The late Willard Sperry, for twenty years Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, once defined religion as “the attempt to live in two worlds at the same time.” I had forgotten this definition until I was reading some words of George Buttrick, Willard Sperry’s successor as Preacher to the University. Buttrick made a similar point. “Life,” he observed, “is not petty: it is a two-world conversation and a two-world traffic, between time and eternity, between each of us and God.”

In an era when people speak of living physically in “one world,” theologians cling to a two-world symbolism. Such imagery, they declare, is necessary to understand the life of faith. Because I believe this to be the case, let me reflect with you this morning on why the plea, “one world at a time, please,” – at least religiously speaking – is insufficient. And let me do so by looking into the nature of faith’s two-world conversation and what that conversation entails.

The first world with which religion is concerned is the world of practical earth-bound living. This world has its own characteristics. Its range of understanding is framed by what we can see, hear, taste, touch, smell. Its goals are often pleasure, power, prestige, all the things that make for success. Its overall meaning is seen in terms of time as duration and how we use the time allotted to us to bring the objects of our surroundings under control. The result? A world in which using, owning, accumulating, are primary themes!

Now let’s make no mistake. You and I spend much of our time living in this world. We cannot escape it. Our very existence depends upon our capacity to modify our environment. Scientific and technological advances bear testimony to this fact. Then there’s the utilitarian nature of our status as social beings. Human development is impossible if laborers, managers, professionals, government officials – all of us – are not committed to creating functional and responsible social order. Yet what is a functional society if not one in which people enhance their own happiness by subsisting on the energies and skills of others? In this sense, don’t we use each other; and don’t we have to do so every day of our lives? Then there’s the arena of personal satisfaction. Doesn’t each of us, in Tolstoy’s words, have to learn “to sweat some of the self?” To make a long matter short, isn’t this world of conscious manipulation and ambitious striving, a natural and necessary part of human living?

Our trouble comes, however, not because we refuse to accept the reality of this world. Quite the contrary! It comes when we make it the only reality there is. This is the message imbedded in Tennessee Williams’ play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. In this 1960’s drama, Williams depicts the final two days in the life of Sissy Goforth. Sissy is a middle-aged, iron-willed widow living in splendid luxury in an Italian villa overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Dying of cancer, she spends her last hours dictating her memoirs to her secretary and talking with a young man, Christopher Flanders.

Flanders sees it as his special mission to help Sissy come to terms with her approaching death. But as the play unfolds, it is clear that such acceptance will not come easily. Somehow, Sissy can’t believe that all the grabbing and fighting for money, recognition, and domination that sparked so much of her life will soon end. In a panic she declares defiantly to Flanders that she will not give up control of her destiny. “Sissy Goforth’s not ready to go forth yet,” she shouts, “and won’t go forth ’til she’s ready.”

But then the panic subsides. Gradually it slides into despair. In a rare revealing moment she confides to her secretary how meaningless life has become. “I’ve often wondered,” she says, “but I’ve wondered more lately [about the] meaning of life. Sometimes I think, I suspect, that everything we do is a way of – not thinking about it. Meaning of life, meaning of death, too…What are we doing? Just going from one…frantic distraction to another, ‘til finally one too many…frantic distractions leads to disaster and blackout? Eclipse total of the sun!”

For all her bravado, Sissy realizes that her tough, self-centered façade can no more help her through dying than it did in giving her more than a superficial handhold on life.

How often this occurs! How often we find ourselves incapable of dealing with the larger issues of life and death because our values and vision have been limited to the myopic world of aggressive ambition!

Vital faith always proclaims that living merely in the rough and tumble of the here and now is not enough. Its interest is also in another world. It is concerned with that world which judges and gives aim and direction to the world of day-to-day existence. This is the world of what ought to be which makes us dissatisfied with the world of what is. And it is because there is a gap between the ideal and the actual that we are moral beings at all. Because our faith gives us a vision of what it means to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly, because it holds above us a picture of what a life of loving-kindness and human decency requires, we find that we indeed can live here and now for more than self-centered ambition. Because we really do believe that there is constant two-way traffic between the ideal and the actual, we find that we are not doomed to the pointless strivings of a Sissy Goforth. We are able to “confess a Higher Light;” and we are able to make our energy the servant of that Higher Light.

