A young man asks to meet with a pastor. When they sit down to talk he tells her that he’s struggling with whether he believes in God or not. He really wants to find out the truth of the matter, so he’s been seeking some kind of experience to confirm for him the existence of God. 

The pastor nods and she says, “Great, I have an invitation to extend to you. One of the things we do at this church is we prepare meals that we serve to folks at a park. I’d like you to join us. And when you do, I encourage you to sit down and eat with someone who’s living at the park, and just listen to them, with a spirit of respect and curiosity and openness.”

The man is taken aback by this. He says, “Uh, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

“I know,” says the pastor.

The young man is clearly uncomfortable. “I’m trying to get proof of the existence of God. How is that an experience of God?”

She replies, “How is it not? Give it a try and we can talk more after.”

Martin Buber, the great 20th century Jewish sage, said, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

And why is this?

Why do all the great sages and prophets and no less than Jesus say that our love for God is intimately tied with our love for others? Jesus even went so far to say that that the way we treat others, especially those who tend to be mistreated, is the way we treat him? “What you do unto the least of these you do so unto me?” As if Jesus is somehow fully present in the people we encounter. 

Why is the golden rule not just a nice platitude for children’s stories, but is in fact central to the mature practice of our faith?

Now, I’ll share some of my reflections about why. But I want to emphasize, like the pastor in the story did, that the important thing here is the practice of it, not the theory, the discipline of learning to listen more deeply and encounter more truly the lived reality of someone other than ourselves. 

 But before talking more about that practice, it is worth justifying theologically. The young man’s question of how the experience of encountering another is indeed an experience of the reality of God is a question worth addressing. It’s worth addressing because the opposite belief is so widespread: meanness has somehow become a virtue in our culture, which becomes an excuse for injustice. 

As an Open and Affirming Church, encountering and honoring as sacred the lived reality of another person is particularly important to us in how we practice the Way of Jesus; and we are still very much in the minority in our faith.

So, let’s ground this in the Holy Reality we refer to with this word “God.” The great sages and theologians and prophets all say that one of the astonishing characteristics of God, one of the things that makes God God, is that God is All-Knowing. That means there is no nook or cranny in the universe that is outside the awareness of the Divine. This includes our inner experiences. When we connect this All-Knowing nature of God with the All-Loving nature of God, it means that the beneficent consciousness of God knows and embraces the inner experiences of all beings. The Universal Mercy of God reaches the depths of everyone’s souls. 

We just have to let this blow our minds. 

One of the implications of this is that our ability to be conscious and aware can give us a taste of the transcended consciousness of the Holy Creator, especially when our awareness has love or mercy mixed in. 

When our awareness grows to become aware of a little more of what is real, we get even more of a taste of the nature of God. We also become much more aware of just how much we do not know. The more we are aware of, the more we are aware of the hugeness of what lies beyond our awareness, we behold more Mystery to behold. What do we call that mystery? Holy. When people experience an increase of their awareness of what lied beyond their awareness, it’s very, very common that they report this to be a sacred experience. This is because our consciousness itself is one way we are gifted to participate with the stuff of the divine, as small as we are. 

Another person, another being, another node of conscious experience: what a mystery to behold! We are everywhere surrounded by opportunities to glimpse beyond ourselves into the otherness that is another’s lived experience, and allow that to draw us into the wider unity we share within the hugeness of God. 

And so, the practice of witnessing one another, the practice of listening to one another, can be for us a spiritual practice. It certainly is a way of practicing what we preach, and practicing what Jesus preached. 

How can we treat other people in a loving away if we don’t witness their lived reality and listen to their fundamental needs? Isn’t that how we want to be witnessed and listened to and treated?

Let’s talk about the Golden Rule for a bit. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What does this mean in practice?

Well, I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean in practice. Say my favorite flavor of ice cream is pickle mustard ice cream. I love it, love it – I get Milky Way Farms to do a special run of it for me. I throw and ice cream party after church, and that’s all I serve. Gallons and gallons of pickle mustard ice cream, for all the people!

What?! Why’s everyone grumbling? I’m doing unto you as I’d have you do unto me, serving lots and lots of yummy pickle mustard ice cream! I’m being just like Jesus here, what’s your problem?

This is not what the Golden Rule is all about. 

But in fact, we do this kind of thing often enough. We assume that other people are just like us in ways and do unto them as we would like them to do unto us in ways that can foist things on them that actually end up being much worse than pickle mustard ice cream. The example that leaps to my mind is European settler colonialists forcing Indigenous people to adopt sedentary agriculture – “It works for us, we like it, it’ll work for you. Even if seasonal nomadism has allowed you and your ancestors to thrive for eons, we’re giving you our better way of life. I’m doing unto you as I’d have you do unto me. What’s your problem? 

Okay, so this is a morally immature take on the Golden Rule, because it completely erases the experience and needs of the other person. And obviously this is not what Jesus was preaching and what he was practicing. Most of his ministry was hearing and responding with love to what other people were telling him and showing him about their lived reality and their deepest needs. 

You’ll notice that I’ve titled this sermon, “The Golden Rule Goes Rainbow.” 

This is the last Sunday of Pride Month. Our church is Open & Affirming of the diverse ways our Creator has seen fit to give humanity to seek and find love, and to live into gender. 

Our Open & Affirming values are an important practice of a mature Golden Rule, led by a practice of deep listening. This is Golden Rule that’s so rich it’s gone rainbow, it’s iridescent in its reflection and embrace of human difference. 

So for example, I don’t happen to have the experience of my sense of my gender being out of alignment with the gender everyone has been telling me I am since my birth. But if someone tells me that’s been their experience and they would like me to refer to them in new ways that honor their lived reality and deep needs, then the Way of Jesus compels me to hear them and witness them and honor them as I myself would like to be honored. 

The Way of Jesus then has helped me to have a dialogue, an encounter with another person with a very different life experience from my own, in a way that can expand my awareness a few steps past the boundaries of my lived experience. This can be a sacred experience, that in fact enriches my life.

This kind of listening takes discipline, a spiritual discipline of witnessing others without our egos stomping all over it. We can practice this in little ways; we can practice this in big ways. 

Step number one is in our basic attitude: even just naming the act of listening as a spiritual practice, as an act of prayer, can shift our approach.  

This spiritual practice can include things like maintaining an attitude of respectful curiosity and openness toward the person we’re listening to. 

To let go of our own inner monologue, the ways we rehearse what we want to say next instead of being present to what the other person is actually saying. 

To have the humility to notice the assumptions or judgments we may be making about the other person, and to be willing for those to not be true or at least to be complicated. 

To be open to be surprised by the ways that another person’s lived experience is quite different from our own; as well as to be open to similarities. 

To be honoring their lived experience while honoring our own; to be honoring their fundamental needs while honoring our own.

All while keeping a prayerful connection with the Holy Mystery that God knows and embraces each of us and all of us. 

Have you had experiences where a conversation with another person became a holy moment? 

How have you learned to listen more deeply to others in ways that enrich your soul?

         What would it be like for more and more of our conversations with each other to be acts of prayer?  

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” – Martin Buber

That electricity is surging here among us. Let’s practice it. Let’s deepen it. Let’s share it. 

         Thanks be to God

         Amen

(By Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg; delivered Sunday June 26, 2022, at United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)

(Image by Piotr Siedlecki, License: CC0 Public Domain)