revmjd

Mid July in Rockford, IL.

2008-07-26T19:42:00.000-06:00

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?

2008-05-07T12:22:00.002-06:00

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

2008-01-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-12-27T14:34:00.001-07:00

Rosie's first Christmas.

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

2007-12-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Sermon: Oct. 28, 2008: For All Souls

2007-10-28T14:05:00.000-06:00

The annual Halloween sermon.
Two readings first.

A Sonnet of William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

She speaks of death by Barbara Pescan
Oblivion, she said
in a weary voice,
is what is after death.
There is nothing after death
but nothing
and that's all right with me.

It made good scientific sense,
nailed to the cathedral door
of her religious childhood.

And when her husband died
a few years later
oblivion
pinned against eternity
sagged in the middle
and in its folds
sweet disbelief surprised her
and the hope
she hadn't seen the last of him yet.

Message For All Souls

Eight times the wheel of the year turns.

It turns on Yule, the winter solstice.
The shortest day.
It is when Christmas comes, too.

It turns on Imbolc, Feb. 2^nd,
halfway through winter.
We call it “Groundhog day.”

It turns on Ostara – the spring equinox.
A celebration of fertility.

You celebrate Ostara with eggs and rabbits.We call it “Easter.”

It turns on the 1^st of May, Beltane.We call it, well, May day.
This is halfway through spring.

It turns on Midsummer, the summer solstice.
The longest day.

It turns on Lammas, August 1^st, halfway through summer.

It turns on the Fall Equinox, September 21^st.

At it turns on Samhain, October 31^st.
halfway through autumn.
We call it Halloween.
We call it the “Day of the Dead.”
In the days that follow,
we celebrate All Saints and All Souls.

The turning of the year is the cycle of life.
You plant in the spring.
You harvest in the fall.
On Samhain, the ancient Celts believed
that the veil between the worlds lifted for a night,
that the spirits of the dead came to visit.

In love, and as an offering to their power,
people left candies and sweets in their homes for the spirits.
The dressed up in costumes.
They feasted together.

The night of the 31^st of October was Hallowed –
a sacred night, when magic was strong,
a time to appreciate life,
to honor the cycle,
to anticipate the rebirth of the spring,
to join together in community.
It was Hallowed.

We have still the remnants of a spiritually powerful tradition.
We miss, too often, the meaning.
The chance to reflect.
To honor death as part of the cycle of existence.
To honor those who have died.
To honor mystery.
To commit ourselves, again, to love.

We too often lose the meaning.
We’re working against that loss here.
This is the third year we’ve celebrated Samhain and All Souls here.
I know that well because my challenge is to say something a little different
each year.
This year my theme is love.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The bard’s love knows that he,
like the turning of the year,
grows old.
His hair like leaves of the autumn trees begins to fall.
In knowledge of finitude,
love is courageous and holy.
We do not last forever.
But we are capable of love –
and in need of it –
both to give and receive the gift of caring.

And love surprises.
sweet disbelief surprised her
and the hope
she hadn't seen the last of him yet.

On Samhain, the dead come to visit.
Their spirits cross the threshold.
We offer them peace and love.
And candies for their journey back to their world.
We honor them.
We open our hearts, just a little,
to the mystery,
to the hope,
to the possibility
that we haven’t seen the last of each other yet.

Part of our ritual each year is that we honor those who have died.
We speak their names,
aloud or in our hearts.
We speak those names into this beloved community,,
into this hour and place of worship.
This is an expression of our love.

So, I invite you into a time of ritual, prayer and reflection.
A time of remembering and honoring.
I will ask you to speak aloud, if you are willing, or bring to mind,
the names of those whom you remember.
To speak from your seats, our voices an intermingling tribute.
I will ask you to speak the names, first, of those long gone, ancestors and mentors;
second, friends and colleagues, the more distant but no less missed.
Third, our relatives, our partners, our dearest.
And finally, those who have died in the last year –
and I’ll ask you to save those names for this final category.

[ring bell]

Great spirit of life and love,
be with us in this hour and in this time,
as we remember and honor those who have died.
Be with us in all our lives and as we speak these names.

Let us speak the names of those who we remember.
We remember those long departed from this world,
our ancestors, who remain yet with us:

We remember our friends, our co-workers, our acquaintances,
those who passed through our lives, who remain yet with us:

We remember those we love, our spouses and closest friends,
children and parents, brothers and sisters, who remain yet with us:

We remember those who have died in the last year,
those whom we mourn, but who are, and will remain, yet with us:

Great spirit of life and love, we know that life and death are interwoven;
and at this time in the year, we honor the dead so that we can honor life,
so that we will know that life is a precious gift,
that our lives are worth something,
that we have a limited time to make our mark,
to love and live in such a way that we, too,
will be forever honored in memory.

Great spirit, where remembering brings joy, be present in joy.
Where remembering bring pain or sorrow, be present in comfort.
Where remembering brings love, be present in love.
Amen.

[Ring Bell]

I brought my spirit to the sea;
I stood upon infinity, I heard the waters roar.
And then there came a sense of peace,
some whisper calmed my soul.
Some ancient ministry of stars had made my spirit whole.

For all the saints from whom their labors rest . . .

We express our honor and our love.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

We plant, we harvest.
We begin, we end.
Life, love, being – it nourishes us,
and in the end, it consumes us.

Some ancient ministry of stars had made my spirit whole.

Wholeness – we say that word a lot here.
That’s our mission – to welcome people to lives of wholeness.
I’ll tell you what wholeness isn’t –
it isn’t pretending we know all the answers.
it isn’t living in denial of mortality – ours or others.
it isn’t trying to move on before we are ready,
and it isn’t holding on past the time when we are.

I’ll tell you what wholeness is:
it is being surprised by love.
it is hope, inexplicably.
it is love, though we must leave before long.
it is compassion for one another’s grief.
it is celebration of one another’s joy.
Wholeness moves us to spiritual maturity –
the awareness that we are finite, limited, mortal,
and simultaneously, that we are part of the
infinite, unlimited, immortal unity
of Love with a capital L,
of Wonder with a capital W,
of the Universe with a capital U.
Of God, if that word works for you.

Spiritual maturity, wholeness,
is willing to be surprised.
It is bringing your spirit to the sea,
and letting the stars heal.
It is loving come what may.

Do the dead come to visit?
Or is this some supernatural nonsense?
Me, I am sure they do visit.
And not just on Samhain.
They come to us whenever we recall their spirit.
Whenever they influence us –
for good or for ill.
Whenever we act or think in ways they might have something to do with,
then they are visiting.
Then we have seen them again,
not for the last time.

Just this week, we gathered up the three photographs
of our daughter Rosalie with her three great-grandmothers.
We’re on the lookout for a nice three picture frame to put them in.
They are sweet pictures –
I was quite moved to see them laid out.
And of course, it made me think of the fourth great-grandmother,
the one not living.
My Grandma Johnson,
my father’s mom.
She died fifteen years ago.
Her breakfast – a glass of whiskey.
Her lunch – a pack of cigarettes.
She was, frankly, a mean, bitter, difficult woman.
I did not realize this until I was older,
closer to the end of her life.
Because when I was little,
I spend my time at their house with my Grandpa Johnson,
and his 10’ by 5’ train set,
or riding with him in his red 66’ mustang convertible,
or getting to drive the golf cart as he and my dad and my uncle played a round.
Seeing the pictures of Rosie’s three living great-grandparents
caused Grandma and Grandpa Johnson to come visiting.
Remembering her bellicosity first,
I then also recalled his grace,
his kindness and care.

Both of them live in my father,
and both of them live in me,
and they live in Rosie.

When the Spanish conquerors arrived in what we now call Mexico,
they found that the people there had a ritual
about death.
The Spanish conquerors where unclear
if the ritual was honoring death,
or mocking it.
They tried to kill the ritual,
to make the day of the dead, well, dead.
But, unsurprisingly, it would not die.
It kept coming to visit.
Eventually, the conquerors compromised,
and forced the ritual to move from late summer to mid-fall,
to match the “Christian” holiday of honoring All Saints.
Of course, All Saints was an attempt to co-opt Samhain,
and like Samhain, the Aztecs welcomed the spirits of the dead back into their lives,
they celebrated with costumes and feasting.
They too, brought sweets to share with the spirits of the departed.

Some ancient ministry of stars has made my spirit whole.

This is ancient ministry,
the honoring of the dead.
Across cultures and religious traditions,
for thousands of thousands of years,
honoring all the saints and all the souls,
we bring sweets and flowers,
we light candles and say prayers.
This is an expression of love.

We could choose otherwise.
Some do.
We could observe that our lives are too short,
that nothing lasts as it is,
and say,
nope. I will not love, will not care, will not reach out.
That is a live option.
One that many people in our society select,
with intention or simply by default.

Or we can choose otherwise

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
To love well, to be fully present,
in the time that we do have together.
And to keep love alive past the boundary,
through the ancient veil that separates the worlds,
to bring those we miss into our hearts –
to tell their stories (truthfully, with no glossing over the messy parts),
to remember their faces and their dreams,
to build on what they have built,
that none may be forgotten.
That all the souls,
gone, here, and to come,
may be blessed.

I’ll end this year’s sermon with a few lines from the poet,
All Souls, by the Unitarian Universalist poet May Sarton.
She writes:

“Did someone say there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
nor the gift ungiven. . . .
What has been plaited cannot be uplaited -- . . . .
and memory makes kings and queens of us . . .
the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.”

Love and mourning are tied together –
they are part of the same motion.
Our love is complex –
it changes and grows,
fades, returns, begins anew.
We honor all the souls,
because we love them.
We love with more strength,
because, before long, we leave.
We love,
and sweet disbelief surprises us with hope,
mystery and wonder comes into our heart.

The wheel of the year turns,
as it must.
The day ends and begins again,
as it must.
Life comes and goes,
as it must.
We honor the cycle.
We rejoice in and comfort each other.
We reach out to the holy,
which stands always with open arms.
We live each day,
as best we are able.
May it be so.

Amen. Blessed be. Namaste.

Reverence V: For Spirit

2007-10-08T14:17:00.000-06:00

I preached this at High Plains last Sunday, Oct. 7th. The first part of the sermon is notes for stories that I told, while the rest of the sermon was a manuscript.

Spirit of life, come to me, come to me.

I have felt the spirit of life come to me many times.
I can’t define it,
but I know it when I feel it.

Young Adult Camp [Here, I told a story]

Spirit of life, come to me, come to me

FTF [also, a story.]

Spirit of life, come to me, come to me

table, hospital room, singing

It’s tricky, talking about feeling the spirit.
Unitarian Universalists are suspicious about supernatural language.
But I know I’ve felt it.

Last week, Morgan and I had some friends from out of town over for dinner . . .

It’s a sign.
She said, “that’s not a sign. That’s just what we grill for vegetarians.”
No, it’s a sign.
You don’t believe in signs.

Well, not in their objective meaning or their placement by an outside intelligence.
But still, I believe in signs.

What I mean is . . .
-- objective meaning
-- placement

I feel the same way about the spirit of life.

I have learned so much from God
That I can no longer Call Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

You’ve seen those bumper stickers, I bet:
“God is too big for any one religion.”
Every time I see one of those I want
to follow them home and give them a brochure about our church.

The spirit of life is too big for any one religion.
Too big for only one name.
We bring many names:
strong mother god
warm father god
old, aching god
young, growing god
To big for any one name:
Hafiz, the sufi poet,
says that “Love has befriended Hafiz so completely
it has . . . freed me of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.”
This is reverence for the spirit.
Reverence for Love with a capital L.
For Truth with a capital T.

Here is how you can tell the difference between reverence and irreverence
for the spirit of life.
Those who are reverent say that what is holy is bigger than them.
Those who are irreverent use the idea of the holy for their own purposes.

In another of Hafiz’s poems
(it is called Reverence)
he says:
“Because there is nothing outside my master’s body
I try to show reverence of all things.”

I try to show reverence for all things.
If you have genuine reverence for spirit,
then that feeling of awe will lead you to
show kindness to others,
to care for the earth, our home.
(I think this works the other way, too –
I think if you show reverence for others
and reverence for the earth
then you will learn to have reverence for spirit.)

“Because there is nothing outside my master’s body
I try to show reverence for all things.”

The sufi’s have a deeply imminent theology.
Their version of Islam teaches that God
is everywhere and in everything.
So, we show reverence for all things.
This kind of reverence for spirit is possible for all types of Unitarian Universalists.
Whether we use the same language as the Sufi poet or not.

If you are humanist Unitarian Universalist,
then you believe that human lives and hopes are sacred,
that what is important and meaningful is this world,
our concrete experiences.
If such is the case,
then showing reverence for all things makes sense,
for all things – especially all people, but all life –
all things have potential dignity and worth.

If you are a liberal Christian Unitarian Universalist,
then you believe that the spirit of god
and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth
ought to guide our lives –
and what does Jesus say?
Luke 17:20:

“Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!” or “There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

It is among you.
Since nothing is outside the holy,
we try to show reverence for all things.

If you are a naturalistic or earth-centered Unitarian Universalist,
well, that’s easy.
The whole point of pagan and indigenous traditions
is that everything is interfused with the spirit of life,
every being, every molecule, every breath.

If you are a Buddhist Unitarian Universalist,
then you might observe these words of the Buddha,

“May all beings be filled with joy and peace.
May all beings everywhere,
The strong and the weak,
The great and the small,
The mean and the powerful,
The short and the long,
the subtle and the gross:
May all beings everywhere,
Seen and unseen,
Dwelling far off or nearby,
Being or waiting to become:
May all be filled with lasting joy.”

All beings deserve our reverence,
for the holy is one (that’s what Unitarian means, after all)
and we are all one human family, with one destiny
(that’s one Universalist means.)

If we have reverence for spirit,
then we know that what is ultimate is too big for any creed,
then we know that we should show reverence for all things,
and we know one more thing:
we know that we must resist idolatry at every turn.

Idolatry is the opposite of reverence.
Paul Woodruff,
who wrote the book
“Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue”,
reminds us of the difference between respect and reverence.
He writes,
“Respect is sometimes good and sometimes bad,
sometimes wise and sometimes silly.
It is silly to respect the pratings of a pompous fool;
it is wise to respect the intelligence of any student.
Reverence calls for respect only when respect is really the right attitude.”

Idolatry is worse than silliness –
it is a false deity,
it is making something partial and limited your object of ultimate concern.
We have many idolatries in our world:
the notion that one race or tribe is better than another, that’s idolatry.
the notion that one sex or gender or sexual orientation is better than another,
that’s idolatry.
The notion that one nationality is better than another,
that our allegiance should be to our homeland,
rather than to the truth and human dignity regardless of flag,
that’s idolatry.
The notion that if we buy enough, we’ll be happy,
that’s idolatry.

You can tell pretty easily what people worship,
in practice.

No matter what someone says they value,
you can tell what they really value by observing their behavior.
I’ve seen people worship a political party,
I’ve seen them worship their possessions,
I’ve seen people worship their jobs,
I’ve seen people worship their own suffering.
Whatever it is that a person counts as most worthy,
that is what they worship.

Me, I try to worship the spirit of life and love.
I try to pay attention to when it shows up,
in forest clearings and around dining room tables,
in the eyes of children and the laughter of the wise.

We are called by reverence to resist idolatry.
It is a difficult task,
it is something we have to work at every day.

But if we wish to show reverence
for all things,
and if we believe that what is holy
is bigger than any creed,
then resisting idolatry is our task.

Spirit of life, come to us, come to us.

The good news, my friends, is that it is does come.
The spirit does move among us.
It enters our lives and our communities,
it sings in our hearts.
We might know it by different names –
indeed, I hope we do.
We might experience it in different ways –
I’m sure of it.
But that which matters most brings us joy.

In the poem Reverence, Hafiz,
who tries to show reverence for all things,
concludes:
“No wonder, Hafiz,
it has been unusual
for a smile to forsake You!”

I’ve been giving the impression, I fear,
throughout this series of sermons,
that reverence is just about duty and obligation.
That’s it is really hard.
And reverence can be difficult.
But it is also deeply joyful.
To live with reverence in our heart,
is to have a smile with us.
To live with reverence as our calling,
is to have a life of profound meaning and purpose.
To live with reverence,
despite all the yelling of society to do otherwise,
is to make ourselves free and loving.

