Mid July in Rockford, IL.

It's warm, but not unpleasant. Humid, but not too bad. Things are greed and flowers everywhere. Two weeks until I begin work at the congregation in Rockford. Sermons will be, I think, posted on their site - I'll put up the link when it's ready.

I obviously never got to the backlog. And never will. If there was a particular one you loved that isn't posted, send me a note and I'll send it to you.

In answer to the question posed in a comment to my last post, I'm very pleased that the Rev. Wanda Daniel is the consulting minister for High Plains for the coming year. I got to know Wanda when she moved to Colorado three or so years ago, she's a dear heart, a great listener, a wise minister, and will serve the church there well as they search for a new settled minister.

Why so long between posts?

Hi --

I knew I was behind, but didn't realize I had not posted since Jan. Yikes! But I've got good reasons. I was investigating the possibility of moving congregations to be closer to our family, and that has come to pass. Starting in August, I'll be the minister at the UU Church in Rockford, IL. This process has involved a lot of travel and focus on other things than posting sermons :) I'll try to catch up before I go. Once I arrive in Rockford, though, new sermons will be posted on their website. (Maybe even pod-cast! -- though that might take a while to get set-up.)

In faith,
Matthew :)

Sermon: The Middle of the Night

I preached this sermon on Jan. 13 at High Plains.

Readings.

Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Morning Watch by Barbara Pescan

Patiently

we waited in the dark.

The planet turned

and we upon it

stupid with sleep

hoped something would happen.

While we leaned toward the east

the weight of the night sank behind us,

toward the north a comet passed so close

we could see it through the sleep in our eyes,

and then dawn flung itself up

swirling with clouds and color and birdsong.

Look—this is our world for another day.

Reach out to it, it is your own life.

Know, too, that this day is dear

even to strangers you will never know.

Stretch out your arms to embrace it.

Do not go back to sleep.

The sermon is based on the lyrics to the song "The Middle of the Night by Lowden Wainwright III. They are as follows:

Into this pitch darkness we're hurled
Where there's not a glimmer of light
It's not the end of the world
It's just middle of the night

And the blackest of flags is unfurled
In all this absence of light
It's not the end of the world, good people
Merely the middle of the night

The middle of the night
That's what this is
If death is the real test
This is just a quiz

When grey creeps through your window
It will be daylight
The end of this darkness
Is almost in sight

To a ball of fear you are curled
You're holding on with all of your might
It's not the end of the world, little sister
It's just the middle of the night

In the maelstrom of your mind you are swirled
Almost down the drain but not quite
It's not the end of the world, my brother
Rather the middle of the night

The middle of the night
When you fear everything
but the birds will awake soon
and you will hear them sing

You doubted you'd make it
not sure you'd survive
Now you’re dead tired
but you're still alive

Around fate's fickle finger we're twirled
Small wonder we're all so uptight
It's not the end of the world, good people
Merely the middle of the night

It's not the end of the world as we know it
it's just the middle of the night

And here is the sermon:

My wife and I were sitting at the dining room table,
finishing a meal.
Rosie, our 10 month old, was carefully chewing on a carrot
or maybe it was a piece of bread.
Listening, as we usually do at home, to National Public Radio.
We are all three born-and-raised Unitarians, after all.
And there is this song.
It’s not the end of the world, little sister,
just the middle of the night.

Something about it worms its way into my mind
in that telltale fashion
that I know a sermon is starting to write itself.

It’s not the end of the world as we know it,
it’s just the middle of the night:
this is the good news of liberal religion,
this is what I’ve been trying to tell you all for four years,
this is the message of hope and assurance I need to hear,
and I think everyone needs to hear.

It’s not the end of the world,
it’s just the middle of the night.

That word “just” though . . .
I don’t want to give the impression that
the middle of the night is easy.
That our struggles, our worries, our pain is “just” anything.
The middle of the night is not easy.

Robert Frost isn’t the only one acquainted with the night.
Not the only one to look down the saddest city lane,
or avert their eyes from another,
not the only one to wish and pray
that the call overheard
was for us,
to call us to company and friendship,
but knowing it is not.

Another – she lies awake in bed,
in the middle of the night,
in such pain.
Her arthritis is flaring again.
Or maybe her neck is so tight she can’t move her head.
Maybe, after a day of lifting bags,
or bending down to clean other people’s rooms,
a day on her feat helping grumpy customers in flickering florescent light,
she just hurts.

Maybe her lungs ache from the infection,
or her whole body, nerve end to nerve end,
hurts from the cancer she’s been fighting for a year.
She lies awake in the middle of the night.
She took some pills before she went to bed,
but it’s four hours later now,
and they’ve worn off.
She lies there and thinks, Oh god, why this again?
“Just” the middle of the night?
Not to her, not tonight.

Another – he lies awake, unable to fall asleep.
The mind races.
Those doubts that come when only streetlights illuminate the world,
the fears and worries.
The wakeful nightmares.

Worries about whether he really knows what he is doing at his job,
in his life,
in his relationships,
or if it is all just a sham.
Worries about the future:
what will happen if one of us gets sick?
what will happen if one of us loses a job?
And then the paranoia slips in,
fate’s fickle finger wraps him up –
what if everything falls apart?
what if it is all a lie?
And he lies awake,
full of doubts and fears,
unable to find rest and comfort.
For him, the middle of the night is anything but easy.
It is the hardest time.

The middle of the night is not easy.
For those acquainted with it.
For the grown son who paces the lobby in the hospital,
while a parent struggles for life.
For the homeless teen,
trying to find a place to keep warm.
For the janitor working her second job,
bone tired from the first one,
but needing the money for her family.
For these and so many others,
the middle of the night is not easy.
You are awakened by that siren,
somebody’s going to emergency,
somebody’s going to jail,
the middle of the night is not easy.

