“Is That Your Final Answer?” a sermon by the Rev. David S. Blanchard The First Unitarian Universalist Society of Syracuse January 23, 2000

“I am often wrong, but never in doubt.”

-Ivy Baker Priest

Even if you never watched television, it would be difficult to be entirely unaware of the latest fad in television programming: the new, and improved, BIG stakes game show. No more making a fool of oneself on “The Price is Right” in order to win an ‘Amana Radar Range’ or a trip to “Puerto Viarto”--- a place I imagine populated entirely, and exclusively, with game show winners. Today the trend is toward winning piles of money, though people are still required to make fools of themselves in the process by either demonstrating their astounding grasp of trivial information or their complete cluelessness at the most simplistic questions.

In anycase, the most watched of these programs is the ratings sensation, ‘Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” And for those of you who may have been trekking in Tibet for the past 6 months, the host of that program asks the contestants, after each and every answer they offer, with deep earnestness, “Is that your final answer?” To which the contestants typically reaffirm their answers by saying, “Yes, that’s my final answer...” A long dramatic pause follows, at which time we learn if the contestant goes forward or is lead away regretting his or her certainty over staking $64,000 on a guess that Richie Cunningham’s rarely seen older brother on the 70’s TV series, “Happy Days”, name was Chip, and not Chuck.

So now you know. I’ve been watching.

We were talking about this a little at our Staff Meeting Thursday when Rebecca asked me if I was preaching a sermon on game shows, not being sure of much sacred music on that theme. She succeeded, but was unable to get a complete English translation of a Latin game show anthem, but we appreciate the effort. In any case, Rebecca commented that watching the show is sort of addictive. You sit there yelling at the television as someone is trying to guess what word comes next in the children’s game, “Duck, duck,...? .... “ You are certain that you would win a million if only YOU were sitting there. As the stakes build, you are hooked, and before you know it you’ve wasted an hour, and have heard Regis Philbin ask “Is that your final answer?” at least 50 times.

Well, my sermon today is not about game shows, even though there are probably a few sermons in the subject of the media, materialism, and greed. They’ll have to hold for another Sunday. Today I want to stay closer to my area of so-called “expertise” - theology. Technically, theology is the study of God, but practically, it is the struggle to find those “final answers” that will put life’s deepest, enduring questions and our most disturbing doubts to rest. Theology brings us in relationship to that which is Ultimate, or at least the parts of the Ultimate that we can know as little transitory beings, bumping into each other and stepping onto each others toes, on this long journey we travel together. The consideration of the Ultimate is a worthy pastime, and is not the least bit akin with contemplating the lint in your navel. (Which is, I shamefully admit, akin to spending an hour watching “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”) If we in leadership are doing our job right, being a part of this spiritual community provides individuals in the congregation consistent and nurturing opportunities to formulate the important questions in their lives, and to forge meaning in this life, this world, this blessed mystery of being.

Whether you know it or not, whether you ever thought it was possible (or for that matter desirable), in the process of being members of this congregation, you have signed on to become a theologian. All of you. People who don’t want to be theologians don’t often stick around. It is hard and challenging work. It can be discouraging. It requires an active engagement with the raw and painful dimensions of being alive. It means living with the ambiguity of that multifaceted prism that some call, the ‘Truth’. It takes profound humility to be a decent theologian: to stay honest enough to admit you don’t really know what is Ultimate, or why we must die, or why people suffer, or how forgiveness heals, or what becomes of us when we die. It also takes great patience, vigilance even, to be on guard from the seduction of “one size fits all” solutions to theological questions -- solutions that too often mask the question, or deny ones own experience, or require us to suspend our judgment or reason in deference to one with claims to greater enlightenment.