People come to church because they want their life to mean something.
They experience loneliness,
they experience despair,
they experience rootlessness,
and they wonder, “is this all there is?”
People come because they want to know the purpose of their life.
Well, this is the purpose:
have reverence.
Embrace riddles and silence.
Attend to birth and death as sacred moments.
Love the earth.
Love each other.
Love the holy.
This, I believe – because I have felt it and seen it with others –
the reverent life is the joyful life.
the reverent life is the meaningful life.
the reverent life is the life worth living.

So let us join together in courage and hope,
helping each other move towards reverence,
opening our hearts,
living our values,
expanding our love,
until all existence is included.

Amen. Blessed Be.

Reverence IV: For Others (Sept. 30, 2007)

2007-10-08T11:00:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, reverence demands of us silence in the face of mystery.
Sometimes, reverence calls for us to attend with seriousness to birth and death,
when we come into and out of this world.
Sometimes, reverence invites us into a deeper relationship with the earth.

These are the three approaches to reverence
I have already spoken about
in this series of sermons.
Today?

Well, sometimes reverence makes us say:
“God damn it. That ain’t right!”
Sometimes reverence makes us fire off a letter to the editor
or our member of congress,
Sometimes reverence makes us strap on our marching shoes,
pick up our sign, and start chanting.
Sometimes reverence means we have to annoy the other people
at the party, and say the truth, “that joke isn’t funny.”
Sometimes reverence means serving up a ladle of soup,
writing that check to help out.
Sometimes reverence is holding the door open,
looking someone in the eye and giving them a smile,
Sometimes reverence is a handshake or a hug.
Sometimes reverence is saying, I love you,
but you can’t treat me like this.
Sometimes reverence is about justice, compassion, and dignity.

Here is a story about reverence for others.

John is thirteen.
Let us say his parents take him to a Unitarian Universalist church.
It could be a Congregational church, or some other type.
But let’s say, it’s a UU church.
And at this church,
John and his parents have many friends.
They go to one another’s houses for dinner.
Once a year, John and his parents travel a few hours to a camp,
let us say this camp us on the edge of a lake,
in the woods,
and here they spend a week with other Unitarian Universalists
from all over the area.
They eat together and sing together and play “to tell the truth”,
they have a talent show,
they go boating on the lake.
In church on Sunday morning,
at the camp they go to,
and most of all, from his parents every day –
by their example and their instruction –
John has learned some things.
He’s learned that everyone is valuable.
He’s learned that you should treat people well.

He’s learned that you should stand up for your values.
He’s also learned a particular lesson –
because two of his parent’s friends in the church
are Susan and Gillian,
who have been partners for twenty years,
and have a neat old house with fancy windows and a hidden stairway in the back.
And at the camp each year,
Tom and Sam always lead a sing-a-long for the whole camp,
Tom plays the guitar and Sam sings,
and they’ve been together for a while, too,
and John’s parents don’t think it’s right that Tom and Sam
and Susan and Gillian,
don’t have the same rights as everyone else.
And neither does John.
John has learned reverence for others.

But learning it isn’t as easy as showing it.
At the middle school that John goes to,
the other kids are always making jokes,
whenever they don’t like something, they say,
“that’s so gay!”

John knows he should say something,
but it’s not easy to be thirteen.
But one day,
easting overcooked pizza and soggy French fries
in the cafeteria,
one of the other kids tells a nasty, mean joke,
and John has had enough.
He says, “I don’t think that’s funny.
I have good friends who are lesbian and gay,
and I don’t think you should tell those jokes anymore.”
The table is quiet.
Then one of the other kids changes the subject.
Will John keep these friends?
Will he have to find new ones?
Will these boys think about what they are saying and change?
Doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that John has been true to himself.
He has shown reverence for others.
Reverence for others takes courage.
It’s not easy.
But it is possible.

Here is another story about reverence for others.

Karen works in an office.
Maybe they make widgets.
Maybe they answer telephone calls.
Maybe they design software.
Maybe they educate children.
That’s not the point of the story.
Karen works in an office.
She’s worked there a while.
She’s pretty good at her job.
Knows what she’s doing.
The work isn’t amazing,
but it is decent.
The pay and benefits are OK.
But Karen hates going to work each day.
Because of Rob.
Rob has worked there a while too,
but he just got promoted,
and now Karen has to work with Rob every day.
And she can’t stand it.
Rob is, well, annoying.

He always talking about politics.
And his politics are not Karen’s politics.
Once, she said,
“I don’t really agree with that”
and he got mad and sulky at her.
That whole week was just awful.
And that’s not all –
Rob is always talking over her.
Interrupting.
He says nasty things about other people
behind their backs.
He’s just difficult.
And Karen is having a really hard time at work because of this.
She doesn’t want to make a fuss.
She just wants to do her job in peace.

And one Monday morning,
a bright fall day,
she wakes up and decides
she will never change Rob.
It’s not her job, and she couldn’t do it if she tried.

She decides
that every time he does something difficult,
she will say to herself,
“even he is a child of God.”
When Rob is rude,
she says to herself,
“even he is a child of God.”
When Rob interrupts her in front of their boss,
Karen says to herself, “even he is a child of God.”
Petty soon,
she leaves off the “even” –
and affirms to herself that,
Rob is a child of God.
And so too, is Karen.

Does Rob change? Does the job get easier?
Not really the point,
although I like to think that in this case,
Karen’s compassionate heart changes the spirit of the place.
The point is that she shows reverence to others.
It takes deep compassion.
It’s not easy.
But it’s possible.

Here is another story about reverence for others.

Dateline: Bangkok, September 28, 2007
The New York Times.

Myanmar’s armed forces appeared to have succeeded today in sealing tens of thousands of protesting monks inside their monasteries, but they continued to attack bands of civilian demonstrators who challenged them in the streets of the main city, Yangon.

Witnesses and diplomats reached by telephone inside Myanmar said troops were now confronting and attacking smaller groups of civilians around the city, sometimes running after them through narrow streets, sometimes firing at protesting groups.

Brutal attacks on monasteries and a heavy military presence outside their gates appeared to have choked off, at least for now, the huge demonstrations, led by monks, that have presented the military junta with its most serious challenge since it took power in 1988.

Exile groups passed on many vivid, unconfirmed reports about brutality toward monks and their superiors. Many monks were reported to have been seized and driven away in trucks, and armed soldiers were said to have been preventing others from leaving.

“Wednesday night numerous monasteries were raided, and we have reports that many monks were beaten and arrested, and we have pictures where whole monasteries have been trashed, and blood and broken glass,” Ms. Villarosa, the chief American diplomat in the country, said.

With the monks contained, another diplomat said, the demonstrations seemed to have lost their focus, and soldiers were quick to pounce on any groups that emerged onto the streets.

Perhaps you saw the pictures on television or in your paper –
hundreds of Buddhist monks
in their saffron and orange and yellow robes,
their heads shaved,
barefoot, or maybe with sandals,
standing at the front of thousands of demonstrators.
Sitting on the street before the armed police.
The monks gave courage to the people.
They showed compassion for suffering.
They stood there,
they did not quail in fear.
The military dictatorship knew the only way to control the protest,
to stop it,
was to arrest the monks, to seal them in their monasteries,
to prevent them from entering the world.

The monks provided the focus.
The monks have reverence for others.
They have compassion and courage and love.

Reverence for others means working for justice.
It is opposed always to totalitarianism,
the attitude that people are to be controlled,
that they serve the state, and not the other way round.
Reverence for others demands some form of democracy,
it means dignity and trust.

Will these protests, by bringing the attention of the world,
change Burma?
I don’t know.
I know that for me, it is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
From last week forward,
I have resolved not to purchase
anything made in the country whose government vetoed
in the United Nations security council,
a resolution condemning the junta –
that would be China.
I believe that reverence for others demands that of me.
I may not always be able to tell where something is made,
but if I can, then I will act accordingly.
Will my actions, by themselves, make things change.
No.

Will the monks make Burma change?
Maybe, maybe not.
Not the point.
The point is that they show and inspire reverence for others.
Reverence takes love and commitment.
It’s not easy.
But it’s possible.

Here is a another story about reverence for others.

John Hassler Dietrich was born in 1878,
in Pennsylvania.
His parents were active in the Reformed Church,
and John became a Reformed minister.
He was a powerful speaker and his congregation near Pittsburg grew and grew.
But John discovered that he didn’t really believe all the doctrines.
He didn’t believe the virgin birth, the deity of Jesus, or the infallibility of the Bible.
He started using a Unitarian hymnal in his Reformed church.
Well, it wasn’t long before he was defrocked by his denomination,
and he joined the Unitarians instead.

He went off to Spokane, Washington,
where he turned a fifty member church into a 1500 member church
in five years.
In 1916, he went to Minneapolis,
where he built a church of over a thousands,
with thousands more listening on the radio.
He was a really good preacher.
And he was preaching a new message:
that human dignity and human achievement
should be the basis of religion.
That science was the way to truth.
Dietrich, along with a few of his colleagues,
created religious humanism.
He said this:
it matters tremendously how we conduct ourselves,
for we are actually the makers of human destiny."
Therefore, he continued, our responsibility
"is to put beauty in place of ugliness, good in place of evil,
laughter in place of tears;
to dispel error with knowledge, hatred with love;
displace strife and contention with peace and co-operation."

Some religious traditions –
like the Calvinism that John Dietrich grew up with –
have a doctrine of “innate human depravity”,
that human beings are miserable, worthless scum.
That compared with the deity, we count for nothing.
But we, thanks in part to John Dietrich,
have a different vision.
A vision of the majesty of the human being,
a vision of our possibility and our wondrous souls.
Oh, we’re not perfect.
No doubt about it.
We goof, often.
But we are capable of such wonder and love.
We have dignity and deserve respect.
This is reverence for others.
It takes faith.
It isn’t easy.
But it’s possible.

Here’s another story about reverence for others.

Less of a story, actually, than a portrait.
I know someone – a lot of folks actually –
but I’m thinking of one in particular –
who is a deeply gracious host.
When you show up at his house,
he takes your coat and offers you a glass of water
or a drink.
There’s a plate of yummy cheese on the coffeetable.
He lets you settle in,
and asks how you are –
and listens.
Really listens.
If you needed him, he would be there for you.
He makes you feel welcome.
He is the sort of person who reminds us that Jesus of Nazareth’s first miracle
was turning water into wine
so the guests would feel welcome.
You know anyone like this?
I bet you do, because there are many of you here in the church like this –
gracious. Welcoming.

This reason that this church is growing –
the most important reason, I am sure –
is that so many of you are gracious hosts.
You welcome the newcomer.
The gracious host, the person who opens their heart and their home,
the person who listens well,
this is reverence for others.
It takes grace.
It isn’t easy.
But it’s possible.

I could keep telling stories about reverence for others.
There are many of these stories.
The stories are important because they teach us how to live.
We Unitarians are the inheritors
of a radically incarnational theology.
Nineteen hundred years ago,
some people were saying that only Jesus was the son of god,
that he alone deserved our reverence.
But our spiritual ancestors said otherwise –
they said that all people everywhere are children of God.

Every person is an incarnation of the holy.
The thirteen year old who stands up for his values,
the bullies who he stands up to,
his parent’s friends at camp and church,
Karen, who struggles with Rob,
Rob, who struggles with himself,
The monks who lead the march,
the soldiers carrying out their orders,
the generals, with their fear and anger,
the civilians, wanting a better life,
John Dietrich, creating a new faith in human possibility,
the gracious host,
the honored guest,
every one is an incarnation of the holy. Every one.
Therefore, we have reverence for others.
It isn’t easy.
It takes courage.
It takes compassion.
It takes love and commitment.
It takes faith.
It takes grace.
It isn’t easy.
But it’s possible.

So let us strive each day,
with each breath and each word,
to show others reverence,
for in so doing,
we make manifest our true and beautiful heart.

Reverence III: For the Earth

2007-10-08T09:35:00.000-06:00

I preached this on Sept. 23rd.

More times than I can count.
More times than I can remember.
But I remember many of them.

The ravine behind my house when I was a kid.
The water would roll over the rocks in the creek.
It was a magical sound.
The light would turn green as it came through the leaves.
I would sit down there at the creek bed
and wonder about my place in things,
the sweep of time and eternity.

I remember the sun setting over the Olympic Mountains,
dancing on the water of Hood Canal.
We would sit on the grass at Seabeck Camp and Conference Center,
overlooking the water.

We were there in early August for a Unitarian Universalist family camp,
and some years, some nights,
we’d lie on our backs in that same grass
and stare up at the Perseid meteor shower.

I remember driving through the wheat fields in Eastern Washington,
watching them ripple in the winds,
fingers of gold bending likes waves.
Sarah and I drove out there one moonless night
with a bottle of wine,
and listened to the wheat sway
and I swear, we heard the stars burn in the heavens.

I remember standing on the shore of Lake Superior,
feeling the cool breeze off the water
balanced with the hot sun of a summer day.
Walking through the woods in Northern Wisconsin.

Silent, until you hear the noise of life –
birds and bugs and the rustle of leaves.
One particular night this summer,
the red harvest moon, full, just over the horizon,
larger than you could imagine.

I remember driving west on 24,
on the other side of Ute pass,
and coming up over the bend,
and seeing a long lush valley floor before me,
with the collegiate mountains standing sentential over the scene,
and thinking to myself,
how did I get so lucky to live here?

I remember the trees and shrubs in Hyde Park, Chicago,
when spring came,
and the drab grey of the city became alive with florescent green,
buds of life and joy.

More times than I can count.
These are just a few.
Sunsets and Sunrises (more often, sunsets –
I’m not really a sunrise kind of guy).
Valleys, Mountains.
Rafting down a river,
Hiking up the trail,
on and on.
More times than I can count,
I have felt a feeling of wonder and awe –
a feeling of reverence –
in the presence and awareness of the natural world.

If you ask Unitarian Universalists to talk about when they have felt reverent,
I bet that the experiences you’ll most often hear
involve the natural world.
I don’t think this is unique to us.

I bet most folks would talk about wilderness and water and light,
about that view,
about that one moment when the shining star
the trilling bird
the falling leaf
grabbed their attention and held it.

What about you?
You ever have a moment like this?
I bet you probably have.
Bring it to your mind.
Where were you?
What did you smell or see or touch?
What did you hear?
What changed?
Did your heart fill?
Did your breath ease?
Did you long for more?
Did you turn away because it was more than you could absorb at the time?

When I started this series of sermons on reverence,
I quoted lines from William Wordsworth.
He describes his feeling “of a presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts” and then he writes:
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
The beauty of the earth can create reverence in us,
and the virtue of reverence can make us see the beauty of the earth.
The natural world can surprise us,
pull us out of our mundane-ness and cynicism.
And when we are aware and attentive,
when we take the time to walk outside,
to lift our head and look up,
then we can see the wonder with surrounds us always.

If we eyes to see and ears to hear,
then when morning breaks we can see the first morning,
the garden sprung in completeness.
We hear the blackbird’s song as the song of the earth itself.

Do you hear?
Through the roar and the rush,
in the heights, on the plain, in the vain,

in the sun, in the rain,
Do you hear?
All the dreams, all the dares, all the sighs, all the prayers –
they are yours, mine, and theirs.

I think the reason that reverence and nature
go so well together
is that reverence is about seeing the unity of all,
reverence is about hearing the dreams and prayers
of the world
in the blowing of the wind,
reverence is about feeling the heartbeat of the universe
in the pulse of your own neck
reverence is about all that is;
and nature offers a chance to see the whole,
to notice the ecological system,
the cosmological history,
the interdependent web.

When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking /
outward, to the mountains so solidly there /
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking /
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea /
that was also there . . . ?

The Sufis, the Pagans both ancient and new,
the Taoists and the followers of Shinto,
they all know that the sacred way,
the cosmos, everything,
is contained in each living thing.
And that all things are part of the whole.

This is not a new idea for us Unitarian Universalists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the graduation address
to the students of Harvard Divinity School in 1838.
Emerson was a Unitarian, as were all the divinity students at Harvard back then.
It is required reading today for students preparing for our ministry.
I read it again at least once a year.
Emerson begins with:
“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.”
Later, he says,
“the true faith . . . should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns,
with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers.”