This is the truth:
it is not the end of the world,
it is the middle of the night.

But I do not mean to say,
not for a minute,
that the middle of the night is easy.
Neither, I think, does the songwriter,
who speaks of the ball of fear into which we are curled,
the despair,
the fear that we are down the drain,
he knows too, that the middle of the night is not easy.
But, he sings, it is not the end of the world,
and this is good news.

Many people, though,
they would not think this is good news,
this claim that it is not the end of the world.
They would not like that at all.

For many people across the globe,
of many different religious traditions,
the good news of their faith is opposite:
they sing,
do not worry, friends,
for it is not the middle of the night,
it is the end of the world.
And they rejoice in this.
For they expect the end of the world to put things right.
To restore some mythical vision of a correct world,
a world of order,
a world of righteousness.
They expect the sinners to be washed away,
or even the whole of existence as we know it to end.

Last year
I decided that I needed a white clergy robe
to go with my black one.
I wanted to mix it up for those few occasions
when I wear a robe,
Easter, Water Ingathering, Ordinations, and the like.
I thus found myself in a Christian gift and supply store,

not the usual one I go to downtown,
which is run by some lovely Catholic nuns,
but one up here on the north end.
As I was standing in line to order my robe,
I saw there on the self a book –
I don’t remember the title,
but it had a picture of an explosion
over the skyline of Jerusalem.
It was a key to interpreting recent events
in light of Right-Wing Christian Apocalyptic fantasies.
In the upper right corner,
in a little star,
it said, “Revised and Updated for 2007!”
Next to it on the self was the 2006 edition.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
I tried to do so quietly.

This isn’t new.
A hundred thousand Americans awaited with great hope
the end of the world,
scheduled for October 22^nd, 1844.
The last years of the 10^th century,
right before the year 1000,
was a time of great violence, upheaval,
fear, and strangeness in Europe,
as people anticipated the end of the world.
Of course, people didn’t have exact calendars,
so they panicked at different times,
some well after the odometer turned over.
Jesus of Nazareth,
in addition to preaching a lot of good sense
about love and kindness,
also preached that the end of the world was at hand.
His followers believed him –

or surely, the occupation of Israel by the Roman Empire would not continue.

But when the Jewish temple in Jerusalem
was destroyed in 70 A.D.,
the followers of Jesus re-interpreted his predictions to refer to this cataclysmic event.
The authors of the book –
the end of the world, revised and updated for 2007,
the key to their predictions
and the reason for the cover photo,
is the rebuilding of that very temple.

It is not just religious conservatives, though,
who have such fantasies.
I have heard them from liberals too,
who believe that through some kind of new consciousness
or utopian awakening,
the world will change,
peace and harmony and love will break out everywhere.
Just because it is nice,
doesn’t mean it isn’t fantasy.

All these hopes and expectations of the end of the world,
they have always disturbed me.
I saw a cartoon once,
a frog-shaped creature crawling out of the sea,
wearing one of those sandwich boards reading,
“The Beginning Is At Hand!”
That’s more my style.
I am not a fan of the apocalyptic imagination.
But I understand.
When you lie awake in the middle of the night,
you think, lord, will this go on forever?
You begin to long for some great change,
some wonder,
a new heaven and a new earth.

Thus, the good news of liberal religion:
it is, sometimes, the middle of the night,
but not the end of the world.

The middle of the night is real.
But no, it does not go on forever.
Dawn does break, with its gray light and birdsong,
and we awake to the world.
The middle of the night is hard.
It’s real.
But it is not the end of the world,
and it is not the end of the story.

This we know:
For thousands upon thousands of years,
some humans have predicted the end of the world.
Hoped for it, feared it, expected it.
And yet, each morning the sun comes up.
Life goes on.

“Patiently
we waited in the dark.
The planet turned and we upon it
stupid with sleep
hoped something would happen.”

Thus does the author of our second reading,
Barbara Pescan, live in expectation –
not for the end,
but for the beginning.

And what:
“we could see . . . dawn fling itself up
swirling with clouds and color and birdsong.”

“Look—this is our world for another day.
Reach out to it, it is your own life.”

Look – this is our world for another day.

This is spiritual maturity:
Sometimes things are great.
Don’t expect it to last.

Sometimes things are awful.
Don’t expect it to last.

The realization that “this too shall pass”
is part of the spiritual assurance offered by liberal religion.
But though it offers comfort to the weary,
and humility to the proud,
the knowledge that dawn follows night which follows day,
forever and ever,
this is not enough.
This is not all we have to say.

A sense of perspective is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient in a renewal of the spirit.
A renewal of the spirit comes from not just
awaiting the morning,
but embracing the mystery and wonder of dusk and dawn.
A renewal of the spirit can happen
when we open our hearts,
when we breathe a bit deeper,
uncurl from the fetal position, as it were,
and reach out.

Today begins a series of six sermons,
spread out over the next five months,
on the six sources of our living tradition.
The sources are those places where we Unitarian Universalists
find inspiration and meaning.
This series is in conjunction with a curriculum that Morgan and I are writing
for our middle school youth,
who will be joining us for these services.
The first source is “Direct experience with that transcending mystery and wonder
affirmed in all cultures
which moves us to a renewal of the spirit
and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

“Transcending mystery and wonder”
is a lot of syllables to describe what many people just call “God.”
But that’s the Unitarian Universalist way.
It’s our attempt to be more inclusive.
But it is not the noun that interests me today,
but the adjective.
We speak of the ultimate as transcending,
and not transcendent.
There’s a difference.
We are not speaking of a power that is abstract
out there beyond our reach
but of something that begins, that is encountered,
where we are, in this world.
It goes beyond, but it begins where we are.

