, then it needs to be specially prepared so that it may meet whatever scientific and technological developments are to be born. We'll have to work on it. It won't be easy. New human achievement and expanded knowledge have always been a struggle for religion.

No matter the age, no matter the advancement, much of religion has been threatened by scientific discovery and technological innovation to the point where they have been viewed as a menace both to theology and morality. Rarely has that view resulted in the good.

That's the point Karen Armstrong made in her latest book, The Battle for God. Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun, has turned to the academic life. Having rejected the church, she now calls herself a "freelance monotheist," and has become one of the foremost British commentators on religious affairs. She argues that fundamentalism is a phenomenon in all the world's faith traditions and she takes some time spinning out its various manifestations in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. She writes that each expression of fundamentalism shares a common trait with the others, that it is a fearful defense against the modern world which is seen to be spiritually bankrupt, tainted by new science and technology. She writes that fundamentalists haven't really gone back to the roots of the traditions and that they have actually misconstrued the purpose of science and blurred the distinction between myth and reality. The irony is that every time something new is learned, we human beings are confronted with all the more that we do not know. And that is threatening. And, too often it has veered off into the desperation of violence.

This, she wrote, well before September 11, well before this very day when, in New York City, a rescue worker is surely sifting through ashes and dust, taking into his or her fingers the remains of heroes, office workers and terrorists, all in the very same handful.

I have a deep affection for anyone who seeks the ineffable. But when that effort leads to the denial of all that has been learned about life and religion, when it leads to the acceptance of the gods of an earlier humanity, gods who are judgmental, overly involved in the affairs of humanity and too interested in either saving or destroying the souls of those who do not worship them, then that effort leads necessarily to human fragmentations and brokenness. It pits human beings against one another and splinters us apart, and it is a rent in our humanity that can only grow more severe as the modern world draws us closer together.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Retreat, defensiveness, denial and the resulting violence is not the file drawer that automatically has to be reached for when confronted with the achievements of the modern world. I'm thinking of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics who got at it by writing about flowers. He said: "I have a friend who's an artist… He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. And he says, 'You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.' And I think that he's kind of nutty... I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure… All kinds of interesting observations which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don't understand how it subtracts." It only adds, it doesn't subtract; a scientific understanding adds to our experience of wonder, doubts add to the bedrock of truth, the modern world is the place where the fulfillment of all our heartfelt values will come to pass.

Let me tell you a little true life story, told by a newer member of our church in Pasadena. Julia grew up in the fifties in a Christian Science home where she learned that the only true reality is God, that the earth's existence is meaningless, that this flesh of ours is illusory. The only thing with true substance is the spirit and intention of God. And so it is God who is in control of our bodies and our healing. All humans can do is to petition God to be healed when ill. In her home, prompted by the teaching that only God could offer instantaneous healing, in her home no medicines were allowed and no medical treatment was sought.

For Julia, a first bout with tonsillitis was both painful and prolonged. So, when a second episode flared, at seventeen, she snuck out of her home and took a shot of penicillin. Twenty-four hours later she was healed, confirming the faith of her parents. "See, Julia," they said, "God is the true healer." But more importantly, it proved to Julia the validity of that same faith. This, she agreed, was God's instantaneous healing, which came through medicine. The modern world, she saw, was the fulfillment of church teaching, not a challenge to it. So now she has found a home in our church and with our insistence that truth is added to by the modern, more scientific world.

But this is what I would like you to hear today. Our liberal tradition is no different from any other faith tradition. Our liberal tradition is not immune to the retreat from modernity. Our tremendous openness offers a spiritual haven for all seekers, including those who have latched on to the answers of numerology, astrology, phrenology, and "angelology."

I'm confident that it is not just a Southern California thing. I've been to too many Unitarian Universalist coffee hours and talked to too many members of UU churches. But even if it were a California thing, it is only the most graphic example of what I'm talking about. There are among us more subtle and prevalent forms of the retreat. And as I look over this congregation and pick out the more than half-dozen ministers with whom I attended seminary, I say to you particularly, "We are kind of responsible for this," at least our generation of ministers is.

Twenty-five years ago, a generation of liberal theological students vowed that we would take something new to the pulpits we filled. We vowed that we would bring spirit and passion to a ministry that we saw covered with the dry dust of reason and intellect. We wanted to lend the poetry of story and the heartbeat of personal experience to the ideas we brought to our parishioners. And, in many ways we have been successful, perhaps too successful. For now, in our movement, there is a generic strain which confuses feelings for spirituality, which is so thirsty for the intimacies of personal relationships that they are thought to be the ultimate, which so desperately wants the new, just world to be created that it is seen to be the only concern of religion. These are narrow tracks which, too often, have taken no account of the human mind's great lessons and accomplishments.

One hundred and sixty years ago, William Ellery Channing was criticized by the younger ministers of his time for being too heady and not passionate enough, for not being integrated enough into the modern, real world of human experience. He internalized those criticisms and took them as his failing. He wrote, "The age in which we live demands not only an enlightened but an earnest ministry.…To suit such an age a minister must communicate religion-not only as a result of reasoning but as a matter of experience…"
Our modern age is different from Channing's modern age. In our time, feelings rule the day. In our place, intimacy is thought of as supreme. In our company, justice is thought to be all. And that means, perhaps, that we do not need to guard against the detachment of science as much as we need to guard against religious passions which have no anchor in science or reason. Myself? I would flip Channing's sentiments on end. I would say, "The age in which we live demands not only an earnest religion, but an enlightened religion.…To suit such an age we must communicate religion-not only as a result of our passions and experience but as a result of our reasoning as well."

"It only adds," wrote Richard Feynman. It does not subtract. The world is in trouble. It won't get beyond this terrible time without learning and accepting that truth

It only adds. It does not subtract. Our precious movement is susceptible to its own confusion and to a bit of myopia. We will not be served in our quest for wholeness without keeping a broad connection between heart and mind.

It only adds. It does not subtract. There is a future for all of humanity in those words and only in those words.
Amen

Reported for the web by Deborah Weiner; formatted for the web by Julie Albanese.

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