Emerson’s vision is of a faith which lives and celebrates life.

He sees in nature and in the human soul the continuing presence
of the spirit of life and love,
and urges the preachers to preach
that revelation is not closed.
If you trace the world reverence all the way back to its Proto-Indo-European root,
it comes from a word meaning “to be or become aware of.”
Reverence is to become aware,
and the word revelation comes from the sense of unveiling,
taking the cover off.
To believe, as Emerson believed,
as Unitarians and Universalists today believe,
that revelation is happening all around us
is to invite a reverence for life.

In Emerson’s words:
“It is the office of the true teacher to show us that God is, not was;
that he speaketh, not spake.”

Reverence means to see the world as it is.
Alive, dynamic, not ours to control.

Mary Oliver is right:
“Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it.
It’s frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds . . .
Don’t call this world an explanation, or even an education.”

We human beings are anxious animals.
We don’t like it when things are out of our control.
We don’t like it when we don’t understand everything.
We get nervous around mystery.
A lot of people are freaked out
when they look up at the stars
and realize that the light from those fires
burned millions of years ago,
and that we see them only now.
Why do 40 some percent of Americans
refuse to believe in evolution?
It’s because they can’t handle the idea
that all this is out of someone’s control.
But reverence, real reverence,
being aware of the truth, of the real world,
taking the veil off,
means accepting that things are out of our control.
We are not gods.
For the ancient Greeks,
this was reverence’s first and most important meaning:
we are not gods.
We do not control the world.
We are not in charge.

Reverence for the earth gives us strength and humility.
It inspires and grounds us,
widens our vision and focuses our attention.

Okay, then. So what?
How then shall we live?
What are we supposed to do with this reverent feeling?
I can watch a lot of sunsets,
stand on the shore and listen to the waves,
but is that all there is?
Or are we supposed to do something with this feeling of reverence?

Following Wendell Berry,
I’ll make three suggestions for how we might then live,
if we take reverence for the earth seriously.
Plant Sequoias.
Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.
Practice resurrection.

Plant sequoias.
The native people of the part of the world I am from
say to always think about the seventh generation.
Seven generations is an imaginable time frame.
I knew my great-grandmother,
and, if all goes well,
I will probably know,
someday, my great-grandchild.
That’s seven generations.
But that’s not how long we usually think.

We usually think about this week.
Monday to Friday.
Or we think about this Quarter,
are we up or down in these three months?
Maybe we think a year ahead.
Maybe even five years.
But often, that’s about as far as we go.
We don’t have the faith to plant sequoias,
to make our crop that which we ourselves will not harvest.
What’s in it for me?,
we too often ask.

Plant sequoias.
Ask, what can I do for the grandchildren of the babies hanging out in back rows here?
What world will they live in?

How about the grandchildren of the babies been born in other parts of the world?Will we leave things better for them
than we found them?

A lot of folks think that the answer to that question,
unless things change,
is probably not.
Billions of refuges,
driven from their homes by rising sea levels or failing crops – that’s not a better world.
Shrinking biodiversity, disappearing wilderness,
that’s not better.

Plant sequoias.
Make changes,
even though they seem small in the scope of things.
They make things better for the seventh generation.
Here is a list of five easy things.
Choose at least three, and do them.
1. Change out all your light bulbs to the high-efficiency ones.
2. Recycle. Take it to the recycling plant yourself if you have to.
3. Fully inflate your tires.
4. Vote for people who pass good laws.
5. Stop eating beef. Try it for a month.

Thus endeth the instruction.
If you find yourself aware,
if you find yourself reverent,
then plant sequoias.

Be joyful, even though you have considered all the facts.
So things are in trouble.
Still, be joyful.
I am convinced that reverence leads us to joy.
It leads us to justice and caring, too,
but it must be joyful justice, joyful caring.
If all we have is anger,
If all we have is our consideration of the facts,
If all we have is concern,
we will burn out, give up, become bitter.

We must have joy,
we must enter into the world with our dreams and hopes
in the forefront of our mind.

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.
Do not be ignorant.
Do not put on blinders.
Consider the facts.
Be joyful anyway.
Be joyful because.
Share your joy with others.
I mean this quite concretely –
share with your friends and family your favorite trail,
a trip to the river,
a garden.

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts,
and by being joyful,
bring more reverence into your life
and share more reverence in the world.

Practice resurrection.
Today is the first day of fall,
not the first day of spring.
It’s at springtime when we celebrate
the rebirth of the world,
Earth day and Easter and all that.
The fall is a different season,
the season of harvest,
the season of gathering up,
the season of drawing in,
but these too, are about resurrection,
about the continuing cycle of life,
the ebb and flow.

Reverence is about become aware,
noticing,
being open to mystery,
and this, my friends, is what resurrection means.

To come back to life,
to awaken from the drowsy every-day of drudgery,
of spiritual boredom,
of going along to get along.
Resurrection can happen whenever we breath in,
look around,
listen closely.

Before creek beds and mountaintops,
sunsets and cool breezes of the lake,
in wheat fields and along city streets,
anywhere at all,
there lies in bud all that is,
and all that is possible.
To be reverent, to be aware,
this is our calling and our gift.
Let us embrace it.

Reverence II: Birth and Death

2007-10-08T09:23:00.000-06:00

Preached at High Plains on Sept. 16th.

Readings

For So the Children Come by Sophia Lyon Fahs

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

-- W. H. Auden

Message Reverence II: Birth and Death Minister

This is the heart of our faith:
every night a child is born is a holy night.
As time went on,
the wise women came to understand that the
gifts of birth belong to every child,
born anywhere, at anytime.

This is the heart of our faith:
every night a child is born is a holy night.
It matters not the where, or the why, or the how.
It matters not the color of their skin,
the language used to say,
“welcome to the world.”
It matters not whether they have official papers
or not.
Every night,
and every day,
a child is born is a holy night.

This is the heart of our faith:
People matter.
Human beings are sacred.
We are not tools to be used.
We are not just passing through.
We are not trends, subgroups, or consumers.
We are sacred human beings.
Our lives matter.

This is the heart of our faith:
When people die, we remember them.
We grieve their loss,
and we remember their lives.
What they stood for,
what they dreamed.
Their lives give us hope and strength.
“Though the path be hard and long,
still we strive in expectation,
join we now their ageless song.
One with them in aspiration.

One in name, in honor one,
guard we well the crown they won,
what they dreamed by ours to do,
hope their hopes, and seal them true.”

This is the heart of our faith:
What is holy and wondrous is not something just “out there.”
It is present in our lives.
In the everyday.
In the extraordinary moments of our existence,
and in the ordinary moments, too.
It is not the birth of just that one person,
so long ago,
which is holy.
It is every birth.
The one that is happening now. [snap.]
And the one that is happening now. [snap.]
And now. [snap.]
And now. [snap.]
Each is holy.

It is not the death of that one person,
so long ago,
which matters,
whose life is worthy of our memory and respect.
Every person who lives and dies is worthy of our respect.
And every death is a moment to be marked as a sacred time.
Messy, peaceful, in war, in poverty or wealth,
every one.
The one that is happening now.
And the one that is happening now.
And now.
And now.
Each is holy.

This is the heart of our faith:
Human beings – each one of us –
are miraculous.
We live for such a short time,
and our lives are so precious.
We can let them mean nothing,
or we can let our lives honor
the power of birth and death.

We can let these limits –
that we come, and must go –
we can let these limits
define us,
truncate our hopes,
or we can embrace our finitude and thereby transcend it.

Birth and death mark the beginning and the end
of our existence as we know it.
But they are so much more than that.
Birth and death, in our culture,
are highly medicalized events.
This is sometimes very necessary.
Lives are saved, lives of mothers and babies,
lives are given long extensions,
by surgery or radiation or medication.
But the medicine of it sometimes distracts us from the larger meaning.
Birth and death are more than medical events.

Birth and death mark the beginning and end
of our existence as we know it.
But they are so much more than that.
Birth and death, in our culture,
are highly statistical events.
The statistical estimate is that there are 4.17 births per second, worldwide.
And 1.8 deaths per second, also worldwide.
And we can measure these things.
So many births are at a hospital.
So many are at home.
This many people of so-and-so race were born today.
The rate of mortality from so-and-so disease
is up such-and-such percent.
It can be helpful, sometimes,
to understand such trends.
But this can hide the real meaning.
Birth and death are more than statistical events.

When we affirm the heart of our faith,
that every night a child is born is a holy night,
that every life and death deserves to be honored,
then we display that virtue,
reverence,
which is the subject of this five sermon series.
This being the second sermon in the series.
I spoke last week about how reverence demands
we honor riddles,
metaphors and silence.
In a couple of weeks,
I’ll speak about how reverence asks us to work for justice.
But today my topic is birth and death –
that reverence for these moments,
these times when we come into and pass out of existence as we know it,
that reverence for these mysteries,
is an essential part of our liberal faith.

Last week, I used as the benediction a poem
by Maryanne Hannan,
which began:

It was Einstein who said
either nothing is a miracle
or everything is.
I believe that.
I believe that when we see the world through the eyes of
cynicism, statistics, control,
then we don’t see miracles.

We see the unknown citizen,
found by the bureau of statistics
to be without complaint.
He thought the right way,
bought the right things,
had the right number of children.
Was he free? Was he happy?
The question is absurd.
And the question is absurd,
if you have no reverence for birth or death,
no reverence for each person’s unique story.
There are no miracles here,
no wonder, no awe,
just trends and patterns and society.

This is the heart of our faith:
that each night a child is born is a holy night.
and the reason for that?
Because each person, each new life,
carries with them the possibility of transformation, change, and creation.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt is probably best known
for her work on what she called “the banality of evil”
I think her best stuff is on human dignity.
These are deeply related topics, of course.
The worst evils of our age – the holocaust,
genocides in the Balkans, and central Africa,
and southeast Asia, and Central American,
totalitarianism in China, Russia, the middle east,
all these evils are about the denial of human dignity,
and the absence of reverence.
When you see birth, death, and life as nothing more than statistics,
then such atrocities become possible.

However, when you see that each person is unique, sacred,
with their own story and purpose,
then you live differently – at least, you ought to.

Either everything is a miracle, or nothing is.

The fact that we ourselves are new when we are born
means that we are capable of bringing the new into the world.
Of making miracles.

Here is Arendt in her own words:

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins. Thus, the origin of life from inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic processes, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the standpoint of . . . the universe . . . the new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

Either everything is a miracle, or nothing is.
When you have no reverence for birth,
then “nothing is new under the sun”,
then our lives are meaningless,
we are unknown citizens,
statistics and consumers.
But when you have reverence for birth,
when you see miracles in the eyes of every child,
(and children are, after all, what each one of us is –
the child of someone, and of the universe itself)
when you see miracles there,
then everything which is impossible becomes possible.
Then wonder abounds.

We cannot speak long about birth until we must speak of death.
If we do not honor birth, then we will not honor death.
But if we honor birth, and honor life, then we must honor death.
For both ends are mysteries,
and every night that a person dies is a holy night, too.

We live in so much fear of death.
Oh, we find the fake version fascinating –
People tune in to watch the various versions of CSI
and their knock-offs.
Psychics who talk to the dead remain as popular as they have
for the last five thousand years.
But the real thing?
The woman who quietly stops breathing
in her bed at the hospice?
Most folks would rather not think about that.

Death, like birth, comes in many forms.
Quiet, loud. Too soon, unexpected,
long in coming, a relief. In many forms.
But regardless of how and when and where
something powerful and sacred has happened.
Sometimes people act like on nice, happy things are sacred,
but often the most sacred times are the hardest.

To have reverence in the face of death
is first, to admit that we know not,
have not the words,
cannot know with any certainty,
what the end of this existence means.
I once performed a memorial service
for a longtime member of the church where I did my internship.
He was an atheist, through and through.
Neither he nor his wife wanted any supernaturalism.
It was a traditional Unitarian Universalist service.
There were readings and music,
and a focus on this person who had died:
his life, his dreams and hopes.
We honored what he cared about:
his friends, his family, the birds that gathered in his front lawn
which he would sit and watch each day.
Afterwards, a neighbor of the family
came to me; she was mad.
“There was no reassurance!
No resurrection!”
I explained that he didn’t believe in that.
She left, shaking her head.

But the truth is, even if he had believed,
I wouldn’t have preached it.
I couldn’t.
I don’t know what happens.
I shall not pretend otherwise.
I am willing to go this far:
The holy is loving, and we embraced in love.
All are welcomed into the arms of the divine.
These are metaphors and riddles,
and all the reverent person can say.
Albus Dumbledore says “to the well-organized mind,
death is but the next great adventure,”
I’ll go that far, but no farther.
These are mysteries.
When we think we know all the answers,
we lose our ability to stand humble before life.
When we dismiss this existence as nothing but prelude,
temporary trial before our reward,
then we lose all the miracles of existence,
the preciousness of life.

At memorial services in communities who believe
in a more traditional doctrine of the resurrection,
you will often hear nothing at all about the particular person
who has died.
It is not about them.
It is about the heavenly kingdom,
about the coming judgment,
and so one.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd.
But to me at least, reverence for death
means respect for that person.
Hannah Arendt again, is helpful.
The fact that we are born,
unique and new the world,
means that we are capable of new things,
capable of action, creation, greatness.
But that action will fade away,
it will be forgotten,
drowned in the well of statistics,
unless people remember it.

She uses as an example the Greek city state,
called the polis,
from which we derive the word political.
She writes,

The . . . function of the polis . . . was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; . . . [it] offered a kind of organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow [humans].

She continues by writing this:

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.

Sometimes, we call the church
a house of memory and hope,
and this is what we mean:
we are people who organize together,
who act and speak together,
who listen to each others’ stories and remember each other.
We are a house of memory –
for we remember,
we have reverence in the face of death
and we honor those who have lived;
we are a house of hope –
for we celebrate new beginnings,
we have reverence in the face of birth
and we honor those who are born.

This is the heart of our faith:
Every night a child is born is a holy night.
Every night a person dies is a holy night.
Every breathe, in and out, is holy.
Every dream, every word.
Miracles abound, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
If we are reverent.

After the reflections,
we’ll sing one of my favorites:
“Wake Now My Senses.”
Wake, we’ll sing,
reach out to the new
honor the beauty and wisdom of time
praise the sublime
This is what we do
when we strive to be reverent
for the beginnings and the ends
and all the moments in between.

So let us go forth with love and hope
wonder and awe,
compassion and courage,
each as our own person,
respecting other persons,
doing the best we can today,
and the best we can tomorrow,
until our days come to an end.

Amen, Blessed Be, Namaste.

Sermon: Sept. 9th, 2007: Reverence I: Riddles and Silence

2007-09-10T16:10:00.000-06:00

I preached this sermon yesterday, Sept. 9th, 2007 at High Plains.

Readings

Job 38:1-11

38:1 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
²‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
³Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
⁴‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
⁵Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
⁶On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
⁷when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings^* shouted for joy?
⁸‘Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?—
⁹when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
¹⁰and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
¹¹and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?

From the Tao Te Ching

Thirty spokes meet at a hollowed-out hub;
the wheel won’t work without its hole.
A vessel is molded from solid clay;
its inner emptiness makes it useful.
To make a room, you have to cut doors and windows;
without openings, a place isn’t livable.
To make use of what is here,
you must make use of what is not.

Message Reverence I: Riddles and Silence Minister

When I lead us in prayer,
I usually say at the beginning,
Spirit of Life and Love.
And so, last week, we had the Q&A service.
Where folks write down questions
and I try to answer.
There are always questions I don’t get to.
Because I run out of time,
or because the question requires a longer answer
than I can give,
or because I don’t know the answer and need to look it up or think about it.
And one of the questions that I didn’t answer was this:
“What do you mean when you say
“Spirit of Life and Love.”

Didn’t get to it last week.

I’m going to try a bit today.
But I probably won’t get there.
So I’ll work on it next week,
and the week after,
and then the week after that.
In fact, today begins a long planned series of five sermons
on reverence.
And the series is really an attempt to answer that question:
what do I mean by the spirit of life and love?
But at the end of it,
I will probably not have succeeded.
Indeed, I would be deeply disappointed in myself
and in you,
if I ever answered this question so well
that it never needed to be asked again.