It is, sometimes, the middle of the night.
And although this is often not an easy time,
it is also a time when we can experience that
transcending mystery and wonder
which renews our spirit.
In the midst of our worries and our struggles,
we can find meaning, purpose,
and encounter that power of life
which sustains and transforms our lives.

The Universalist minister Jacob Trapp wrote that
to worship is to stand in awe under a heaven of stars,
it is a loneliness seeking communion.

We encounter that power of life
when we stand under a heaven of stars,
when the full moon –
Frost’s luminary clock
where the time is neither wrong nor right –
casts its glow upon the earth.

Magic can happen in these witching hours,
in the silence of the night we can hear the smallest noises:
the leaves rustling,
a single pedestrian walking home,
the breathing of a pet, lying by the side of your bed.
We have a wind-chime, a gift of my sister,
and in the middle of the night,
when doubts and worries plague me,
it’s noises give a bit of peace,
a bit of joy.
Some of the most powerful spiritual times in my life have happened late in the evening,
when,
stupid with sleep,
I’ve moved past my fears and past old answers
and lived in the present,
been open to magic and mystery.
4 A.M. on the way back from the all-night diner,
talking gossip and philosophy,
we fell into a quiet for a block or so.

11 PM in the woods in Washington State,
worshiping and singing and reaching out.
Midnight at my desk,
or sitting with a laptop on the couch,
writing the end of that paper or sermon,
and things just fall into place.
Past the fear and under the suffering,
magic, wonder, awe, transformation awaits
those who make the journey.

To worship is to stand under a heaven of stars,
it is a loneliness seeking communion.

We encounter that power of life
when we seek out communion, too.
In the middle of the night,
we need one another.

It’s not the end of the world, little sister.
It’s not the end of the world, my brother.

It is the middle of the night
when parents walk the halls with their infant children,
when, again, stupid with sleep,
love overpowers everything,
rushes into their heart like a mighty river.
It is the middle of the night
when friends lift up their glasses in salute
to companionship.
Saying to one another, in their actions,
this life business is too hard to do by yourself,
and to wonderful not to share it with others.
It is the middle of the night
when lovers keep each other company.
It is the middle of the night,
when nurses keep station at hospitals,
when a shelter keeps its doors open
so the homeless have beds,
when conscience disturbs the guilty,
and makes them resolve to change their ways.

It is the middle of the night,
when human beings remember that essential truth:
we are not alone.

Awe, attention, insight:
Compassion, caring, love:
these are the manifestations and the incarnations
of what is holy and wondrous.
They are the way we renew our spirits,
the way we know that it is not the end of the world,
it is just the middle of the night.

For myself, and for you,
I carry this prayer in my heart:
Yes, the world can be hard.
The nights can be long and difficult.
May each of us have the courage,
when it feels like the end of the world,
may we have the courage to resist the temptations
of apocalyptic fantasies,

may we have the wisdom to reach out
to the universe itself and to another;
may we know better than to suffer alone –
may we also have the grace
to be there when others need us.
May we build religious communities
whose fellowship and caring sustain us,
whose ritual and teaching comfort us,
and whose ministry calls us to awake to the new day,
to see it as our life,
and to live it with radical love and everlasting hope.
May it be so.

Amen.

Rosie's first Christmas.

Sermon: December 23rd, 2007: Into the Dark, Into the Light

I preached this on Sunday.

Readings

An excerpt from "Morning Dewdrops of the Mind: Teachings of a Contemporary Zen Master, by Shodo Harada Roshi

The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus. The brightness of this planet was seen by Buddha from the depths of one week of samadhi [deep awareness]. …

One week straight of this deepest possible samadhi was burst through by the brilliance of that morning star. A whole week's experience of that world burst the brightness of the morning star, plunging into the Buddha's eyes and giving rebirth to the Buddha's consciousness.

He cried:
That's it! That's it! That's it. That's me! That's me that's shining so brilliantly!

How deeply he was moved and what wonder he felt. From this comes all of the Buddha's dharma. From within this state of mind the Buddha said:

How wondrous, how wondrous! All beings are endowed with this pure nature! What a wondrous, astonishing thing has been realized! All the ten thousand things, all the flowers, all the trees, all the rocks, all things everywhere are shining brilliantly! What an amazing thing! It's the same landscape, but how brilliantly it is illuminated! What freshness is everything!

- Wallace Stevens, Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Message

Into the dark.
Into the light.

At this season,
two days after the start of winter,
two days before Christmas,
in this season,
we go into the dark,
we go into the light,
so that we might find the truth:
the freshness of everything!
so we might behold the nothing that is not there,
and the nothing that is.

Into the dark.
Into the light.

We begin then, with the facts.
In the northern hemisphere,
at this time of year, the nights are long.
So very long.

And the days are short.
It oft grows cold and snowy.
The wind blows chilly across the world.

For millennia upon millennia,
the people of the world have observed this remarkable fact.
There is a day on which the night is longest,
and the day is shortest.
And the next day, the day grows a bit longer.
There is a day when the darkness begins to recede
and the light begins to return.

We are still in the realm of facts.This day is observed.
It is celebrated.
Ancient peoples created observatories – Stonehenge only the most famous –
to measure the turning and mark it.
They saw the day as the rebirth of the god of the Sun in Egypt and Mexico.

The ancient customs were changed, denied, co-opted –
we’ll come back to how –
but they are making a comeback,
as we acknowledge and celebrate the shortest day, the longest night,
and the turning of the year.