Being a theologian, I would add, is not all punishing and perplexing work. I don’t want to scare any of our visitors away! It is, just as often, the most creative and joyful, empowering and playful endeavor that you could ever hope to lean into with mind and heart and soul. Theologians think not only about the Sunday School God we all outgrew. (In fact a few years ago, a book was written about Harvard Divinity School where I attended, that was called, plaintively, “Looking For God at Harvard”.) Theologians, those tenured and tenuous alike, hold the world in a much wider embrace. They think about sexuality. They think about love. They think about service. They think about joy. They think about justice. They think about healing. They think about community. So do I. So do you.

When we say we’re democratic, we aren’t just talking about our governance. We are also talking about our theology. This is, of course, not a new idea. It was part and parcel of what another theologian, Martin Luther, was doing when he launched the Reformation. Among other things, he was saying that the interpretation of the scriptures was best left to the person reading them. The scriptures were not well served by the priests who mediated their meaning to the people. As God’s word, Martin Luther held that religious faith was best developed through direct encounters with those scriptures, rather than through the mediation of the sacraments available only at the hands of a priest. I imagine Martin Luther would think we have carried all this a bit too far as Unitarian Universalists, but nevertheless, here we are today, worshipping in this community not because we comfortably share one set of beliefs and we’ve come to brush up on the fine print, but because we have promised each other acceptance and encouragement to spiritual growth and understanding. This is the place we can come each week to bear witness to what it means to live with integrity and purpose, to win and to lose, to laugh and to cry, to hope and to grieve.

The incarnation, that is the manifested presence of all that is holy and good, occurs because of what each of you bring into this place. All I have to do is invite you in. You do the rest.

Well, I guess I do have a bit more to do than just invite you in. Otherwise, why am I standing up here, and you’re all sitting out there? (A good question any honest minister poses to him or herself with some regularity.) I am here, instead of most of you, because I am a “professional”, trained and certified by people whose authority and wisdom you respect. That may give you comfort, but I hate to tell you how little that has to do with ministry. 5% maybe. 10% on a challenging day. Ministry is actually quite a little bit like, well, being a permanent contestant on the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” game show. You are in the “hot seat”. One after the other, people come to you with questions that sometimes strike you as inconsequential, but that more typically are really tricky. You can “phone a friend” or poll the congregation if you want, and sometimes that helps, but mostly confuses things. In ministry, things much more important than money are riding on the ‘correct’ answer. In ministry, there rarely is a final answer. And so the most important thing that I am in a position in ministry to accomplish, is to help each of you to be the best theologians you can be, so you can discern the presence of the Ultimate in the midst of whatever chaos your Life encounters. I am here to suggest questions: Where is the meaning? What am I meant to learn from this? How can I transform suffering? How does grace figure in this? Where is hope present? Who will stand with me?

Let me offer an example. A couple comes to me whose child has committed suicide. At first, about all there is are questions: Why did this happen? Is there a God? What did we do wrong? How could we have prevented this? How will we ever get over this pain? Is she in Heaven? They ask me the questions, but beyond acknowledging that they are fundamental, inevitable questions, what I have to say about the answers is rarely what people are actually looking for. They don’t realize what it is they are really seeking through our interaction. They want to talk about what they are thinking, what they are feeling. They want to reflect on their own beliefs, their own hopes, their own encounters with the Ultimate, not mine. This is as it should be. I have not had a child die. What could I know about what they were experiencing? But I know about grief, and I know about love, and I know about loss, and I know about healing. The secret is in finding the path that allows another to access their own resources of wisdom and power, as they might come to realize how much they too already know themselves about things like grief and love and loss and healing. No one has ever come to me and asked for help to access their own spiritual resources.

But that is the only way I know how to help, to be a minister.

The most significant drawback to being a theologian is highlighted on the Peanuts strip that is on the front of this morning’s Order of Service. It has gotten more than a few folks in trouble, not necessarily for BEING wrong, but for suggesting that someone else was. In theological language, its called heresy, and our own free church tradition wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for the heretics that blazed the way...some of them literally ablaze, unfortunately, as being burned at the stake was the customary punishment for heretics. Heresy is derived from ancient words that simply mean “to choose”. By that definition, we all continue to be heretics, as we choose our beliefs and build our own theology. We choose what we choose to believe, not because we view them as complete and final answers, but because, well, on a good day they have the capacity to carry us along that deep and powerful current of wonder, and on the bad days, they keep us from being swept away in a tide of despair. If you can build a theology that can do that, it could never be “wrong”.