Who am I to say?
I was not there at the beginning,
when the lines where drawn and the cornerstone laid.
⁷when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings^* shouted for joy.
Who am I to say?

I have always found the book of Job troubling.
Job suffers terrible misfortune:
his children die,
he is covered in boils,
he loses his land and his home.
But he is a just and righteous man,
so he cries out:
“Why has this happened to me, God?”
And God answers.
Well, answers is a strong word.

God says to Job,
“What do you know?
I created everything.
Don’t bother me.”
In the end, though,
God gives Job back his health
and he has many more children
and becomes a rich man.

I find this troubling.
I cannot believe in a God who has the power
to prevent the death of children,
but doesn’t.
In that, I will not, cannot believe.

But then I remember that the book of Job
isn’t a documentary.
It’s not a certified transcript of what
Job and God said,
back in 613 B.C., or whenever
faithfully recorded on digital tape.
God didn’t say,
“Gird up your loins and answer me!”

No, this book is a story.
A riddle.
A mystery.
It is a legend,

told not because it answered theological questions with clarity and style,
no, not that.
It was told because the feelings and the questions,
the doubts and the struggles,
the wonder and the despair,
the compassion and the anger,
are real.
It is a story told not because it is factual
but because it is true.

People struggle with these questions:
“Why is there anything at all?
Why do bad things happen?
What is my place in things?
What is ultimate and real?”

In this legend,
God’s questions reduce Job to silence.
After a long series of boasts by God –
that God has been to bottom of the seas and to the stars,
that God put feathers on the ostrich
and counted the newborn deer,
and so on and so on,
Job says,
“I have nothing to say.”

I always thought that Job was being pretty clever here.
Oh sure, it could mean that Job is admitting that God is right,
Job never should have complained,
he takes it back.
That’s what most people think it means.

Or it could be Job’s way of saying,
“I have nothing to say
because you’ve said nothing.”
I used to compete in debate in High School and College.
And sometimes when we were arguing over something,
we would say about the other team’s claim,
“That’s fascinating but irrelevant.”
Maybe Job is saying to God:
“That’s fascinating but irrelevant.
Interesting about how you made everything, God.
That’s nice.
But you haven’t answered my question.”

But there’s another possibility.
Job could be silent
because the storyteller,
the author of this legend,
wants us, the hearers, to be silent.
To listen.
To know that this legend is a riddle:
The holy is powerful.
There is evil.
This is a riddle.
And being silent for a while,
not jumping to an answer,
might be a good thing.

Job is not just righteous,
he is reverent.
He speaks when speaking is called for.
When there is injustice, he speaks out.
But when it is time to be silent,
he is silent.
He is reverent.

Reverence is my topic for these five weeks:
reverence in the face of birth and death,
reverence for the earth,
reverence for others,
reverence for spirit.

I’ve been thinking about this series
since I read a beautiful little book
titled “reverence” by Paul Woodruff.
Woodruff is a student of the ancient Greeks,
and although I am more of an amateur than he,
I too find the ancient Greeks helpful
in thinking through big questions.
Reverence, Woodruff argues,
is a virtue.
In Aristotle’s understanding,
virtue was a learned discipline.
We learned, if we had good teachers,
to be virtuous.

And being virtuous was not a matter of following rules,
but a matter of doing the right thing,
at the right time,
in the right amount.
Take courage –
what might be courage at one time is rashness at another,
or cowardliness at another.
Virtue is usually in the middle between too extremes.

For reverence, one extreme is obedience.
When we bow down to political power,
to material wealth,
to appearances,
then this is no virtue, it is vice.
The first interpretation of Job’s silence:
that he concedes God’s argument,
this is not reverence.

The other extreme is hubris, excessive pride.
When we have no appreciation of beauty,
when we devalue the lives of others,
when we think we have all the answers,
this is not reverence.

In the middle is genuine reverence:
in the face of mystery, silence.
Letting the riddle that is life,
be the riddle.
The question stands unanswered,
and that’s OK.

Reverence is a virtue under siege.
Woodruff seems to argue that this is a new development,
but I don’t think it is.
I think that reverence has always been under attack.
Those who wield political power
pharaohs and kings and presidents
bureaucrats and paper-pushers everywhere,
they fear genuine reverence.
They want worship, obedience.
Don’t ask questions, just do what I say.
They want nationalism, not patriotism.
How many times in human history
has political power tried to claim religious authority?
More than anyone could ever count.
Reverence demands that we challenge the powers that be,
because the ultimate never resides in such petty hands.

But reverence is also under attack
from cynicism and consumerism,
and always has been,
although they seem to be winning at the moment.
Those who deny the possibility of meaning,
who want us to buy! buy! buy!
they fear reverence,
for if, as I claim, reverence sometimes means silence,
then we might have the courage to say no,
I don’t want that.
We might be OK with the TV turned off.

We find that our center is within us,
and cannot be ordered online.

Reverence moves us not to creeds
(for that is the extreme of obedience)
nor to cynicism and coarseness
(for that is the other)
but, instead, reverence moves us to
metaphor and image,
poetry and song,
a kind of grasping wonder.

Let me give you an example.

Here is too much reverence:

Let us praise nature,
for it reveals God.
Let us praise thought,
for it reveals God.
Let everything we do be for God.

Here is too little reverence.

Trees are firewood.
Thought is hard and annoying.
Let’s just have fun!

Here is reverence:

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear -- both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Those, lines from William Wordsworth,
tell us about reverence.
It speaks in riddle:
what is, after all, a dwelling in the light of setting suns?
A motion and a spirit?
The anchor, the nurse of our heart and soul?
These metaphors are riddles,
treasures to be unlocked by the reverent.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
religion speaks in metaphor.
It has no other tongue.
How do you describe what cannot be described?
How do you name what cannot be named?
What do I mean when I say
“The Spirit of Life and Love”?
I mean, the spirit of life and love.
I could say,
the breath of vitality and affection.
Or I could say,
the power of existence and communion.
Or I could say,
the sacred way.

God, Allah, Nirvana, Tao, Adonai, Elohim,
Grandfather/Grandmother Spirit,
Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Vishnu, Kali,
There names are nothing but metaphors.
They are riddles.
The best metaphor for the holy may well be
Coyote, or maybe Kokipelli,
tricksters, magicians, seducers of maidens,
troublemakers and lovers of life.

When Moses asks the burning bush,
“what’s your name”
the bush says,
“I AM WHAT I AM.”
or, in another translation,
“I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.”
Now, that’s a really good riddle.

This is why I love the Taoists.
The sacred way:
Why, it is the empty space where the spokes of the wheel meet.
It is the window that makes a room livable.
It is empty space in the jar.

The four oldest religious traditions on this planet:
Taoism, three thousand years old,
Judaism, three thousand years old,
Hinduism, four thousand years old,
Animinism, older than memory,
all four of these traditions,
when they speak of the spirit of life and love,
they speak in riddles.
Taoists say it came before,
and cannot be named,
“forced to describe it,”
says Lao-Tzu,
“I can only say, it is great.”

Jews do not speak the name of God aloud.
They spell it out with just the consonants:
Y-H-W-H.
It means, “I will be what I will be.”
Hindus and Animists know that the ultimate
cannot be summed up,
so they have hundreds of names for what is holy,
different characters in the legend.

Are the legends factual?
Not the point.
Are they true?
If we can hear them,
if we can sit still and be present to ourselves
and to others,
then, yeah, they can be true.

Reverence isn’t easy.
It is perhaps the most difficult of the virtues.

The other major virtues get results.
The courageous person will achieve their dreams.
The wise person will be respected.
The temperant person will make good choices.
The just person will have healthy relationships.
But the reverent person?
They will be laughed at
by those who cannot take their life seriously.
They will be persecuted
by powers who want their allegiance,
and not their principles.
The reverent person,
in the face what matters,
cannot give it words,
they avoid easy formulas,
and speak in riddles,
or speak not at all.
Reverence is hard.

But for us who care about truth and integrity,
for those of us who wish to live with wonder,
who wish to live in harmony with the way of things,
and neither in ignorance nor subservience,
for us who care for such things,
then reverence is the path appointed to us.
We will never be perfect at it.
Some days it will come easier than others.
But we try, and keep trying.
We join with others on the journey,
because it is easier – and more fun –
do to this with others.
And we know that the rewards of reverence,
though they may be less concrete,
are more profound and lovely
than all the power, or all the trinkets,
in the world.

So let us set out on this journey
with hope in our hearts
a bounce in our step
a riddle on our mind,
and wonder in our soul.

Amen, Blessed Be, and Namaste.

Sermon: August 19th, 2007: Them that sewed 'em on

2007-09-10T15:58:00.000-06:00

This is the sermon I preached on August 19th at High Plains. The seminary colleague who gave me the title for this sermon was Laura Waters Jackson.

Reading “A Wedding” by Bruce T. Marshall

Message Them that sewed em on

Every year, I become more my father.
I have not yet –
and doubt I ever will –
embrace his politics
(although he is becoming more liberal in his retirement)
but I have his personality.
I’m cheap most of the time –
especially on myself –
but free-spending on meals for friends.
Just like my dad,
nothing makes me as angry as liars, charlatans, and deliberate un-clarity.
I have my father’s taste in beer.
Last time I was home,
I even caught myself enjoying my father’s music,
which was truly terrifying.

But I decided a while ago
that if I was going to be like someone,
my father was a fine choice.
I respect him, his life, his integrity.
I think that realization was the final end of adolescence
and the true beginning of adulthood.

We are using these new re-usable orders of service here –
to save paper, time, and money –
but that means that the sermon title is not printed anywhere.
So I will tell you that this sermon is titled:
“Them that sewed em on.”
I had a colleague in seminary;
She was from the south
and she would often say:
“Ain’t nobody who can push your buttons
like them that sewed em on.”

This sermon is devoted to them that sew ‘em on - -
not just parents,
but siblings and grandparents and the whole tribe
of ancestors and relations
who play such a big role in who we are.

We religious liberals like to talk about how families
come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
We talk about how family is something you can create;
our theology that encourages individualism
and self-determination.
I myself like to quote the definition of family as
a group of people who share the same life chances.
It’s such a nice definition:
so inclusive and devoted to free-will.
There is something to be said for this way of thinking.
We do have power to make some choices about families,
who we align ourselves with.
It is good to include the variety of families,
and not be stuck in some narrow definition.

But the problem with the usual liberal approach to families – much like the problem with liberal theology in general –
is that it does not account for complicated reality,
the fact that fate matters.
We do not choose who will sew our buttons on.
That is not up to us.
We do not choose who sewed on their buttons.
Or theirs before that.
Some things are just given.
We choose how to play our hand,
but we don’t get to pick our cards –
those are dealt to us by history and the universe.
So much of our personality is set before we are even born;
we come into a network of relations,
a patchwork of stories,
a web of meaning,
and although, from our first breath,
we start participating in and thus re-creating
these relations and stories and meanings,
they existed before us and they condition our possibilities;
we are not their master.

This is not to say we cannot go our own way –
we can and often do.
But no matter how much we move into our own world,
we remain connected to these origins, and these histories.
They cannot be so easily waved away.

It’s not true for all of us, of course –
some of you, I know, have your families here –
but many who live in this part of town,
who come to this congregation,
have their families of origin far away.
We do.
In four years, I’ve put eighty-thousand miles on my car.
Forty-thousand of those were to visit family,
in the Pacific Northwest or the Upper Midwest.
In four years since we came here,
we’ve taken two vacations
that were not a trip to see family,
or a minister’s conference.

Now, with a six-month old,
the first grandchild for three of our four parents,
our next non-family vacation is too far away to imagine.
What can you do?

I recognize, of course,
that we have mixed feelings about what is called our
“families of origin.”
Sometimes we enjoy deep and fruitful connections with
our button sewers.
Sometimes we wish we were closer to them,
for the times we our threads come loose
and we feel only they know how to fix it.
Sometimes we feel grateful for the distance we have
or wish we had more –
that in our own space we can flourish in ways we cannot
when we are too close to our beginnings.
For some, when we think of our ancestors
parents, grandparents,
we are thinking of people who have died.

Maybe that was so soon ago
that the grief is palpable,
overwhelming still.
Maybe long ago,
but we still feel the empty place in our soul.

Families of origins are full of life:
They can be sites of love and caring,
a deep and abiding affection for one another.
They can be sites of fear or pain,
the memories of abuse to self and other.
They can be sites of learning and inspiration.
They can be sites of longing, a wish for more,
a grief for what has passed away,
baggage, memories, and identity.
They are always,
whether we like it or not,
sites of meaning.

OK then, so what can we do about it?
How can we live with and in and from
our families,
both our families of origin and the families we build ourselves?
Given the mixed legacies we have been left,
how do we leave good legacies for those who might call us
their family of origin?
We spend more emotional and spiritual energy
on families than almost everything else we do,
so liberal religion ought to have something helpful to say.

I perform a lot of weddings –
not as many since I decided that I would perform them
only for members and friends of the church,
and for my friends.
I’ve sat through many toasts –
some awkward and some moving.

I’ve seen couples who have given the wedding a lot of thought,
and the marriage very little.
And vice versa.
I’ve met a lot of in-laws.
When I meet people’s parents,
I often say to myself,
Oh, I see.
I can so easily imagine being in Bruce Marshall’s shoes –
to see that this teenager will be making this family work.
It is to her that it matters most,
that it needs to be serious.

Being a new dad has made something clear to me,
something that’s been floating on my mind about parenting:
it’s not about me.
it’s not about the parents.
You’ve probably heard that expression –
I raised you, you owe me.
I think this sentiment is a mistake.

I say to parents: it is not about us.
Children are not playthings for adults.
They do not come into the world to care for us.
They may do so,
but it is my hope that any care given to me,
years hence,
by my children or grandchildren,
is offered out of love and not obligation.

This is another way of saying that
history ought to be an inheritance,
not a debt.
Each person has a unique destiny,
a power and spirit inside them,
a mission in the world,
a love in their heart,
and the job of them that sew the buttons on –
if you’ll allow me to keep pushing this metaphor –
the task of the sewers is to create buttons
strong buttons,
to help our children get through windy winter days,
functional buttons,
which can be undone on hot summer days,
to sew a coat of many colors,
not a straightjacket.

And if we find that our families of origin
have sewed us buttons that do not work,
that are too tight,
or too loose,
well, it may be time to take off that cloak,
hang it in the back of the closet,
and pick up another.
Maybe –
this happens more often that you might think –
maybe our partners or friends might let us use one of theirs.

I’m a big fan of the Harry Potter series.
In case you don’t know the basics,
(I suppose it is possible),
Harry is more or less an orphan,
raised by his aunt and uncle.
For Christmas one year he gets from them
a toothpick.
But Harry makes a friend on his first day,
Ron Weasley. Ron has five old brothers,
and one younger sister.
Every member of the family receives a knit-sweater
each Christmas.
With their initial on it.
And that first Christmas, Harry gets one too.
It is his first loving Christmas present.
Over time, in many ways,
Ron’s family becomes Harry’s family too.

This happens.
We can get some new buttons.
The old ones never really leave us.
But the new ones can give us
the freedom to become ourselves,
in ways the old ones could never do.

Whether we add the buttons of another family
to our collection or not,
we are still faced with the task of making the most
of the hand we are dealt,
the family of origin we have.
This is good practice for us.
For we have no power to choose when and where are born,
and this is the first in a long line of things
over which we have no power.

It seems to me that we ought to begin,
as much as we can,
with loving our family members for who they are.

We can spend all our energy trying to get them to change.
God knows, sometimes we do.
But that’s a tree that will bear no fruit.
Loving people for who they are means warts and all,
it means seeing their histories and their contexts –
that a man raised in a certain generation is not likely to become Mr. touchy-feely.
that the parent raised with an alcoholic mother
has done pretty well, considering.
Loving people for who they are –
it is a difficult task.
Sometimes it is more than we can do.
But we can keep working at it.

The other side of that coin is that we need it insist
that our families of origin –
them that sewed em on –
love us for who we are.
That they respect our choices, our faith, our families.