Those are the facts.
What does it mean?

The earth goes into the dark.
It uses the time to rest, to prepare,
to let the cycle renew so that life can continue.
Then, only after the dark,
the light returns.

The poet Denise Levertov remarks thusly:

The bare trees have made up their seed bundles.
They are ready now.
The warm brown light pauses briefly, shrugs and moves on.
They are ready now to play dead for a while.
I, human, have not as yet devised how to obtain such privilege.
Their spring will find them rested.
I and my kind battle a wakeful way to ours.

The earth goes into the dark
so that it can come into the light.
The coming of solstice is a chance for us to be reminded
that such activity is necessary for us, too.
We ought to rest, too.
We ought to pause, too.
We ought to let ourselves be in the night.
One must be in the mind of winter,
one must be cold for a while,
too see the truth,
to see the nothing that is in us and in the world,
and the nothing that is not there.
To become wise and wondrous,
we have to observe and participate in the cycles of life.
There is no other way, I am sure.

Let us return though,
before we get too a field,
to the facts.
The year five hundred twenty-eight before the common era.
The date might be off, but we think it is right.
A deer park, under a Bodhi tree.
A man – Siddhartha Gautuma sits.
He has sat there for some time.
As much as a week, perhaps.
Six years prior, he left is comfortable home and saw,
according now to a legend,
illness, poverty, and death for the first time.
Shocked by these realities,
he renounced everything,
wandered, begged, joined a holy order.
But this was not working.
So he sat under the tree and meditated.
And on the eighth of December,
the morning star rises,
and he sees – he goes into light.
The freshness of everything!

That is the way one Zen master imagines the Buddha speaking.
The light is in everything,
all beings!
What wonder!

And this man, Siddhartha,
begins to teach –
attachment leads to suffering.
May all beings become enlightened and realize the truth:
the nothing that we are,
the nothing that is not there,
and the nothing that is.

These are the facts.
What do they mean?

Enlightenment doesn’t come easy.
Can’t buy it at the mall.
Can’t order it from the catalog.
The Buddha sits and sits.
But light does come.

The star rises, and we begin to understand.
One must, still, be in the mind of winter to see rightly.
The Buddha’s first enlightenment, truly speaking,
is when we sees suffering.
We must know that life is not all sweetness and joy.
There are hard parts.
Oh, lord, unbearably hard parts, sometimes.
You have to go into the dark.
And then, once you’ve been still long enough,
it is possible,
to come into the light.
To have wisdom and understand,
there is no other way. Of this, I am sure.

These are not the only facts at issue in this time year.
We learned last week from our Children many of the facts
about the creation and re-creation of the modern Christmas.
Today, a bit back farther in time.
Facts are hard to come by, actually.
Is Tuesday, the 25^th of December, really the birthday of Jesus?

Surely not.
For one, the birth legends of Matthew and Luke are inventions on their behalf.
They do not correspond.
There are shepherds in Luke, but none in Matthew.
There are wise men in Matthew, but none in Luke.
The gospel composed first, Mark, has no birth story at all.
That wouldn’t do, so Mark and Luke added one of their own.
And let us say that there really was a census,
and Joseph had to travel to be registered –
the time for such things would be right after the harvest,
not in the middle of winter.

There is debate about how Christmas
– which was not celebrated in the first few hundred years of the common era –
got set.
There was an ancient Jewish tradition that a true prophet was conceived and died on the same day.

Thus, since Jesus died on March 25^th (that was a guess,
of course,
knowing that it was during Passover but not knowing the year),
a conception of March 25 would put his birth nine months later,
on Dec. 25.
Another theory is that the emperor
wished to co-opt the pagan celebrations of the solstice,
especially the ancient Roman holiday of Saturnalia,
so choose a late December date for that reason.

The facts in this case are thin.
But there are some facts.
We know that two thousand years ago,
a group of people began to celebrate the life of a new prophet,
they told stories of his birth and life and death at the hands of imperial power.
They sought to understand what he taught,
and to spread the message:
love your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength,
and love your neighbor as yourself.

We know that this new religion grew,
it widened,
and the imperial power – the same power that put the prophet to death –
that power made the new religion the official religion of the empire.
They changed some things along the way.
But they could not destroy the essence:
in the dark and cold of our lives –
in the metaphorical winter of our souls,
a light shines in the heavens.
The same morning star, perhaps,
that Siddhartha saw while he sat under the Bodhi tree?
It is possible.
The light shines,
and in a forgotten corner of the world a child is born,
a little more love enters existence.

Facts are thin,
and meaning is obscured,
but the truth is in you.
From the dark, we move to the light.

From fear, hope.
Do not be afraid, the angel says to the shepherds,
and I say to you:
do not be afraid of the dark.
Let your eyes adjust.
Light no bright flame.
In the dark, you might spy out that star.
Wisdom and possibility are found in the dark,
they begin with a single spark, a single baby’s cry in the night.
It can be no other way. Of this I am sure.

The facts I have shared with you are not the only ones.
While Buddhists were celebrating Bodhi day,
the anniversary of enlightenment,
earlier this month,
Jews were observing Chanukah.
They were lighting candles, in memory of a long ago story
of survival in the midst of persecution,
of hope in the midst of fear,
of the miracle of God and community.

A month before that, in November,
Hindus and Sikhs and Jains were celebrating Diwali,
the festival of lights.
A time of rejoicing and recalling the inner light of each of us.
These are some of the facts.

But what of the meaning?
All these thousands of years later,
what shall we make of this season?
Shall we see “the freshness of everything”
and rejoice?
Shall we let our eyes grow accustomed to the dark,
so that we can truly see the light?

