This sermon was preached in honor of the 50^th Anniversary of the United Church of Christ. On this Sunday Old South Church was privileged to host a delegation to the 50^th Anniversary General Synod of the UCC of thirty-five youth and adults from UCC congregations in Hawaii

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In an ancient Buddhist text, Buddha tells this story:

Once upon a time, a man gathered together in one place all the men of a single village who were born blind … and showed them an elephant.

One blind man was presented the side and, when asked what an elephant was like, exclaimed with conviction, Why, an elephant is like a wall!

Another, feeling the tusk disagreed. He shouted his truth: An elephant is round and smooth and sharp. An elephant is, therefore, like a spear.

Another, trying to get hold of a writhing trunk, averred that an elephant is like a snake.

Another, feeling a leg and knee, was convinced that elephants are like trees.

No, no, no, said another who was enjoying the breeze from a flapping ear: An elephant is like a fan.

Another, who was holding onto the tail, argued that it was more like a rope and still another, whose cheek felt the swish of the tail’s tuft, argued, Elephants are like paint brushes.

A modern American cartoonist, Sam Gross, pictures a blind man feeling a pile of elephant dung, with the caption, “an elephant is soft and mushy”.

You know the story and its parabolic intent: no one of us, from our limited vantage can grasp the whole.

Now, since we are in a church and it is Sunday morning, the elephant in this room is none other than the living God. God is in our midst. Like the blind men we can catch glimpses of God. We can explore facets of God. We can see evidence of God’s handiwork and overhear what the prophets and apostles tell us. We can study the words of Jesus. We can see a bit of God in each other’s faces. And listen for God in organ, anthem and hymnody … in the words of our prayers and in the silences between.

Yet, we know what the blind men didn’t know: that each of us possesses only a sliver of the truth. God is bigger than we can get our minds or hearts around. God is unfathomable, immutable, invisible. In the words of St. Paul, we see through a glass darkly … our sight is impaired.

But, let’s try something the blind men in the Buddha’s story didn’t think to try. The Buddha’s blind men hailed from the second century. Surely, we can claim to have learned something in the meantime.

I invite you to imagine a cartoon elephant. Imagine that this cartoon elephant grows. It grows and expands until it covers the whole earth. And, I invite you to imagine that the elephant is no longer surrounded by blind men, but rather, by all the men and women and children, living around the world.

Those in Antarctica have access to the elephant’s tail; those in South America and Australia, its knees and legs; those in Europe, its tusks; those in Africa its ears; those in Asia, its head and those in North America, its trunk.

What if, we, who are strewn across the continents, endeavored to communicate to each other what we each experience of God? What if we set about to learn each other’s languages, visit in each other’s home, meet each other’s children, hear each other’s stories? What if, instead of proclaiming our own small piece of truth as the truth, we pooled our information, held global conferences and workshops, and read each others books about God?

That, in essence, is the living promise of the United Church of Christ. The UCC was born fifty years ago in the midst of the modern ecumenical movement … in the midst of a global conversation about who God is.

In fact, the ecumenical conversation that eventually gave birth to the UCC, emerged as an attempt to understand how Hitler and the Nazi’s managed so successfully to communicate their version of God … a horrifying version. Following WWII Christians around the world began a global conversation about the nature of God and the nature of truth. Our forebears agreed never again to allow one group of people define God or the nature of reality without challenge and correction form others. The UCC was born with a yearning and a commitment to learn from each other.

In the United Church of Christ our theology occurs in the context of our deep desire to become a multi-racial, multi-cultural church. This is an historic and unique commitment of the UCC and of our forebears. It is a commitment deeply embedded in the historic merger of two denominations that were linguistically, theologically, socially and ethnically disparate. It is a commitment embedded in the work of Congregational abolitionists, and in those who worked to free the Amistad captives. It was a commitment to be and to become a united and uniting church … a Christian people who yearn to be a living answer to the prayer of Jesus: that they may all be one.

Today we describe this historic commitment as a yearning to become a multi-racial, multicultural, open and affirming church that is accessible to all. For us, this is not a demographic project. It is not diversity for diversity’s sake. It is not filling quotas. We are committed to it … we yearn for it, because we yearn understand the nature of God, the nature of the world, the nature of the human soul, of meaning, of sin, of justice, of good and evil.

We know that we need each other’s experience and perspective. For the UCC, this is a theological reach toward becoming more whole, more human, more Christian.

Mark Heim, professor of theology at Andover Newton Theological School, argues that every time the Gospel enters a new context – when it is translated into and heard in another language, when it is studied by a different people, preached from a different pulpit, heard in different pews by different ears – that “each new context brings out new and additional aspects of the Gospel.”

Professor Heim claims that “the more languages, the more races, the more nations and geographies, the more religious contexts within which the faith of the church has been embodied, the more closely that faith can approximate a true understanding” of the nature of God.

In other words, we New England Yankees need our Hawaiian sisters and brothers … and visa versa. If we compare our different perspectives, our different life experiences, only then can we even begin to claim to know something of the magnificent elephant in this room: the God who made heaven and earth … who is in us, yet beyond us, as near to us as our own breathing and as far as the most distant star.

The theme of the 50^th anniversary celebration of the UCC, “Let It Shine,” comes from the words of Jesus as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. “Let your light shine!” Jesus says.

In the UCC we believe we need a lot of light, different lights, all of our lights to shine to dispel the darkness that besets us all.

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Fourteen years ago in 1993, the then president of the United Church of Christ, Paul Sherry, traveled to Honolulu. In the presence of an estimated 10,000 persons, he delivered an apology to the Hawaiian people from the United Church of Christ. He apologized for and on behalf of those responsible for the overthrow of Hawaii’s Queen Lili’oukalini. The apology was followed by a financial gift from the UCC in recognition of the cultural genocide perpetuated by Euro-Americans who gained enormously at the expense of native Hawaiians.

Queen Lili’oukalani was a beloved monarch and pious Christian. She reigned in the early 1890’s. When wealthy capitalists from the US objected to her efforts to restore some of the power of the monarchy, her government was overthrown and she was imprisoned.

While in prison, the queen wrote a hymn of forgiveness for those who had brought about the end of her reign. The hymn, much revered by many Christians in Hawaii, is often sung at the end of worship and to those departing the islands.

I invite you to turn to #580 in your hymnals. The English translation is found on the bottom of the page … but Hawaiians request that the hymn not be sung in English. We are honored and humbled to learn the hymn from our Hawaiian friends.

In the process, may our eyes be opened. May we see and touch a part of God we had never experienced.