It will be harder to do this,
by the way,
if we can’t love ourselves for who we are –
these tasks, of course, being closely intertwined.
The joke about loving your neighbor as yourself is that
most of us do –
we just don’t love ourselves very much,
so no wonder the neighbor gets it bad.
For families, double that.
We have to love ourselves.
If our families treat us without respect,
we have to say,
this isn’t OK.
And when they do love us for who we are,
when they encourage us to reach for the stars,
we should say, thank you,
and return the favor.

History should be an inheritance,
not a debt.
We have some power over that.
Rifling through the old family files,
we will find both debts and gifts,
we can choose on which to focus.
Some debts may have to be paid,
but others can be written off –
no longer owed.
The gifts, the grace, the stories and the hopes,
they can continue in us.
We can choose to love our sewers,
to love ourselves,
to move forward with gratitude and hope.

This is the good news of liberal religion:
yes, some things are given to us.
We have no choice on that.
But have a chance – a chance to find beauty and wisdom
wherever we find ourselves.

For there is beauty and wisdom everywhere,
if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
We have a chance to stand up for ourselves,

to insist on dignity and integrity,
since all people deserve dignity.
We have a chance to love without hope of reward,
As we are loved without judgment
by what is holy and wondrous.
And we have a chance to begin anew,
as new life is always springing up in us,
and around us.
May love and hope guide our ways,
our families, near and far,
and the world we share.
Amen, blessed be.

Manuscripts and Notes

2007-09-10T15:51:00.000-06:00

You maybe notice that there are a lot weeks missing between June 10th and July 22nd. I was at GA and taking a preaching class at Iliff and visiting my family on June 17th and 24th and July 1. On July 8th and July 15th, though, I preached. But I preached from notes, not from a manuscript. I hope to do this on occasion. When I preach from notes, I gain a lot of engagement with the congregation. The preparation is very different. Instead of thinking about it for a week or more than writing on Friday, when I preach from notes I'm trying to compose it orally a little each day, making the note after I have the thought composed in my mind. I enjoy doing things this way a lot. But I lose something to: the exact phrasing, the careful construction of a sentence, and, of course, the ability to share it with others later. I've found, too, that if I preach from notes every once in a while, my manuscript preaching becomes more engaging too -- I feel more confident to look up, change a word or two on the fly, and so on. So sometimes sermons will be missing from this blog, and that's because there is no manuscript.

At the church, we keep talking about creating pod-casts of the sermons. Not there yet, but when we get there, it won't matter if there was a manuscript or not, either way, you'll be able to hear it.

In faith,
Matthew :)

Sermon: July 22, 2007: Reading the Bible With Universalist Eyes

2007-09-10T15:44:00.000-06:00

I preached this sermon on July 22nd, 2007 at High Plains.

Reading Isaiah 56:1-8 and Luke 7:1-10

Message Reading the Bible with Universalist Eyes
A student minister walks into a hospital room.
The lights are low.
It’s hard to see.
The curtains drawn tight over the windows,
but no matter,
for it is 10 pm up on the 5^th floor.
It’s the surgery wing.
There is one patient in this room.
The student chaplain is on call this night.
The patient has asked the nurse for the chaplain.
The nurse has paged the chaplain.
And so he walks in.

He walks into a darkened hospital room.
“You asked for the chaplain?”
She says, yes.
He sits.

Her words tumble out:
Tomorrow she is having surgery.
First thing in the morning.
It’s not that risky, the doctors tell her.
But it’s surgery.
She’s nervous.
She’s scared.
“Well, it’s OK to be scared.
It’s normal to be scared.”
She’s worried about dying.
“Of course.
It’s OK to be worried about that.”
But the chaplain does not understand.
He’s missing the point.
She’s not scared, she explains,
about her life ending.
She’s terrified –
she starts to cry –
she is frightened to the depths of her soul,
she shakes –
she’s scared of hell.

She thought that she didn’t believe in hell anymore.
She doesn’t really go to church anymore.
But here, late at night in the hospital room,
she’s terrified of hell.
The fires, the torture, the heat –
all those fearful images her teachers and parents gave to her
have risen up and taken over her mind.
She is supposed to sleep before the surgery,
but she cannot rest.

Pastor, she asks, am I going to hell?
Pastor, she asks, what do you believe?

It so happens that the student minister is a Universalist,
so he says,
“You are not going to hell.
You asked what I believe: this is what I believe:

I believe that God is love.
That all people are embraced in love.
No loving parent would send their own child to hell,
and neither would a loving God.”
She, the patient, and he, the chaplain,
talk for a long time.
She talks about those old childhood images,
how they were used to keep her subservient.
He talks about the long history of universalism,
about how some church leaders had tried to stamp it out –
because without fear,
it is harder to keep people slaves to power.
But how the vision of a holy love keeps coming back.
It seems to him that it was enough for her,
simply to hear a minister say,
there is no hell.
She knew in her heart that it was true.
But needed “an expert” to agree with her.

Eventually, she says, “I’m ready to sleep now.
I am less afraid.”
He wishes her well.
Leaves the darkened room.

There are two visions of the holy:
One is tribal, exclusive, and local.
Our God is powerful.
He will help us strike down our enemies.
He will reward us because of our ritual,
ethnic, or political purity.
He will punish the troublemakers,
the doubters, and the strangers
with eternal suffering.
The other vision is more expansive, inclusive, and global.
The God is powerful. – not ours, the.
He (or She) includes all who live with dignity,
or who have faith,
or simply, all. Everyone.
She (or He) is a power of mercy, not vengeance.

It was seven years ago that I had a conversation
with a patient in a darkened hospital room,
much like the story I’ve told you.
Since that time,
I often remember her questions and her fear.
I remember that universalism still matters,
still needs to be preached.
I am reminded of this all the time.
I hear from our middle schoolers or their parents
that on the playgrounds
the gospel of a tribal and vengeful god is alive and well.
The stories told to me
by one of this town’s Rabbis are heartbreaking –
you’d think it was the 16^th century in Europe,
with the kind of violent persecution language being used.
You don’t go to my church,
so you will burn in hell!
This is what people say to one another.

Adults are sometimes more tactful,
but haven’t we experienced this message too –
even in our own families?
I’ve heard stories of surprise – even secret –
infant baptisms
by grandparents out to keep children from some hell.
Religion used as a bludgeon, a tool of fear.

I’ve also heard this expression:
maybe you’ve heard something like it:
“I don’t want to believe in hell,
but the bible says its true.”
These folks say things like this:
they say,
“Hell is a reality.
The Bible talked about it a lot.
The Scripture says there is only one guaranteed way to avoid hell,
which is to take Jesus into your heart.”

The evangelical who said those words also said this:
“Read your own bible.
But of course there is always a scholar somewhere
that says the bible doesn’t mean what it says.
That’s why I encourage people, ‘read the text.’”
The evangelical leader who said those things:
that was Ted Haggard.

It’s more than a little unfair of me, actually,
to pick on the Rev. Haggard.
To dismiss his arguments about the bible by reference to his personal hypocrisy.
The truth is, he is absolutely right.
If you read the bible,
you will find passage after passage about hell.The prophets of Israel, Paul, and even Jesus himself are all quoted as believing in hell.

I will not be the scholar who says,
oh, that’s not what they meant.
It is what they meant.
We all sometimes succumb to the vision of a tribal and vengeful God.
None are immune.

However,
if you read the bible,
you’ll also find passages like the ones that were our readings for today.
The prophet Isaiah – my favorite book in the Hebrew Bible –
Isaiah has good news for his people.
After generations of oppression by the Syrians and the Babylonians,
the Persian king has overthrown the oppressors
and allowed the Jews to return to their home.

And how is the community instructed to behave?
Who is included?
The prophet says,
“maintain justice, do what is right.”
The foreigner is included.
The eunuch is included.
They are given an everlasting monument,
brought to the holy mountain.
Why?
Because,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord God,
who gathers the outcasts . . .”

And you find passages like Luke 7.
A centurion, an agent of the empire,
asks for help, the healing of his servant.
Remember that this story is written down
a generation after Jesus has died.

Some people in the new Christian community are saying,
only the Jewish people get to be saved.
But the meaning of this story is clear:
Even a centurion – if he lives well and has faith –
a centurion is included.

Well then, how shall we decide?
Shall we count up the passages of the vengeful God,
and count up the passages of the inclusive God,
and see who has more?
That seems pretty childish to me.
Shall we explain away the hurtful passages as allegory, outdated, or just cultural?
We could.
That’s the usual liberal approach.
But I’m not so sure that would be wise.
Sometimes religion is hurtful.
Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Shall we just ignore the bible altogether?

That’s the approach some Unitarian Universalist congregations seem to take.
Just don’t talk about it.
But in this book we find the struggles, hopes, dreams, fears, loves of people
working to understand themselves and the holy.
As we work to understand ourselves and the holy,
maybe something about their lives would be helpful to us.

So how shall we decide?
Shall we read the bible with Universalist eyes,
with inclusive, justice-centered, global sensibility?
Or shall we read it with tribal, narrow, exclusive eyes?

This isn’t really a question about how we read this book.
It’s a question about how we live our life.
It’s a question about the state of our souls.

Sometimes I’m in a grumpy mood.
I’m mad about something –
probably another driver on the freeway –
and I close up.
When I’m in this kind of mood,
I don’t listen very well to others.
I don’t see what’s around me.
My breathing is more shallow.
You ever get like this?
We all do.

I was in a grumpy mood like this Friday afternoon.
I was mad and sad all at once.
Joe and I were ready to go knock heads over at the planning department.

Trouble was, I was trying to write a sermon about universalism,about how all are included in the holy,
about how we should reach out to one another.

In that grumpy mood,
I re-read these passages from Isaiah and Luke –
I noticed, not the inclusive vision that I had seen when I picked them out a month ago,
but instead,
I saw Isaiah saying only the converts were welcome,
I saw Jesus healing the master’s slave
instead of condemning slavery itself.
I was seeing the tribal god in these words.

I wandered out of my office and around the building.
Joe said to me, “you look down.”
I concurred.
“Go home. Play with your kid. Don’t worry about it.”
That was wise spiritual advice.

I went home and played with Rosie.
Spent a bit of time outdoors.
Played bridge with some church folks,
bid and made a five club contract, which we really fun.
Spent Saturday morning reading the first 150 pages of the new Harry Potter book.
And came back to the sermon.

Reading the passage again – what did I see?
“I will make them joyful in my house of prayer.”
“They found the sick man returned to good health.”

It is not what it in the text that determines the meaning.
It is what is in us.

When we look up into the stars,
or at the row of mountains out these windows,
do we feel small and week and pointless?
Like nothing matters?

Or do we feel awe and mystery and part of a whole so march larger than us,
but to which we still belong?
It isn’t the stars or mountains that do that.
It’s what is in us.

When we see the joy of another
do we feel shared joy, inspiration for our own life?
or do we feel resentment, jealousy, scorn?
Those responses are our responses.

When we engage in worship with others,
when we read poetry and scripture,
see a movie or sit down for a meal,
are we open to be surprised, inspired, moved?
or have we already decided we aren’t interested.
“Move along folks, nothing to see here.”

Sometimes we tell ourselves that,
but it isn’t true.
There is always something magical and wonderful
happening right now right here
if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

We have a choice about how we approach the world,
the bible included,
we can enter with fear, hate, narrowness, exclusivity.
Or we can enter with hope, love, generosity, and inclusively.
It’s seems so obvious I hardly need to say it;
but the obvious things are the ones we usually miss –
it feels better to choose hope and love,
generosity and inclusion.
It feels better.
Isn’t that enough reason to do so?
It makes our days better when we read with Universalist eyes.

It makes it more likely for us to do what is right and just,
because it is right and just,
and not because of our fear of punishment or hope of reward.
It helps us stay open to wonder.
We are more likely to laugh out loud.

Unitarian Universalism
doesn’t claim to have hard and fast answers
to life’s persistent questions.
We have no creed for you to recite,
and no bible commentaries
that tell us all what this old book means.
We don’t insist that any book,
no matter how despised or venerated it might by others,
is necessary for salvation or required for participation.
Instead, we have one simple rule:
a rule which can be applied to all situations.

It is this:
Do what makes you, and others, more loving, compassionate, and wise.
Do not do what makes you, and others, less loving, compassionate, and wise.
That’s it.

When it comes to reading sacred texts,
or staring at nighttime skies or purple mountaintops,
or listening to the words of another,
try your very best to see and hear
with Universalist eyes and ears.

We began this morning by singing Amazing Grace.
Grace has set me free.
Grace, my fears relieved.

It’s my deepest belief that grace –
openness and love and beauty –
grace is a gift of the universe itself,
ever present to us all,
and that if we open our hearts and our minds to the expansive global vision
it will come rushing in.

I say to you: there is no hell.
Oh, you can believe in one if you like.
You’ll find plenty of believes in every religion,
saying, yes, there is a hell.
And neither side will ever prove their case,
not with science or with scripture or with logic.
But my proof,
my proof that there is no hell is a practical proof.
When we believe that all loved by the holy,
no matter what,
then we can become more loved and more loving ourselves.
That is all the proof I need.

There’s no great secret here.
We know what makes us more loving and kind.
Family and friends.
Natural beauty.
Laughter and silence.
Creativity.
In short, the boundless power of love itself.
May we spend our days and our nights
making a home for that love
in our souls.
Amen. Blessed be.

Sermon: June 10th, 2007: But I Meant Well

2007-09-10T15:39:00.000-06:00

This was the sermon I preached back on June 1oth at High Plains.

Readings:
Check Up by Gordon B. McKeeman

From the Tao Te Ching (#58)

Message But I Meant Well

When we look back at history –
Hell, when we read the paper –
sometimes we wonder:
how could that have happened?
How could people do such evil?
How could others stand by why such evil takes place?
We are especially perplexed by the occurrence of evil
when we know that the folks involved had what we call
“good intentions.”

There are too many examples to count
of people who wanted to liberate the poor
free the oppressed
lead their people to progress
and wound up dictators, tyrants, bullies.
The parent who just wants to love
their intentions are good
but they stunt the child’s growth,
limit their horizons.

The C.E.O. who wants to protect her company
protect her employees
so tells a little lie on a disclosure form.
The justice advocate who knows that with more access
he can get more done for his cause
so sells out a little bit each day.
The cop who plants evidence on someone she knows is guilty.

All these people mean well.
They have good intentions.
What went wrong?
How can we stop it from happening to us?

This is the topic that Mark Sheehan picked.
He won the right to do so at the church auction.
Why do good people do bad things?
(note, please, this is a very different question than
“why do bad things happen to good people?”
which is a completely different sermon.)

How good people do bad is a problem for religious liberals.
Especially for Unitarian Universalists.
No religious tradition has cast its lot so much with the anthropological theory
that people are inherently good as we have.
Other traditions have answers to this question.
Why do people do bad?
If you are an orthodox Christian,
it’s because of original sin,
the fallen nature of the world.
If you are an orthodox Buddhist,
it’s because people are attached to things which are not real,
this attachment keeps us walking the wheel of samara.
One might believe that bad things happen because
someone in the tribe has angered the gods,
or because a person has been possessed by an outside force,
some spirit of malevolence.
The answer for Unitarian Universalists,
for all religious liberals,
is less clear.
We believe in a loving power,
we reject notions like original sin, devils, and the like.

We’re intrigued by the Buddhist answer,
but we mostly believe creation is good,
so there is a bit of a disconnect there.

Why is there evil?
This is a central religious question.
I know some of you have heard of the “Belief-O-Matic.”
The Belief-O-Matic is a series of questions –
there are 20 –
about beliefs about God, creation, social values, and evil.
You answers the questions
and the test tells you what religion your beliefs come closest too.
Question Five is “Why is there terrible wrongdoing in the world?”
You can choose from these options:
Because humans inherited sinfulness from Adam and Eve.
Because we have free will
and sometimes we desire the wrong things.
Because we are ignorant of our true nature as spirit.
Because we don’t listen to the voice of God within us.
Because of egoism, attachment, and greed.
Because of non-supernatural causes, human nature, criminology, sociology, etc.
None of the above.