These are open questions.

For myself, I shall seek to know in winter time,
the nothing that is myself –
that in truth, I am part of the whole,
part of the wind that blows,
the fir trees they rustle,
the snow that falls,
I am all of that, and the imagined separateness is false.
It takes a winter mind, true enough.
But I shall seek to go into the dark,
and be present there.
To become aware also, then,
of the nothing that is not there,
and the nothing that is.

We can spend our time looking for facts.
Things.
Objects, talismans we can lay out on the table before us and say,
“look, there it is.”
But things – sets of facts – shall not feed our souls.
Meaning, love, possibility, beauty, wonder:
these are not things,
not things you can handle and hold,
measure and catalog.
These are the nothings that are yet still there:
strip away the myth, the legend, the superstition,
or leave it in place and cherish it,
it matters not.

What matters is this:
we are reminded at this time of year
to enter into the quiet and the still,
to see the cold and the dark,
and to be not afraid.
To know that light comes from within.
To return again to who we are.
To return again to what we are.
To return again to the place where are born and reborn again.
To enter this season as a time to be reborn again,
to let the morning star awaken our imaginations,
to let our live turn as the earth turns,
to celebrate, in story and in song,
the everlasting graciousness of life itself.
May we have the courage, the power, and the wisdom then,
to make such dreams and longings come true.

Amen, blessed be.

Sermon: Nov. 18th: I Am Saying Thank You

There is a musician living in Big Timber, Montana.
Her name is Judy Fjell.
She’s been the musician for many a
Unitarian Universalist worship service,
for minister’s retreats and district gatherings,
for the leadership school held each summer.
Some of you have met Judy –
she is a wonderful, wonderful person.
One of these days we’ll get her to sing for us.

My inspiration for today is one of Judy’s songs.
It has four lines.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to sing it.
I’ll just tell you the lines:

I am saying thank you.
I am saying thank you.
I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

We leave Tuesday for our annual trip to rural Wisconsin
for Thanksgiving with Morgan’s father and step-mom.
Morgan’s step-sister will be there.
And her sister will be flying in from South Korea,
where she’s been teaching English and hanging out.
But we’ll be missing Morgan’s brother,
and her step-brother –
A special forces soldier and a marine lieutenant, respectively,
they are both in Iraq this Thanksgiving.
We’ll be missing them.
Also, it will be Rosie’s first Thanksgiving,
and I expect that when we go round the Thanksgiving table,
to say what we are grateful for,
we’ll all be a bit more emotional then we usually are.
Our Thank You’s will be a bit more powerful,
in the presence and the absence of those we love.

I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

I know some people say thank you,
say thanksgiving,
before every meal,
or at least, every dinner,
in November, in April, in June, and in February.
All round the year.
But many of us enact this ritual of thanksgiving just this once:
when, if, we gather on Thursday for cranberries, sweet potatoes, and tryptophan.
The danger in preaching on thanksgiving and gratitude in November
is that I might reinforce,
rather than challenge,
the idea that giving thanks is just what we do on one day.
When, instead, I mean to say,
give thanks every day.

I thank you for most this amazing day:
THIS amazing day,
a spring day, e.e. cummings is talking about,
with leaping greenly spirits.

I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

When Cindy and I were talking about these week’s service,
she mentioned a study she had recently read about.
Two professors gathered a group of people.
They randomly assigned people to one of three groups.
In one group, the people reflected each week
on their hassles.
The jerk who cut them off,
the annoying customer service rep,
the difficult co-worker,
and so one.
In another group, they simply thought of what they did.
I went to the store.
I read my book.
I went to work.
I talked to so-and-so.
And in the third group, they focused each week on what they were grateful for.
You can guess how the study turned out.

I’ll quote from the story about this study:

The people who focused on gratitude were just flat-out happier. They saw their lives in favorable terms. They reported fewer negative physical symptoms such as headaches or colds, and they were active in ways that were good for them. They spent almost an hour and a half more per week exercising than those who focused on hassles. . . .Those who were grateful had a higher quality of life.

Others around them recognized that too. “They noticed that these people had more joy, more energy. They could see that they were becoming more optimistic,” says [one of the professors]. The grateful group “even seemed to be perceived as more helpful toward others, going out on a limb to help people.” [the professor] was surprised by this result. “This is not just something that makes people happy, like a positive-thinking/optimism kind of thing. A feeling of gratitude really gets people to do something, to become more pro-social, more compassionate.” This did not happen in either of the other two groups.

Perhaps the professor was surprised that people who were grateful
became more generous,
but I’m not.

No member of the clergy would be.
All religious traditions know this:
the grateful heart is the generous heart.

What gift can we bring, what present, what token?
When grateful we come, remembering, rejoicing,
what song can we offer in honor and praise?

I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

To make thank you our practice,
to make gratefulness our modus operandi,
this is a lot easier said than done.
Maybe we all need a professor to draft us into a study,
and hold us accountable for saying thank you
at least once a week.
It’s not hard to say, Oh, I should be grateful.
It’s a lot harder to remember, each day,
to be grateful.

This thanksgiving season and holiday season,
I want to call us –
you and me both –
to a more spiritual sense of gratitude.
How would we live,
how would we feel,
if thank you was our practice?

When thank you is your practice,
you are grateful for the concrete goods,
the specific and tangible
and at exactly the same time,
you are grateful for the whole,
the grand, wondrous everything.
When thank you is your practice,
you say thank you for the blue in the sky on one particular day,
and you say thank you to everything which is natural which is infinite
which is yes.

