Here's the first sermon for my atheist congregation...
(Imagine Martin Luther King preaching these words...)
My friends, I want to speak to you this morning about a shadow that is lengthening across the face of our modern world. It is not the shadow of war, though our world is weary of conflict. It is not the shadow of poverty, though millions still languish on a lonely island of want in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. It is a quiet, creeping sickness of the spirit—the crisis of loneliness.
We have built for ourselves a "World House," as I have called it before. We have shrunk the globe. We have bridged the oceans and soared into the heavens. Through the marvels of our technology, we have made the world a neighborhood. But, my friends, we have failed to make it a brotherhood.
There is a tragic irony in our predicament. We are more "connected" by wires and waves than any generation in the history of man, yet we are more estranged from our neighbor than ever before. We suffer from a "poverty of the soul" that no bank account can cure. We are crowded together in great teeming cities, jostling against one another on busy sidewalks, yet we remain isolated islands of ego, locked in the airtight cages of our own concerns.
You see, loneliness is not merely the absence of people; it is the absence of purposeful connection. It is the gnawing feeling that one is "a nobody" in a world of "somebodies." It is the result of a society that has traded the I-Thou relationship for the I-It relationship—where we view our brothers and sisters as tools to be used or obstacles to be cleared, rather than as children of nature to be cherished.
But let us not despair. The antidote to loneliness is the recognition of our Inescapable Network of Mutuality. We must realize that I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of all reality.
We must move from the "me" to the "we." We must rediscover the power of Agape—that overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is a love that reaches out not because the neighbor is likable, but because the neighbor is a human being, woven into the same garment of destiny.
When we begin to live for something greater than ourselves—when we stand up for justice, when we feed the hungry, when we simply take the time to look a stranger in the eye and say, "I see you, and you matter"—the walls of isolation begin to crumble.
Let us rise up from the dark valley of loneliness to the sunlit path of Beloved Community. Let us realize that we are not alone, for we walk together. And in that togetherness, we shall find the strength to transform the jangling discords of our isolation into a beautiful symphony of togetherness.
[The blues band plays a few gospel-style tunes...]