If you select “no supernatural reasons” you will score higher as a Unitarian Universalist.
After answers all the questions,
I score 100% as a Unitarian Universalist.
95% for liberal Quakers.
On down the list.
I have only a 7% match with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

For the survey, I did select “no supernatural reasons”
because you can only choose one,
and that’s the one I feel most, I guess.
But another question makes a similar query
but allows you to select “all that apply”
and here,
I marked “non-supernatural reasons” and
because of our egotism, greed, and attachment,
and because of our disharmony with the ultimate.

But what I really want is an essay question.
I know, what kind of nerd wants an essay question
instead of an easy multiple choice?
This kind of nerd does.
Mark’s choice of this topic is thusly fortuitous.
It’s the essay question I wanted.

Why do good people do bad things?
How do good intentions go wrong?
How can we make sure it doesn’t happen to us?
Or, at least, doesn’t happen too often?

I think people who are good –
which are all people, deep down –
I think we do bad when we come to believe a couple of fallacies
and I think we can avoid doing bad when we “unlearn”
these pernicious untruths,
and then when we move from unlearning to compassion and grace.

The first fallacy we must unlearn is the notion
that good and bad are absolute opposites.

The tao te ching says:
“Good rests on bad.
Bad hides within good.
Who knows where the turning point is?”
The Unitarian Universalist poet and songwriter Ric Masten,
in the words of our second song,
writes “Morning star comes out at night,
without the dark there is no light,
if nothing’s wrong, then nothing’s right.”
But we have learned that good and bad are very different.
We have this notion – it comes from St. Augustine, actually –
We believe it is possible to live in a world that is only good.
Augustine thought that evil was just the absence of good,
that if we were careful enough we could avoid evil,
we could build “The City of God.”
This led him to condemn heretics who would cause disharmony
in the new religion,
and to support the execution
of anyone who believed differently than he did.
If we kill all the bad people, then there will be only good –
this is how good people do bad things.

It may be the case that good and bad are clearly different.
But it’s awfully arrogant of us to think we know what’s what.
Now,
there are some things where I feel 99% percent sure that I’m right.
But that 1% is still out there.
99% is principle.
100% is ideology.
Principle causes good people to hold fast to truth and justice.
It causes them – us – to speak out and get involved.
Ideology causes good people to value their vision of a new world
more than the people they share that world with.
People of principle say,
I have searched my conscience.
This is what I believe is right.
I think this is what God asks of us.
People of ideology say,
I am making God’s will come true.
Those two little words:
I think
They are so important.
They indicate, I have thought about this.
This is not reflex.
They indicate, I might be wrong.
People of principle acknowledge
that they don’t always know there the turning point is.

This is the first fallacy we must let go of.
The fallacy of perfect knowledge of good and evil.
We don’t have it.

The second fallacy we must let go of
is the fallacy of intentionality.
We have taught ourselves that what matters most
is what we intend.
If our heart is pure, we say,
then whatever the consequences might be are not that important.
I hear this fallacy all the time.
I have heard it from my own lips.
Actions have consequences.
They are not always the consequences that we anticipate.
“If you give a mouse a cookie” presents a reasonably manageable set of unforeseen consequences.
And there is a nice circularity
whereby we return to the beginning at the end.
But that’s not always the way it goes.

Have you ever intended to do good,
but bad consequences came of it?
God knows that’s happened to me,
more times than I can count.
I meant to be helpful,
but I wasn’t.
I meant to bring people together,
but instead they fought with each other.
I meant to provide helpful information,
but I wound up making the decisions for others.
I meant to set healthy boundaries,
but people felt unloved or unheard.
Anything like this ever happened to you?
Go ahead, raise your hand if you meant for one thing,
but something else happened that was less good.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
At least we’re not alone.

Here’s my point:
the fact that we meant well,
the fact that our heart was good,
the fact that we intended to make the world a better place,
that’s a good thing.
But it does not absolve us.
Good intentions do not make us innocent.
It does not release us from accountably for the consequences of our actions.
It does not release us from the responsible to carefully consider
as many of the possible consequences of an action we can think of
before we act.
What dictator won’t claim that their actions
are in the best interest of their people?
The slave owners in the American south argued
with a straight face
that slavery was best for the slaves.
Much better than the wilds of Africa.
Any wrongdoer is quick to claim,
“I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.”

What we meant matters a little,
But it is not everything.
It is better to mean good than to mean evil,
but it is best to be humble,
to be suspicious of power – ours and others –
to be responsible and accountable to others.

How do good people do evil?
They do it when they are sure they are great.

Great enough to know the real difference between good and evil.
100%.
Great enough to think that they know exactly
the consequences of their actions.
When people think this way,
the slide into domination, destruction,
alienation, and apocalyptic thinking is easy.

So how do we keep ourselves from this road?
“Therefore the sage does what is right
without acting righteous,
points without piercing,
straightens without straining,
enlightens without dazzling.”

You know the saying that a lot more good can come
when we don’t care who gets the credit.
Likewise,
a lot less evil is likely
when we don’t care who gets the credit.
When we do our work quietly and step back,
to quote another part of the Tao Te Ching.
A lot more good, and a lot less evil,
comes when we know that we’re not perfect
AND we remember that others are not perfect either.
When we do not take the imperfections of another
as a personal affront or insult.
When we stay at the table through the hard times.

I disagree with the Buddhists about the nature of creation,
but I agree with them that too much attachment,
too much desire – especially for the wrong things –
causes us to do great evil to one another,
even thought that’s not what we intended.

The sage – whatever their religion,
for there are sages in every tradition,
the sage knows that to live in harmony with the Tao,
with the infinite spirit of life,
is to admit we know not the turning point,
to admit we know not how things will turn out,
and give those admissions,
to live well and peacefully.

The sage knows also the importance of constant reflection.
Gordon McKeeman, in our other reading,
asks us to think about a regular religious check-up
to go along with our doctor’s appointments
and visits to the mechanic.
We need to look into our souls and see how we are.
And we need others to do this with us.
This is why I go to minister’s retreats and conferences without fail.
This is why go most months to a spiritual director.
She asks me, “how is it with your spirit?”
That is my question for each of you:
“how is it with your spirit?”
Are you awed, hopeful, in grief, in mystery, in transition?

I believe that when people are engaged in real spiritual reflection,
they will catch themselves at 99 and not 100%,
they will do right without righteousness.
At least, that is my own experience.

It is through check-ups like this
that we can unlearn the fallacies of perfect knowledge
and good intent.
We can put aside these falsehoods and embrace real life,
in all it’s complicated ambiguity.
We can turn aside from judgment, and turn to mercy.
We can let go of petty slights and old grudges.
And start anew in love.
Not that’s easy.
It’s hard.
Remember that it is hard is part of the way we ensure
that we keep from doing wrong.
But if we do the hard work, then it is imaginable that
we can remember the essential truth that makes peace possible:
other hearts in other lands are beating too.
In such a spirit of compassion, empathy, and striving for understanding, let us live.
Amen, blessed be.

Sermon: June 3rd, 2007: Mutual Love

2007-09-10T15:32:00.000-06:00

I preached this sermon back on June 3rd, 2007. It was flower communion Sunday. Afterward, talking with people, I don't know that I got across the message I was trying to send. The sermon was not supposed to be a downer, although the facts are sad. It was supposed to say, liberal religion is risky, and some have died for it, so let us take it seriously, and maybe we will see the wonder they gave their lives for. Or something like that, anyway.

Readings

“Acquitted of Universalism” by Robert Walsh

Hebrews 13:1-3 and 5-7

Let mutual love continue. 2 Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. 3 Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. …5 Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, "I will never leave you or forsake you." 6 So we can say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?" 7 Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.

Message Mutual Love

The joke about Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews is this:
it isn’t by Paul
it isn’t a letter
and it isn’t to the Hebrews.
We don’t know the author, but the style is not Paul’s.
It’s probably a transcribed sermon,
not a letter.
It’s not to a Jewish community;
it is written instead to a group of Christians
who have come to believe
that they must become Jews to be good Christians.
This was one of the biggest debates in the early Church –
Jesus was Jewish, after all,
and many of the new Christians believed they must also be Jews –
must be circumcised, must follow the dietary laws, and so on –
if they were to be followers of Jesus.
Paul argues this is not true,
and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews,
whoever he is, agrees.

Most of the letter is about how Jesus is a priest
but not in the line of succession,
and about the meaning of time and sacrifice.
But the parts that interest me for today
are some of the well known lines from this letter.
I read from chapter 13 of the New Revised Standard Version,
but this is one that sounds better in the King James:
[2] Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
You might also recognize these lines.
From chapter 11:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.
And from chapter 12:
Therefore,
since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,
let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,
and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.

This so-called letter, this address, makes an argument.
It’s one that is important to me,
and has become more important to me in recent months and years.

The argument goes like this:
This new religion is a new covenant.
It isn’t like the old covenant,
the one God made with Abraham.
This new covenant is one of faith –
things unseen, the assurance of things hoped for –
without faith, the author argues,
there can be no covenant.
Without hope, why make the hard work of community?
Without hope, why resist the roman empire,
which will probably kill you.
Without hope, why work for peace in your own life
or in the world?
Then the author speaks of the hero’s of faith –
Abel and Abraham, Noah and Sarah,
Isaac and Moses,
and others,
the new Christian martyrs, who gave their lives for this new covenant.
These are the “great cloud of witnesses”
whose example is supposed to inspire the hearer
to lay aside every weight and sin,
to run with perseverance.

And how is this done?
Through the covenant.
And what does the covenant ask of believers?
To let mutual love continue.
To be hospitable to strangers.
To remember those in prison,
those who are tortured.
To turn aside from the love of money.
To be unafraid.

This is the argument
of “Paul’s Letter to the Hebrew’s”
Not by Paul, not a letter, not the Hebrews.

***

I too, have received a letter.
Which I am supposed to share with you.
Let’s call it:
“Miguel, Francis, Norbert, and James’s Letter to the Achievers.”
Of course, it’s not by Miguel, Francis, Norbert, and James,
it’s by me.
And it’s not a letter, it is a sermon.
And it’s not to a group of achievers
as much as it is to people who sometimes think
as we all do
that we must be good enough, smart enough, successful enough
to earn the love of one another and the holy.
We sometimes think we must be achievers
before we can be Unitarian Universalists;
But we have a new covenant.

* * *

Here then, is the so-called letter.

We, Miguel, Francis, Norbert, and James,
your brothers in faith,
address you this day of flower communion.
Since one of us – Norbert – came up with the flower communion,
we thought it appropriate.
This flower communion,
the bringing of gifts to represent community,
it is no small thing.
It’s not just sweetness and light and summertime.
It is about the new covenant that is among you.
It is about how each of you is sacred and different and wonderful
and that your gifts and your presence is valued
by this community and by the God known by many names.

You have heard some say that you must be achievers
in order to be part of the covenant.
You have heard the voices telling you –
and perhaps it is your own voice –
telling you that you must do this or that.
They say, you must be secure and safe.

None of us was secure.
They say, you must win favor with power.
Francis, he had power for a time.
He was the court-preacher to the King!
The only Unitarian king in history.
But King John Sigismund of Transalvania
was a frail young man,
and died from his injuries after his hunting wagon overturned.
His replacement was a Catholic.
Francis could have changed his preaching to fit the new power.
He know how sweet privilege tastes,
the finery of the royal court,
having what you want.
But Francis did not hold fast to power.
He held fast to freedom.
He kept his faith, and he kept the covenant he had made with
the one God and with the new people –
the first people to call themselves,
Unitarians.

Francis preached:
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
God is One. Egy Az Isten, in Hungarian,
God is One, so creeds and doctrines matter less
than the quality of our community,
the integrity of our lives,
the strength of our covenant.
The new king disagreed.
The empire in Vienna worried these heretics of one God
would come back to power and align with the Muslim power,
the Ottoman empire,
who also believed, “God is One.”
So Francis David was thrown in prison,
a damp hovel in the mountains.
Sick, underfed,
he died there on the 15^th of November, fifteen seventy-nine.
He was sixty-nine.
He held fast to his faith.
He worshiped God, not Jesus,
and not the empire or the king,
and for this he lost his life.

You have heard some say that you must be achievers
in order to be part of the covenant.
You have heard the voices telling you –
and perhaps it is your own voice –
telling you that you must do this or that.
They say, only the smart ones
get to be part of the covenant.
They say, if you can’t impress people with your wit
and your cleverness,
if you can’t quote the wise scholars then you don’t really matter.
Unitarians are susceptible to these voices.
We’re well educated and we think that matters.
All four of us were well educated too.
But it mattered very little in the end.
In Norbert’s case, for example –
raised in the Czech republic,
a reasonably well-educated Baptist minister,
he started to question the doctrines of the faith.
Seeking more knowledge, he came to the United States.
There, he found his way to the Unitarian church,
he found his way to a religious home.

He could have stayed in the United States.
He had job offers to preach here.
But he went home to Prague and started a Unitarian Church.
He had a very impressive ministry.
He was an excellent preacher.
Thousands came to hear him each Sunday.
It was the largest Unitarian church in the world.
He started a ritual where people would bring flowers to church
one Sunday,
to represent their dignity and their gifts,
and all the flowers together
would show the beauty of community in diversity,
and then people would leave with a different flower,
to show how we are all connected.
When the National Socialist party came to power, though,
Norbert didn’t change his message.
He preached, “We need not think alike to love alike.”
He preached, everyone has dignity.
He preached about freedom and community.
These were not acceptable messages.

Norbert was arrested and sent to Dachau.
Where he ministered to the other inmates,
communists, Jews, dissidents, gypsies,
he didn’t care.
He preached, “you need not think alike to love alike.”
He preached, “you are all beautiful.”
The prisoners who survived testified to his grace and love,
to the way he refused to surrender his humanity
or to let them surrender theirs.
Norbert Capek was murdered by poison gas on October 12^th, 1942.
He was seventy-two.
He held fast to his faith.
He held fast to the covenant.
He respected, not wit, not Nazi power, not status,
but the human dignity of all.
And for this, he lost his life.

You have heard some say that you must be achievers
in order to be part of the covenant.
You have heard the voices telling you –
and perhaps it is your own voice –
telling you that you must do this or that.

They say, you must be wealthy to be part of the covenant.
You must have a good job,
a comfortable life.
If you do these things, then you’ll be respected.
If you are wealthy, it is a sign that you are the elect,
they say.
And even if we know in our hearts this is not true,
there is a part of us that believes it is.
Part of us that believes that that wad of cash,
or, more likely, that nice house, new car, fancy toy,
will make us happy.
Miguel had a great job.
He was a well-respected physician.
Miguel who discovered that blood circulates through the body.
It doesn’t hold still, but it moves,
giving us life.
Most people would be content with this.
But Miguel was troubled.
He was troubled by the violence in his homeland of Spain,
between Christians and Jews and Muslims.

He searched the bible for evidence of the trinity,
so he could convince the Jews and the Muslims to convert.
But finding none, he instead tried to convince the Christians
that God is One.
He wrote a book – on the errors of the trinity.
He sent the book to Jean Calvin in Geneva,
thinking, here is a man of reason
who has already thrown off the shackles of tradition,
he will see the wisdom of what I have to say.
Calvin did not see such wisdom.
Miguel, traveling through Geneva on his way to Italy –
oh, why not another route! –
was arrested and tried for heresy.
He argued, cannot we live in peace as followers of God
even if we have different ideas about Jesus?
Can’t we love alike even though we don’t think alike?
He was denied clemency –
clemency would have meant decapitation –
and was burned at the stake.
Burned with “green wood” meaning the wood was wet,
for this would prolong his suffering,
and be an example to other heretics.

Miguel Serveto, also know as Michael Servetus,
was murdered in this way on October 27^th, 1553.
He was forty-two.
He last words were,
“Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me.”
Even in this agony,
he did not recant.
It was God who was eternal, not Jesus.
He held fast to his faith.
He held fast to the covenant with truth
he had made.
The violence of his death,
and his steadfastness in the face of torture,
inspired the first movements for religious tolerance in Europe.
His writings inspired Francis.
For his commitment to truth,
he lost his life.