We say thank you to the person who holds to door open
for just an extra second,
just to show that yes,
they noticed that we existed.
And we say thank you for the fact that we exist.
The finite, and the infinite –
all at once –
this is what we are grateful for,
when thank you is our practice.

When thank you is our practice,
we realize that every time
we express our gratitude for some particular individual,
or some particular individual thing,
then we are also expressing our gratitude for the holy and wondrous
spirit of life and love,
whose presence flows through all things.

This is important.
Let me not be mis-understood.

I do not mean to say,
as some religious traditions seem to,
that “God is the only worthy object of praise.”
There’s nothing quite so insulting as when we do something good,
and someone thanks some ultimate being
INSTEAD of thanking us.

Just after Rosie was born,
I remember someone saying to me,
“oh, she’s such a gift from God.”
I was really mad about that.
I thought:
you know, I seem to remember Morgan working pretty hard during her pregnancy,
and both of us (her, a lot more than me),
working very hard when Rosie was born.
I thought:
are you saying that people who can’t have children of their own
are cursed by God?
Because I don’t believe that,
not for an instant.

So I do not mean to say that when thank you is our practice,
that all we do is say thank you to the holy.
I want us to say thank you to each other –
really, honestly, too each other –
aware that we are also thankful that there is another at all,
that there is the possibility of being in relationship.

In the Jewish tradition, the day of atonement –
of forgiveness and reconciliation –
has two parts.
FIRST, you ask forgiveness from the people you’ve wronged.
THEN, you ask forgiveness from God.
You’ve got to go to the people first.
You can’t skip that step.

I think the same should be true of thanksgiving.
Start with the people.
Start with being thankful for that smile,
for that helping hand,
for that caring.

Be thankful for the particular,

for that leaf that caught your eye,
for that sunset,
for that warmth on your arm,
start there.
Get deep into that concrete gratitude.
Do not skip ahead.
Do not pass go until you have been glad
at “THIS amazing day”,
then, only then,
be glad that there are days at all.

But don’t stop with the concrete, either.
Remember to be grateful for the un-namable, the ineffable,
the wondrous spirit –
known by many names,
transcendent and imminent, all at once,
be sure to be grateful for that, too.

I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

When I was in seminary,
each spring,
when the weather would finally turn,
we’d have a party.
The theme of the party was a state—
the first year, the four or five students from Texas put it on.
We had BBQ and cornbread and Texas beer, I remember.
At the end of the party,
the school’s president said,
“I understand that gratitude, in Texan, is expressed as,
‘thanks ya’ll’, so, ‘thanks ya’ll.’
The next year we had a Washington State party.
There were three of us, me included, from there,
and we went in together to pay to fly in fresh salmon
and got some apples, sweet onions,
and some Washington beer and wine, too –
and after, the president asked me –
how do you express gratitude in Washingtonian?
I had to think about this.
My answer was, “thanks.”
Northwesterners are not a verbose people.
I once heard our regional accent described as “clipped.”
So we just say, “thanks.”

Reflecting on this later,
I realized how our gratitude practice is such a learned behavior.
In my family of origin,
we never – never – sent thank you cards.
You said thank you then and there,
when you opened the birthday / Christmas present,
or when you sat down for the meal.
And that was enough.
Morgan’s family, on the other hand,
always always sends thank you cards.
Early when we were together, she said,
you have to send a thank you card.
I told her, they’ll think its weird.
But she insisted, and I sent them out.

I got a thank you card back from my Grandmother,
a thank you for saying thank you,
and I could tell that she was totally flummoxed by my behavior.
We just don’t do that in my family.
And I realized recently that although I had this notion:
we don’t send cards because we say thank you then and there,
the truth is, we don’t.
We don’t say thank you to each other very often.
Not compared with Morgan’s family –
which says it, and sends it too.

You practice saying thank you,
you learn to say it more often.
You say thank you for small things,
you learn to say it for big things.
You say it to the ones you love,
you learn to say it to the spirit of love itself.
You say it to neighbors,
you learn to say it to strangers.

I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

Speaking the words, writing them down –
that’s a start.
A big, big start.
The study, that study the professors did,
of those who said thank you.
Their practice of gratitude led to changes in how they acted.

They felt better, they took better care of themselves,
and they were more generous with the world.
They gave more of themselves.
Surprising to the professors,
but not surprising to me.

The rugged individualist, the person who is totally self-sufficient,
they have no need to say thank you.
They need no one else.
These are the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.
But the truth is we are always in need,
so we must be always grateful.
Did we make the air we breathe?
Light the fires of the sun?
Did we give birth to ourselves?
Did we learn all we know without anyone’s help?
No, we did none of these things.

We are interdependent.
With other people, and with the whole of the universe.
With all life.

We say thank you because we are need of others.
And others are in need of us.
We need to be loved. And others need our love.
We need to learn. And others need us to teach.
We need to be given hope. And others need us to give them hope.

Gratitude creates generosity.
What gift can we bring, what present, what token?
When we are grateful, how shall we behave?
For myself, and for you:
I’d like to be the man in the black cowboy boots and the ten-gallon hat,
the one in the reading,
the one who doubles over with laughter,
at the “Ding-Dong” sign.
The one who is so grateful to laugh,
that he pulls out a fifty dollar bill and gives it away.
I’d love to be that man.

But I’ll also take the bell-ringer.
The Ding Dong.
That’s more realistic.

Sometimes we all think to ourselves,
this is so ridiculous.
Nobody really wants me here.
All they have is smirks for me.
We’re all there, sometimes.
But the grateful heart is the one willing to be changed.
When someone says, thank you –
for the gift of laughter,
for the gift of caring,
for the gift of who you are,
well, that expression of thanks can change our whole day.
That expression of thanks can change a whole life.