One does not need a degree in theology to recognize that when it comes to the Ultimate -- - be it called God, the Ground of Being, Unity, the Spirit of Life, Nature, Love, or Wisdom, or the Void --- there is no shortage of opinions. The same goes for just about every subject theologians debate: salvation, suffering, death, morality, to name a few. If theology was a science, that might be a problem. In a church where truth is held to be unchanging, that might be a problem. But for us, as Unitarian Universalists, the evolutionary principles of biology are as applicable to our approach to theology. Anything that is living, is always changing, always evolving, always transforming into something slightly different than it had been, more adaptive to the world it lives in.

That goes for butterflies, for people, for congregations, and no less, for theology.

In the game show of life, we spend an awful lot of energy searching around for what we desperately hope will be our final answers. We read one more book promising to reveal the meaning of life. We go from church to church, from guru to guru, from seminar to seminar, in an endless pattern of hope and disillusionment, as profound answers to life’s big questions elude us, time after time. An old proverb says, “While the doctor studies, the patient dies.” And so it is with the spirit. While the mind is trying to wrestle some evasive unambiguous Truth about Life to the ground, it is missing the small pieces of truth which might make up a mosaic of meaning that better reflects how life is really lived. Those little fragments of insight, small shards of beauty, shimmering scraps of passion, uneven pieces of compassion, tiny gems of truth. Each piece alone seems of little consequence, barely noticeable. Yet when placed together, edge to edge, revealing of a design we couldn’t see when they were scattered. All this is easy to miss when you think there is only one “final answer” to the complexities of being alive, and put too much stock in having to be right all the time.

I think you will find it a lot easier being a theologian if you take just this one practical hint. The “big” questions do not necessarily have “big” answers. Our conclusions to the most important questions we will ever wonder about will always be qualified by what I like to think of as a sacred ambiguity. (Leave it to a Unitarian Universalist to find ambiguity to be sacred....) What makes the ambiguity sacred is the way that uncertainty, and even doubt, keep us open and receptive to new truths and insights that have yet to dawn on us. It is far better for the soul, if we are wrong and in doubt, than it is to be right and certain. When we are certain of something, we’ve usually stopped thinking about it, and return to that certainty only to defend it from challenge. When our answers pulse with the recognition of their sacred ambiguity, we allow the both the questions and our answers to live as vital and emerging guides to understanding how to live.

On the “Millionaire” show, all you have to be is right. A wild guess counts if it’s right. Life’s more complicated, but lots more interesting. Being right is not as well rewarded in life as it is on TV, but on the other hand, being wrong in life doesn’t disqualify you from the rest of the game. On TV, the questions are multiple choice. In life they are more like 1,000 word essays. On TV your mistakes are a source of shame. In life, mistakes can be a source of new wisdom and profound growth.

Given a choice, I prefer the sacred ambiguity of my life’s evolving truth to the certainty of someone else’s conclusions. Being right all the time is not all it’s cracked up to be. Not only would that make life dull, but no one could stand to be around you. Being wrong once and a while is a marvelous and forgiving teacher. ‘Final answers’ are fine for game shows, but dead ends when it comes to Life.

So if I had to choose between approaching my life as a game show contestant or the resident theologian of my life, I think I know how I could choose.

Given a choice between being a contestant who has to be right, is desperate to be certain, and the in-house theologian dedicated to unearthing fragments of truth and error, sorting them through, and assembling them into meaning, I wouldn’t need any of my lifelines to come to an answer I could live with.

I’d be a theologian.

And, yes, that is my final answer.