You have heard some say that you must be achievers
in order to be part of the covenant.
You have heard the voices telling you –
and perhaps it is your own voice –
telling you that you must do this or that.
They say, you must be talented.
You must be efficient in your work.
Your institutions must be well run.
Policy must be followed.
The voices tell us to bow before the god of competence.
James was a decent minister.
He could have led a parish,
and done so well.
But his call was different.
He felt the urge to work with the poor.
To make their lives better.
To heal their spirit and help them organize themselves.
He worked with homeless people in Boston.
He didn’t care their creed or their color.
He lived out, “you need not think alike to love alike.”
He lived out his conviction that all people have dignity
and deserve to be treated with respect.

He went down from Boston to Selma, Alabama,
to help register blacks to vote.
Leaving a restaurant with two other ministers,
a gang of white supremacists,
who had been following these interlopers,
hit James from behind with clubs.
They beat him to a bloody pulp.
Until he died.
James Reeb was murdered on March 11^th, 1963.
He was thirty-eight.
He held fast to his faith.
He held fast to the covenant.
He worshiped not talent, not competence,
not white power or the status quo, either.
He worshiped love and justice,
and for this, he lost his life.

These are not the only Unitarian Universalist martyrs.

There’s John Biddle,
the English school teacher who spent half his life in prison,
and died there, because of his Unitarian beliefs,
and Viola Liuzzo, the 39-year-old mother of five who was murdered by white supremacists after her participation in the protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and others.
They are the great cloud of witnesses.
What can they do to you?
asks the author of Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews.
Oh, they can do plenty.
They can put you in prison,
burn you to ashes, turn on the poison gas,
beat you to death.
What can they do to you?
Nothing.
For if you hold fast to faith in things unseen,
if you hold fast to the covenant,
then you will keep your spirit, your integrity.
Only you can surrender your humanity.

Whenever you think things are tough,
whenever you think that you’re not powerful enough,
not smart enough,
not wealthy enough,
not talented enough,
to be welcomed into the covenant,
Whenever you think that living your values is too hard –
and it does sometimes feel that way, doesn’t it –
remember us:
Miguel, Francis, Norbert, James.
Have faith.

Faith in things unseen.
Community, Love, Welcome,
these are not as visible as power and wealth, talent and smarts.
They don’t come overnight, either,
so we have to hope for them.
Integrity and Wholeness is unseen.
Only you know in your heart
whether you are doing what you must
to honor the spirit of life, your conscience,
the beauty of creation.

This is the “letter” I received
from Miguel, Francis, Norbert, and James.
A letter to the achievers.

None of these men were acquitted of their Universalism,
the faith in the dignity of all and the oneness of the holy.
They lost their lives for love, for truth, for freedom, for justice.
I’ve been thinking about these men recently.
I always think of Norbert at this time of year,
for flower communion,
since it was his idea.
And thinking of him makes me think of the others.
When I think, ministry is hard –
I think of these four, and remember that things could be harder.
When I think, I must be smart enough, talented enough,
I think of these four, and remember that love and integrity
matters more than skill or success.

This is a new covenant.
In it, we need not think alike to love alike.
That’s an easy thing to say,
but it’s a hard thing to live.
It got these four killed.
We can love each other, even when we disagree about this or that.
We can love each other, even when we believe differently.
We can love each other, even when we look or talk
differently from one another.
We can, but it is hard work.

When you take a flower then,
when you take a flower home,
make it not just a sign of beauty, summertime, and love.
Make it a sign to you of keeping the faith.
Make it a sign that you will give more value
to the hospitality of strangers and to mutual love,
that to disputes about politics, procedure, or doctrines.
Make your flower an affirmation
of the continuing covenant,
the radical and dangerous proposition
that we need not think alike to love alike.
May your flower be a reminder of the ministry that is in you,
the purpose of your life and the hope of things unseen.
May it bloom forever in your heart.

Amen. Blessed Be.

Sermon: May 20th, 2007: Limited and Unlimited

2007-05-21T07:42:00.000-06:00

I preached this on May 20th at High Plains.

Readings

From All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
“The sky is not rationed” by Hafiz

Message Limited and Limitless

Maybe it is because I turned thirty a couple of months back.

Maybe it is because when they say of infants – it goes so fast! –
they are not kidding.

Maybe it is because the renovations to our church home
are taking longer than I thought –
In all my naiveté –
then they would.

Maybe it is because I find myself much more of a political realist and less of an idealist
than I once was.

For whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking about limits recently.
About finitude.
I’ve been thinking about the religious truth
that we are limited.
We are not gods.

We cannot by our will alone
make the world conform to our desires.
We cannot stop the march of time.
We cannot by wishing make the dead rise,
or make the world whole in one grand gesture.
We are limited.
This is the way it is.
Our language is so new it is still trying to invent.
Still shaping its first intelligible sound.
It is important to recognize the limits of our power –
just because we have jumper cables
doesn’t mean we know how to use them
without sending a blue streak of light through the air
and making hairs stand on end.
Fish are Fish,
and humans are humans.
Fish cannot go around on land and see how things are.
That’s their limit.
We have limits too.
That’s just the way it is.

Maybe it is because the other day,
taking a right onto a westbound street,
I saw the very top of the peak,
and the base of the mountains,
but the middle part was covered in a beautiful fog of cloud.
It made the mountains look old and majestic.
It reminded me of all that is hidden to our eyes.

Maybe it is because my daughter has the same eye color I do –
blue with gray and orange –
which is the same as my mom, and her mom, and her mom.

Maybe it is because a stanza from William Wordsworth
sticks in my mind:
“And I have felt a presence
that disturbs me with elevated thoughts;
A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
a motion and a spirit, that impels
all thinking things, all objects of thought,
and rolls through all things.”

Maybe it is because I see among you gathered here each week
beautiful people who long for connection and wholeness
who reach out and make new friends.

Maybe it is because
“the lone, wild bird in lofty flight is still with thee,
nor leaves thy sight.”
I know some of you don’t like this song.
You’ve said, Matthew, why do you make us sing that!
But once I heard a version of this so beautiful
that it brought tears to my eyes,
and I still hear those voices signing:
And I am thine! I rest in thee. Great spirit come and rest in me.

For whatever reason,
I have been thinking a lot about limitlessness recently.
About infinitude.
I’ve been thinking about the religious truth
that we are infinite, unlimited.
We are connected and part of the holy mystery
part of the cosmos itself
beyond time and space.

Miracles and wonder are everywhere
And we are one.
This is the way it is.
For a while, we say,
Look dear – space is no longer being rationed.
Our minds cradle light.
We are complete.
We can learn to use jumper cables,
connect ourselves to the Grand Coulee Dam,
wire ourselves to Almighty God.
Fish are fish,
and humans are humans,
but look at the beauty we can imagine,
and the beauty right here –
where sunrays filter down and make luminescence and color.
We are part of the limitless whole –
that’s just how it is.

This, of course, is the great paradox of religion.

This is what the Buddha is talking about when he says –
all is dukkha – suffering –
but you can become an enlightened being –
indeed, you can become a bodhisattva,
one who helps others move towards enlightenment.
This is what the author of Ecclesiastes is talking about
when he writes:
Vanity of vanities, All is vanity.
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
For everything there is a season.
This is the paradox hinted at when Jesus preaches:
blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
It is what he means when he says
the kingdom of god is like a mustard seed– the smallest of seeds.
It is what the poet Marge Piercy means when she says that
“Connections are made slowly,
sometimes they grown underground . . .
more than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.”

We are finite.
No doubt about it.
We come into the world at a particular time,
and we live in a particular time,
and then we leave the world in our own particular time.
We are frail.
We get sick.
Our horizons are limited.
We cannot have everything we want.
We cannot even get everything we need.
There is injustice and suffering –
and sometimes, even though we don’t want to be,
we are the cause of such evil.
Or a bystander to it, which isn’t a lot better.
We are finite.
We make mistakes.
Sometimes, we make a lot of them.
We are not perfect people, perfect husbands or wives,
parents, siblings, children.
We are not perfect citizens or workers or stewards of the earth.
We goof.
We screw up.
We are limited.

But that’s not the whole story.
For ten thousand years or more,
religious people have been saying this:
our finitude is not the end of the story.
Shamans, priests, preachers, and poets
we’ve been saying – this ain’t it.
There’s more.
We need the right rituals, some say.
The right words or the right thoughts, others say.
Others say, all we need is to open our eyes and see.
The holy and the magical is right there –
in mountains and eyes and poems and communities and songs.

This is what faith means.
At least, this is what it means to us religious liberals.
It does not mean acceptance of a creed,
a hierarchy, or any such thing.
No, to us, faith is a wager
that there is something beyond our finitude.
That although we are limited we are also unlimited.

Oh, yes, when we connect to that infinite,
the only senses that remain blush and stumble
if they try to speak with our language so new.
Oh, yes, we believe that we must be wary –
like jumper cables in the hands of fools
is too much religious certainty.
Maybe we aren’t sure.
But we live our lives – or, at least, we try to live our lives
in awareness and gratitude of the motion and the spirit that rolls through all things.

It’s true – some say that wonder is only an illusion.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see.

What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?
Someday we'll find it,
The lovers, the dreamers . . .

I’m giving away, here,
that I’ve been listening to a lot of those children’s CD’s.

We have a ton of them, given as gifts,
and I think every one has a version of the rainbow connection.
So I’m hope you’ll indulge me with one more verse:
(at least I’m not singing it).

Have you been half asleep? And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name.
... Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same
I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm s'posed to be...
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

This is the great paradox.
We are stargazers –
finite creatures looking at the remnants of fires
we’ll never reach,
and at the same time,
at the exact same time that we are staring at the stars and pondering our insignificance,
we must also remember this:
we are stardust.
That is what we are made of.
Us and that farthest star are products of the same event.
We are made of the same moment.
This is the great paradox.

Religion, it seems to me, ought to teach us more than the fact
that although we are limited we are unlimited.
It should say that – oh, yes, it should.
But if it is going to matter to us,
religion should also teach us what to do about that.
How do we navigate between these two poles
of finitude and infinitude?
OK – there is more to us then chemicals and atoms,
so then what?
How then shall we live?

Well, for starters,
we should be humble about infinitude and our power.
Just because we’ve got jumper cables

doesn’t mean we should go attaching them
to whatever strikes our fancy.

This is the great danger of mysticism.
We think that if we see our connection to all that is,
if we recognize in that moment that yes,
the sky is not rationed,
then we think we also have the words, the language, the skill
to express that sublime feeling.
We might even go so far as to think
that we then get to impose our vision on others.
To make it the law of the land.
We think that because we are star dust
we know all there is to know about astronomy.
But the paradox of being limited and unlimited all at once
means, first of all, that we ought to be humble.
Humble because we are limited,
because we are temporary and contingent.
And humble because we are part of the unlimited whole
which is so amazing and wondrous
that, as Hafiz the Sufi master teaches,
we are still shaping our first intelligible sound.

Humility can teach us –
if we have eyes to see and ears to hear –
that wonder is right with us.
Fish is fish, it’s true.
But in the end, he comes to see the wonder that it is underwater,
where he is.
The fact that we are part of all that is,
that we are limitless,
means that the universe is here –
in these mountains, in those blades of grass,
in the eyes and minds and hearts of the person sitting next to you,
now.
You need not go far away, or become something else,
to experience the limitless nature of your own souls.
Religion ought to help us know this fact –
ought to make us see what has always been before us,
to remove the blinders we put on our own eyes.

When we do this then I think
it becomes more possible for us to hear the voices,
calling our name,
telling us something we are supposed to do.

“Wholeness, I think,
Draws its life somewhere where breathing stops,”
says Hafiz.
Wholeness – meaning – purpose.
If religion is to make sense of the paradox between our limits
and our limitlessness,
then it should draw from this polarity some direction for our lives.
How should we live?
With humility, yes.
With wonder and gratitude, yes.
But there’s more.

If we were only finite,
if we were just a bunch of chemicals and tissue,
well, then, what would be the meaning of our lives?
It might be to simply amplify pleasure.
It might be safety, comfort, gain, power.
He who dies with most toys wins.
Or maybe we’d think there was no purpose at all.
That all was for naught.

This is why a lot of folks turn to religion in the first place –
they don’t like these options.
They feel in their soul that there is more than this.
That their life means something else.

But the other side isn’t a complete answer either.
If we are only infinite – well, then what?
If all this material existence is an illusion?
If we were just biding our time until the end of our lives
or the end of the world?
Well, then our purpose would be
to obey the instructions of a deity so we’ll be rewarded, maybe.
or to achieve our own enlightenment and release
from the wheel of suffering.
or to ponder the universe.
I suppose we could spend our time this way.
A lot of religious people do.

But liberal religion, religion that affirms the paradox,
religion that believes that to question, truly, can be an answer,
well, neither the material, the nihilistic, nor the escapist will do.

We have to listen to the voices calling our name,
we have to attend to the call of the holy in our lives,
we have to pay heed to the warnings of our conscience.

Unitarian Universalists have answered the question –
given that we are finite and infinite, how shall we live –
by affirming the dignity of each person.
Because it is not just me who is connected to the infinite.
It’s you too.
And it’s not just us in this room.
It’s the folks down the street.
And it’s the people who live across the world.
It’s people in penthouses and in garbage dumps.
It’s everyone, now matter their race, their language, their loves.
It’s generations to come.
All these people have dignity.
We’ve gone further in recent generations
to also explicitly affirm that the earth,
natural life, and other species,
also have some dignity,
for they are also part of the interdependent web,
part of the infinite whole.

It’s not like this is a unique idea.
What must I do to gain eternal life?
Love your god with all your heart,
all your mind, and all your strength,
and love your neighbor as yourself.
Love your neighbor as yourself.

If we are totally finite, why bother?
You might be nice to your neighbor for the sake of convenience,
but you have no real obligation to her.
If we are totally infinite, why bother?
This will all pass away in time.
None of this matters.

But we live in between.
Loving our neighbor is how we express the infinite in the finite.
It is how we embody our limitlessness despite our limits.
Treating other people with dignity
is the bodhisattva way –
how to help others (and ourselves) on the journey to enlightenment.
It is to send, in the mail,
jumper cables with instructions and fool-proof lights.

Maybe we’ve been feeling limited these days.
Maybe we’ve been felling that time goes too fast,
that we can’t do everything we want,
that our resources are limited.
That’s part of the story, no doubt.

Maybe we’ve been feeling unlimited these days.
Maybe we’ve been walking around amazed at all that is.
Maybe we are in love with live.
Maybe we’ve been feeling like the sky is not rationed,
like we’re wired into the universe.
That’s part of the story, no doubt.

Put these two stories together,
and then something is really happening.
Put these two stories together,
and you’ve got religion.
So let us pledge ourselves anew
to that high cause of understanding
of who we are, and what in us is true.

Let us be one in building for tomorrow
a nobler world, in searching for that meaning
which binds our hearts and points us on our way.

May it be so. Blessed Be and Amen.

Sermon: May 13th, 2007: Kill Your Television

2007-05-16T08:35:00.000-06:00

I preached this sermon at High Plains on May 13th. It provoked a lot of energetic feedback during congregational reflections. Here it is:

Readings

From “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” by Jerry Mander

Inventing Sin by George Ella Lyon

God signs to us
we cannot read
She shouts
and we take cover
She shrugs
and trains leave
the tracks

Our schedules! we moan
Our loved ones

God is fed up
All the oceans she gave us
All the fields
All the acres of steep seedful forests
And we did what
Invented the Great Chain
of Being and
the chain saw
Invented sin

God sees us now
gorging ourselves &
starving our neighbors
starving ourselves
and storing our grain
& She says
I've had it
you cast your trash
upon the waters-
it's rolling in

You stuck your fine fine finger
into the mystery of life
to find death

& you did
you learned how to end
the world
in nothing flat

Now you come crying
to your Mommy
Send us a miracle
Prove that you exist

Look at your hand, I say
Listen to your sacred heart
Do you have to haul the tide in
sweeten the berries on the vine

I set you down
a miracle upon miracles
You want more
It's your turn
You show me

Message Kill Your Television

Drew is a second grader in Pennsylvania.
I found a testimonial of sorts by him
on the webpage of the TV Turnoff Network.
Drew said this: I really didn't like TV-Turnoff Week
except I did notice that my grades went up
and I was in a good mood all week.

Here are some other things I found doing research on this topic.
The average American watches four hours of TV a day.
Over 65 years, the average person will spend nine years --
nine years of their wild and precious lives –
watching television.