I am saying thank you.
I am saying thank you.
Thank you is my practice.

My friends, we are bound together.
We need one another.
We do good for one another.
Too much, unnoticed.

So let this be our mission:
to give thanks, for small gifts and large ones,
for what others do and what is just there,
for laughter and the possibility of transformation,
for the food we eat, the company we share,
the earth, our home.
For friends and family near and far,
let us give thanks, this week, every week.
Let us make gratitude our practice,
let thanksgiving move us to generosity,
to an open heart and a warm spirit,
to living each day with hope.

Amen.

Sermon: Nov. 11th: The 11th Hour

Here is the sermon from Nov. 11th. The reading is the original Veterans Day proclamation. My sermon reflection group felt that there was a bit too much about my search for the reading, and a bit too little about how to make peace -- concrete examples. I think they are probably right about that. Nonetheless, I hope you like it.

Whereas it has long been our customs to commemorate November 11, the anniversary of the ending of World War I, by paying tribute to the heroes of that tragic struggle and by rededicating ourselves to the cause of peace; and

Whereas in the intervening years the United States has been involved in two other great military conflicts, which have added millions of veterans living and dead to the honor rolls of this Nation; and

Whereas the Congress passed a concurrent resolution on June 4, 1926, calling for the observance of November 11 with appropriate ceremonies, and later provided in an act approved May 13, 1938, that the eleventh of November should be a legal holiday and should be known as Armistice Day; and

Whereas, in order to expand the significance of that commemoration and in order that a grateful Nation might pay appropriate homage to the veterans of all its wars who have contributed so much to the preservation of this Nation, the Congress, by an act approved June 1, 1954 (68 Stat. 168), changed the name of the holiday to Veterans Day:

Now, Therefore, I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America , do hereby call upon all of our citizens to observe Thursday, November 11, 1954 , as Veterans Day. On that day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and cause the Seal of the United States of America to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington this eighth day of October in the Year of our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and seventy-ninth.

Honoring the Veterans

Today is Veterans Day. We honor those who have served and do serve this country in uniform. This congregation has a large number of women and men who are veterans, and we are glad to have you among us. We wish to recognize you.

This is part of an evolving tradition. Last year, I asked those who had served to stand, according to branch of service, and to remain standing. I was asked, afterwards, if next time we might know a bit more about people’s service. So we will add that. I’ll call out a branch of service and ask those of you who have served in that branch or who currently serve in that branch to stand as you are able and will go round the room and have each person say your name, the years you served, and the rank you held at the completion of your service, or the rank you hold now. OK?

If you serve now, or have served, in the Army, Army Reserve, or National Guard, please rise. [go round].

If you serve now, or have served, in the Air Force or Air Force Reserve, please rise or raise your hand. [go round.]

If you serve now, or have ever served, in the Marines, please rise.

If you serve now, or have ever served, in the Navy and Coast Guard, please rise.

We honor your service and express our thanks.

Message

You know, it took me a while.
It took me a while to find a reading for today.
It took me a while to find a reading that said what I wanted to say.
I thought it would be easy:
Because we honor veterans, we honor peace.
I thought it would be easy to find just the right reading.
I thought I’d have a bunch of choices:
poetry, prose, ancient, modern.
It seems so obvious to me:
we honor veterans, so we honor peace.
But it was unexpectedly challenging.
It took me a while to find the reading.

I found many things about peace.
I’ve got a lot of books with readings about peace.
Poetry about peace, reflections on peace.
Ancient and modern.
I’ve got a lot of peaceful readings:
Commentaries on the joys of peace,
on the importance of a peaceful heart,
about how peace is our human quest,
and so on.

But I kept thinking as I read these
of the words of the Hebrew prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
who both condemned the false prophets who
said “peace, peace, when there is no peace.”
Ezekiel compares these false prophets to masons –
concrete workers –
who put up a flimsy wall and then paint it.
“See, looks great!” they say.
But when the storm comes, the wall will not hold.
It is not real.

Too much of our talk about peace is like this:
saying “peace, peace, when there is no peace.”
We do not live in a time of peace.
We live in a time of war.
This is reality.
And wars are fought by people.
When we make peace a platitude,
when we preach peace as if it came cheap,
then it is a wall that will not hold.

There were some things in the Tao Te Ching that came close,
but I found it much harder than I imagined
to locate a reading that had the right message:
because we honor veterans, we honor peace.
I thought it would be simpler.

I also found a lot of readings that weren’t really Veterans Day material,
they were Memorial Day material.
There’s a difference.
On Memorial Day, we honor those who died in the service of their country.
Veterans Day is about them,
but it is also about those who fought and lived,
and about those who were prepared,
who trained and planned and stood ready,
but who never were on the actual field of battle.

I found a bunch of readings – poetry and prose both –
celebrating comrades, the heat of battle, and so on.

But too many of these were nationalistic,
in praise of violence or empire.
Even those pieces that avoided these idolatries were incomplete for my purposes:
they honored veterans, but spoke not of peace.
I wanted a reading that echoed the words of
Robert E. Lee, on the battlefield at Gettysburg,
"It is well that war is so terrible,
lest we should grow too fond of it."
I wanted something that said:
because we honor veterans, we honor peace.

I thought this would be simple.
It was harder than I thought.
Finally, it was Wikipedia to the rescue.
I was wondering a bit about how Armistice Day became Veterans Day,
and there was the original Veterans Day proclamation,
by none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower,
with the message,
because we honor veterans, we honor peace.