I cannot help believing that Jesus had this tension between the ideal and the actual in mind when he declared before Pilate: “There is a Kingdom not of this world but greater than your kingdom…For the cause of this was I born and to this end I came into the world, that I might bear witness to that Kingdom of truth.” Remember, Jesus lived constantly in the light of a vision of God’s kingdom. Remember, also, it was belief in this Kingdom – it was the conviction that somewhere there existed a greater justice, a greater mercy, a greater holiness, a greater truth – that helped keep the Christian experiment alive in those early years. It was this belief in an ideal kingdom seen as a cosmic demand, a kingdom of which they were an integral part, which kept those early Christians from losing heart and provided them with their sense of destination.

But there is another aspect to this second world. It not only challenges us ethically. It is also both beyond us yet within us spiritually. Granted, this is a difficult notion. Yet it is a persistent one. For some reason, when thrown back on ourselves, we human beings – most of us, anyway – are incapable of jettisoning the belief that we belong to a Power and Purpose far greater than ourselves. Why we are unable to do this, I suspect, is that in our moments of great joy or sorrow our experience bears out this conviction. When life reaches its depths, we feel the “touch or pull of Someone or Something utterly beyond ourselves;” and we know that we are the inhabitants of a Deeper Universe. The late Harry Meserve, a ministerial colleague, captured this idea when he wrote:

Somewhere within the human being there lives and works a power and meaning which is not human but more than human, which is akin to human life, connected with it as a tiny stream is connected with the great ocean and the single drop of water with the stream…God is like that ocean and stream. God’s waters continue to flow, endlessly, powerfully through the deeps and mysteries of the human spirit, nourishing it, challenging it, sustaining it, pushing it on.

In short, there’s a divine aspect to human existence. There’s a vitality and creativity at the foundation of life which moves in and through our lives, working for their wholeness and completion.

For those of us who take the Christian faith seriously, this belief takes on specificity. It means that we affirm at the depths of our hearts an indwelling grace – a forgiveness and a mercy – that is not of our own making. More that that, it means that we acknowledge Christ’s presence within us whose grounding is nevertheless outside of us. It means the conviction that we belong not simply to an ever-present, this-world reality but to a transcendent reality, the reality of a God who cares for us and empowers us with a loving and transforming spirit. Beyond this, it entails a choice. It entails the choice to live in these two worlds, not separately but together, at the same time. But it also entails the choice to allow that dimension of God’s truth and love which we see so fully manifested in Jesus Christ to work in us as the shaping framework of our living – nay, more than that, as the very energy source of our lives.

The words of our Second Lesson capture the sense of profound intimacy that exists when these two worlds fuse and collapse into one. Jesus, you recall, is praying not only for his own disciples but for all who follow him, that they, like him, may know what it means to live in the constancy of God’s all-consuming embrace. “I do not pray,” he says, “for these only but for those who believe in me…, that they may be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they may also be in us…I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and loved them even as you have loved me.”

As we move through this Pentecost season, this season of the Holy Spirit, let us keep in mind not only the vital interplay that takes place between religion’s two worlds but the ultimate merging of the transcendent with the earthly that must occur if you and I are to live fully the life God has given us. To this end, may we always keep unlatched the doors and windows of our souls that we may ever be conscious of Christ’s abiding presence in our lives and through him become open channels to the inflow of God’s sustaining mercy.

“I in them and you in me, that they may be perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and loved them even as you have loved me!”

What grander, deeper expression of communion with the God of our life can there be than this?

Let us pray: O God, in all that we say and do and are, make us ever sure of the indwelling power of your Spirit, and enable us to live as those who derive their strength from you and are active agents of your great mercy. Fill us with a Christ-like spirit, that we may act in ways that heal, give hope and reach out to those who need us. Thus may we join “the company of the faithful who have kept your name and witnessed to your kingdom in every age.” Amen.