“On that day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us re-consecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

That’s the message for today.
So that your efforts shall not have been in vain,
we re-consecrate ourselves to the task of peace.

We re-consecrate ourselves to the task of peace,
so that your efforts, the efforts of all veterans,
shall not have been in vain.

To consecrate means,
if you break up the parts of the word,
consecrate means “with sacred”
or better, with-sacred-intent.
We rededicate ourselves, with sacred purpose,
to the cause of peace.
We do this so that your and their efforts are not in vain.

What does it mean to make a sacred commitment to peace,
for the sake of veterans?
What does it mean to make a sacred commitment to peace?
Not a cheap peace of platitudes,
but an enduring peace?
Not a peace of willful blindness,
but a real peace in the real world?
How would we re-consecrate ourselves to that end?

I think we would begin with a deep desire –
an ancient and holy longing for harmony, justice, and community.
Give Us Peace,
We would sing –
Dona Nobis Pacem – Give Us Peace.
There is a truth to those words of Lao-Tzu:

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

If we stop there, that’s not good enough.
But we need to begin there –
with the longing for peace strong in our heart.
Give Us Peace –
this is the song we should sing when we wake in the morning
and when we retire for the night.
It’s what we should sing when we pay our taxes
when we vote
when we sit down to eat.
It’s what we should sing with every breath we take.
That is where we must begin.

Too much, we say, “oh, I like peace.
It’s nice.”
Then we go on with our lives.

We drive our cars and buy our stuff,
We let petty jealousies and small grudges control our days.
Give Us Peace – to be serious about this desire
means we change how we live and how we think.

How might you let peace into your heart?
How might you put aside the anger, the fear, the violence
which lives in us all?
How might you find a moment of stillness in this frantic world?
How might you reassert your control over your being?

How might you make peace in your home?
How might there be more understanding, more listening?
More compassion for one another?
More care and tenderness?

How might you make peace in your neighborhood?
Knowing your neighbors’ names might be a place to start,
if you don’t yet.
Who is your neighborhood is forgotten?
Who is treated without respect?
Who could be included, if you took the lead?

How might you make peace in the city?
In this city?
Here in this town?
Where teenagers kill other teenagers on city streets,
in broad daylight?
Here in this town?
Where domestic violence is happening right under our noses?
Here in this town?
Where the political and religious rhetoric
of empire, control, and oppression is spewed out
from temples both secular and spiritual?

How might we make peace in this nation?
Peace among people of different races,
who speak with different accents?
Peace among people with different ideas?

How might we make peace in the world?
How might people turn from violence to dialogue?
How might we stop the kidnapping of children for the sake of war?
How might we ensure that all people
have enough hope so they might turn away from war?

Give us peace, we sing.
Here, among us and all round the world.
I looked it up.
These are the places at war:
civil wars, rebellions, genocides, slow simmering conflicts.

Columbia
Burma
The Philippines
Western New Guinea
Sri Lanka
Between India and Pakistan
In Pakistan
Afghanistan
Chechnya
Iraq
Between Israel and Palestine
In Palestine
Turkey
Uganda
Somalia
Senegal
Chad
Nigeria
Darfur

Thinking about this list,
I note one conflict about drugs,
one rebellion against a military dictatorship,
and seventeen (all the others) are tribal and religious wars.
Oh, each has its own complications and realities,
histories and characters.
But at root, they are about the choice of violence
to resolve or perpetuate tribal and religious difference.

What would it mean for there to be peace in these places?
What would it mean if we consecrated ourselves to the task of peace,
in these places?

We could not go cheap.
No cheap solutions are possible here.
Not one of these conflicts –
not one –
will be resolved with slogans, platitudes, or because we wish it.
we ought not go cheap for peace.
To consecrate ourselves is to make a sacred dedication,
and things that are sacred, things that matter – as peace does –
are never easy.
They require discipline, wisdom, powerful and transforming love.
If we could just snap our fingers,
if that was all it took to make peace,
then it would not be a sacred duty.

Veterans Day is the inheritor of Armistice Day.
Armistice Day, to mark the end, on the western front,
of the “Great War” – what we now call World War One.
That Armistice was signed in the morning of
November 11^th, and went into effect at 11:00 AM,
in 1918, between Germany and the Allies.
The 11^th Hour of the 11^th Day of the 11^th Month.

Canadian George Lawrence Price is traditionally regarded as the last soldier killed in the Great War:
he was shot by a German sniper and died at 10:58.
10:58.

One person who saw the title of this week’s sermon
up on the announcement board said to me:
“the 11^th hour! Sounds ominous.”
On the contrary, the 11^th hour is the dream for which we long,
it is the goal for which we work,
it is the object to which we consecrate our lives:
the hour when peace begins,
when no more soldiers are killed by snipers,
and no more snipers take aim at fellow human beings.
The 11^th hour is what we dedicate ourselves to:
when no children are forced from their homes
to fight someone else’s war,
when planes land and ships turn back for home,
when petty dictators give way to civil society,
when religion is only a force for understanding,
and not an excuse for violence,
when we realize that there is only one tribe,
the human being; that we are,
as so long prophesied,
all brothers and sisters.

In the 11^th hour, justice will roll down like waters
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
The 11^th hour will not come cheap.
It will not be easy.
But if we wish that the efforts of those among us,
those we love and cherish near and far,
if we wish that their efforts are not in vain,
then the 11^th hour is what we must make.

Let us begin that work today.
In our hearts and homes,
in this city and this land,
in every breathe we take and word we speak,
let peace be our goal,
honor our character,
justice our method,
and love, the ground we stand on.

Shalom.
Salam.
Blessed Be.
Namaste.
Amen.