Four hours isn’t that much – I would have used to say.
There was a time in my life when I watched TV a lot.
I’d watch Law and Order and Star Trek reruns during the day,
if I wasn’t working or in class.
I’d watch a little prime time TV.
Then I’d stay up late and watch news, Letterman, Conan.
Some days, I watched 10 hours or more of TV.
It was pretty out of control.

At the urging of a colleague, I stopped.
This wasn’t easy.
He challenged me: do no TV for a month and see how you feel.
A month! That’s crazy!
I tried to bargain with him:
OK, I’ll give up TV expect for The West Wing.
Just that one show.
No, he said, you’ve got to give it all up.
Just a month.
After that, if you want to watch a particular show, that’s fine.

So I did it.
Since then, things are different.
I didn’t go back to the West Wing, even.
I read at night and get a lot more sleep.
I kept the TV off during the day and got a lot more done.
I was happier, healthier, and a better husband and a better minister.

We cancelled our cable and draped a blanket over the TV.
The blanket looks like a shroud.
We watch now, two hours of TV a week, tops.
Sometimes none at all.

I never do what I once did,
which is leave a social engagement early to catch a TV show.

It was sometime after this that I began to notice TV’s
in places I hadn’t noticed them before.
Not that they weren’t there – they were always there
but I began to notice the way they inserted themselves into a space.
We would feel a craving for buffalo chicken wings, say,
and go to a bar and grill where the TV – TVs, actually –
would be in the corner – and their light, their sound,
it is like a fishing line, hooked into our brains.
I’d catch myself losing the thread of the conversation I was having,
staring at a baseball game – not knowing, let alone caring,
who was playing, the score, or the standings.
I didn’t want to be watching TV, I wanted to be eating wings.

I got to thinking about preaching this message:
Kill Your Television, when I would go down to the cafeteria at Memorial Hospital while we there before and after the birth of our daughter.
There are six or so TV’s in that room, blaring away.

But what made me sure that I wanted to preach on this
was what happened
in the recovery room on our last night there.
We got a roommate – we hadn’t had one the first two nights –
and within minutes of her arrival, the TV was on.
Not loud.
But the light from it, and a bit of the sound,
drifted across the curtains.
She wasn’t rude about it, and we didn’t feel like we could say,
turn it off,
without being rude ourselves.
The phone would ring, people would visit her, and the TV stayed on the whole time.
It stayed on all night and into the next day.
It was still on when we checked out.

When I mentioned the idea of this topic to Dan Leslie,
the worship team leader,
he lent me the book
“Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”
from which one of our readings is drawn today.
The book was written in the late seventies.
I can only imagine what the author would say about today.

The book confirmed some of my suspicions
about what is troubling about this medium.

Here are my arguments for the elimination of television.
They are similar too, but different than, the ones from the book.
They are, let us say, more theological.
More spiritual.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

Television is a prison –
it locks us into its world,
where news of a tragedy somewhere is made simple,
is followed by a commercial for some drug,
then a bit of gossip to make us all feel better.

It is a prison, which keeps us from being free.
It is addictive – that is not a metaphor.

I ran across this notation in my research:

Millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse . . . Heavy TV viewers exhibit [at least] five dependency symptoms--two more than necessary to arrive at a clinical diagnosis of substance abuse. These include: 1) using TV as a sedative; 2) indiscriminate viewing; 3) feeling loss of control while viewing; 4) feeling angry with oneself for watching too much; 5) inability to stop watching; and 6) feeling miserable when kept from watching.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

Freedom is a word we use a lot
but we get confused about what it means.
Some people seem to act as if freedom was the freedom
to choose between McDonald’s and Burger King.
A lot of people seem to think that freedom means
that they get do whatever they want.
That no one gets to tell them what to do.
We’re like a bunch of 13 year olds.
You’re not the boss of me!

But spiritually, freedom is something else altogether.
Freedom means the freedom
not to do what you want
but to do what you must.
Freedom to follow your conscience,
to follow the spirit of life wherever it may lead.
When we are following the instructions of the box,
we are not following our souls or the holy.
I’ve had a lot of deeply spiritual experiences in my life.
Some happened while watching plays.
A few happened while watching a movie.
Most happened in conversations with people,
or in the world outside.
Only one, so far as I recall, ever happened while watching TV.
(Yes, it was the West Wing – the story about the man and the flood
and the radio and the lifeboat and the helicopter)
That’s a pretty poor ratio of hours spent to wonder experienced.

I wish I could live like I’m longing to live –
how many of us have longed to live lives of more awareness,
more wonder, more energy, more dignity.
To live lives with less television.
But we keep watching.

We can free ourselves from this chain,
from these bonds of consumerism and superficiality
just by finding other ways to spend our time.

Freedom is the first spiritual argument for less (even no) television.
Community is the second.

In the same place that I found the testimonial from the 2^nd grader –
how he hated TV turnoff week except he was in a better mood –
I also found this gem from T.S. Eliot:

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.

Loneliness is, I have said before to you,
the great spiritual malady of our time.
We are separated from one another.
We get in our cars, usually by ourselves.
We occupy our own cubicle.
Our families and friends live on the other side of the country.
We might think we are together when we are watching television,
but we are still alone.
Guess how many American families
usually watch television while eating dinner?
Two-thirds.
Or how about these two numbers:
Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful
conversation with their children: 3.5
Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,680

Sometimes – I know from personal experience –
television feels like the salve for loneliness.
But in truth, I have come to believe, TV is one of its causes.
Television isn’t real.
Crimes aren’t solved in an hour.
Family drama doesn’t resolve in 30 minutes,
everyone having a good laugh.
Real community is a lot more complicated.
It remains always unfinished.
The season never really ends.
Sometimes nothing seems to be happening.
But that “dead air” is often the most important time of all.

When we expect our communities, our families,
to function like TV shows,
we are disappointed.
Relationships are real, important, complicated.
They require our full attention.

Community is the second reason we should watch less TV.
Awe and wonder is the third.
To me, the most important.

The Tao Te Ching says of the Tao, the sacred way, this:

14.1 Looked at but not seen, listened to but not heard,
grasped for but not held, formless, soundless, intangible:
14.2 the Tao resists analysis and defies comprehension.
14.3 Its rising is not about light, its setting not a matter of darkness.
Unnameable, unending, emerging continually,
and continually pouring back into nothingness,
14.4 It is formless form, unseeable image, elusive, evasive unimaginable mystery. Confront it, and you won't see its face.
Follow it and you can't find an end.
14.5 Perceive its ancient subtle heart, however, and you become master of the moment. Know what came before time, and the beginning of wisdom is yours.

In other words, you can’t get the Tao through TV.
Looked at by not seen; unseeable image.
TV is one of the ways – perhaps the strongest way –
in which we distract ourselves from everyday life;
but since the holy, the awesome, and the wondrous
lives in the everyday, when we turn on the tube,
we miss the holy too.

In George Ella Lyon’s poem,
she speaks for God:
I gave you the fields and the forests
and she (God) says “I’ve had it”
You throw trash on the waters
play with death
And now you come crying to Mommy
to fix it.

But we are a miracle among miracles
and now its our turn.

I thought a sermon about turning off the TV was a good one for Mother’s day.
It seemed like good motherly advice.
George Ella Lyon has the mother-god
remind us of the prime virtues:
gratitude, service, wonder.
I’m not going to solve your problems for you, she says.
I got you started.
It’s time for you to grow up and take charge of your own life.

Behind the house I grew up in
there was a ravine.
On afternoons after school and on weekends and all summer long,
I’d scramble down the dirt path
to the creek bed.
A trickle in August,
a few inches high in the spring and the fall.
There was a clay cave,
and a little patch of grass,
huge trees of every sort,
the water would dance and bubble over the rocks.

It was quiet and majestic and my imagination would run wild –
I’d think of dinosaurs around the next bend
and old miner’s cabins
(there weren’t any, but there could have been)
and experience the flow of time.
It was here that I felt connected to all that is.
Why my Unitarian Universalist ministers
and religious education teachers
would talk about the sacred, the holy,
the god that makes an acorn into an oak tree,
I would think of this ravine.
Today, when I’m in one of those meditation experiences
where you are supposed to imagine a safe place,
this is where I go.

And this place became important to me in part because
my mother said,
“turn off the TV and go play outside.”

This is what Lyon’s mother-God is saying to us all:
you want me to fix things for you?
No way.
Turn off your selfishness, your isolation, your arrogance,
and go outside.
Miracles abound.
But how will you see them
if you can’t stop staring at the light box?

For the sake of freedom
for the sake of relationship and community
for the sake of awe and wonder
I hope you will take up the challenge
that my colleague once gave to me:
turn off your television for a month.
See how it feels.

One more thing:
In this sermon, television is not a metaphor.
I really mean to speak of TV.
But at the same time television does stand for
and embody a lot of modern culture.

Television isn’t the only thing that keeps us captivated and unfree,
not the only thing that distracts us from each other
and real human community,
not the only thing that cheapens life
and blinds us to wonder and awe.
The way we shop, and eat, and travel all do this too.
If it isn’t TV for you, what is the thing that does this in your life?
Can you go without for a month?
I bet you could.

“Four arguments for the elimination of television”
was written decades before the internet,
and I think it has yet to be determined
how that technology will interact
with the spiritual values of freedom, community, and awe.
So far, the evidence is mixed,
but much more hopefully than the boob tube.
There is more interactivity.
But its quality is occasionally questionable.
My wife, a librarian, has a cartoon on our fridge which reads:
“If the television is a babysitter,
the internet is a drunk librarian that won’t shut up.”

I’m fairly sure that the TV isn’t going to move us very far forward
on our journey to wholeness.
In fact, I think it might move us backwards.
It does me, anyway.
This is the question I want you to interrogate
all the parts of modern life with:
does this activity, this technology, this way of being
make my life more free, more connected, more wondrous?
If not – stop.
If not – stop.
And do something else.

I pray for us all
courage to take the unconventional path
wisdom to put aside temptations and addictions
love to reach out to real people and keep reaching out
joy and real laughter every day
compassion and respect for others
and for ourselves.

Look at your hand, I say
Listen to your sacred heart
Do you have to haul the tide in
sweeten the berries on the vine

You are set down
a miracle upon miracles
You want more
It's your turn
You show me

Amen. Blessed Be.

Sermon: April 15th, 2007: Following Our Path

2007-04-19T12:11:00.000-06:00

This is the sermon I preaching last Sunday. It was for our stewardship drive.

Readings
“Why are You Waiting” by Judith Gass
From “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman

Message Following Our Path

Wake up!
you have slept long enough.
Wake up!
tomorrow may be to late.

Sometimes we are sleep-walking.
It might be at the end of a long day,
a long week.
It might be for a few hours.
A few days.
Months.
Even years of our life might go by without us being awake.

We muddle through.
Not really paying much attention
to ourselves to others to the world in its terror and wonder.
Winston Churchill remarked once that
“Men stumble over the truth from time to time,
but most pick themselves up and hurry off
as if nothing happened.” True enough.

When we feel dead to the world,
as if nothing matters
nothing brings us any deep joy,
that’s sleepwalking.
When we do not know or do not care
about the fate the earth,
about the status of the poor,
about the future of humanity,
that’s sleepwalking.
When we go a full day without laughter or surprise
without tears, be they joy or sorrow,
without outrage at injustice
or wonder at existence,
that’s sleepwalking.

Why might we go a sleep-walking through our lives?
There are plenty of very good reasons.

Perhaps we are feeling sad about a loss.
If we sleep-walk then it won’t hurt so bad.
Maybe we woke up once and it was no good –
we felt pain in ourselves or others.
So we closed our eyes and our minds.
Maybe we sleep walk because we are committed to an ideology.
Ideologies always fail in the presence of reality;
the only way – the only way – an ideology can be sustained
is by willful ignorance.
There’s a lot of that going around.

Or perhaps we are sleepwalking because we’ve got too much nonsense input.
When infants are overwhelmed with too much noise or activity,
they shut down and go to sleep.
There is a theater company in Chicago that puts on an improv play titled
“too much light makes the baby go blind.”

Adults aren’t so different.
Too much light makes us go blind.
But when overwhelmed we go to sleep not in body –
which might actually renew us,
but in mind and in spirit.
Sometimes we are sleep-walking because we’ve given ourselves some sleep drug –
addictions to alcohol, drugs, materialism, sexual exploitation, power,
addictions come in many forms.
And these are just ways of keeping wakefulness at bay.
Too much TV.
Too much noise.
Too much rushing from place to place.
Too much climbing the ladder.
Too much hopelessness.
Too much light, we go blind.
We sleepwalk.

At its best, religion is the cure for sleepwalking.
Of course, at its worst,
religion is sleepwalking.

Sometimes religion is just ideology.
Sometimes religion teaches that this world is not real.
That we are just passing through.
That sleepwalking is an appropriate response to existence.
Sometimes religion is a crutch we use
when we’ve banged our leg
stumbling over the truth.

But when it is vital and true,
religion is that knocking at the door.
It wakes us up.
Isn’t that why we are here?
To wake up?
Maybe we’ve been sleepwalking in our minds
and we want a religion that will make us think.

Maybe we’ve been sleepwalking in our relationships
with family and with friends
and we want a religion that will encourage us to forge deeper bonds
Maybe we’ve been sleepwalking through injustice
and we want a religion that will ask us to get involved in saving the world.

For the last three weeks,
members of this church have been sharing
why this congregation is important to them.

This question – what does this religion mean to you,
why do you bother to come –
is the context in which we would like
those of you who will be making your financial commitment for the next fiscal year
to do so.
And one of you – Kirsten – said, I’m paraphrasing here – she said: I’m glad this is a religion that isn’t easy.
That you have to work at it.
That the answers are settled or given by a creed you recite.

I’m glad about that too.

“Whoever you are, come travel with me!
However sweet these laid-up stores –
however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here;
However sheltered this port,
and however calm these waters,
we must not anchor here.”

This words of Walt Whitman’s are a good metaphor for this church.
14 years ago,
the founders could have just stayed at All Souls.
It would have been easier.
But Jack and Sue and Betty and Beth and Carole and Sue and Lynne and Martha
took, instead, to the open road,
they said in their deeds:
“We will sail pathless and wild seas.”

This church could have stayed in a too-small storefront.
But you did not.
You could have stayed in a too-small elementary school.
The rent was cheap.
But you did not.
We could have stayed here.
Our new home will cost us a lot more than renting this school.
We had to raise a lot of money in a capital campaign.
We will have a big mortgage to pay off.
You could stay here.
It’s convenient.
But no, you are following your path into the future.

But Whitman’s metaphor is also apt for our own spiritual lives
under the condition of wakefulness.
When we are sleepwalking,
we rarely are following our own path.

It’s so easy – so unbelievably easy –
to follow someone else’s directions.
Our parents
our friends
the nice man on the commercial for that thing we don’t really need
“the experts”
that bestselling book
even, yes, our minister –
they all sometimes say, “do this.”
Sometimes they are right.
But when we are awake we decide if what they have to say make sense for us, now.
When we are asleep, we just go with the flow.

Good news!
You have a purpose to your life.
Greater news!
I don’t know what it is.
Oh sure, in general terms I can tell you that your purpose
is to journey towards wholeness
to live with integrity,
to leave the world better than you found it
and to be thankful for all that is.
But that’s about as far as I can go.
You have to fill it in.
You have to set out, afoot and light-hearted,
on the open road.
Onward! to that which is endless
as it was beginningless . . .
to know the universe itself as a road –
as many roads –
as roads for traveling souls.

That’s your journey, and only you can make it.

Only you can make it, but . . .

But, in Whitman’s words:
“Together! the inducements shall be greater . . .
Whoever you are, come travel with me!”

A lot of people find that they don’t need companions on their journey.
A lot of people say, at least, that they don’t need religious community
for their spiritual journey.
I’m not one of those people.
I need others.
I need the fresh ideas that come from another mind.
I need the sound of a group of people singing together
live, in person, in real time.
I need to hear the laughter and questions and hopes of children.
I need to know that although my path is my own
there remains a community of scholarship, love, and hope
that keeps me accountable and grounded.

I think my favorite moment each week comes when
I stand off to the side over there or over there
while you sing or listen to the special music
or hear the worship leader or another speak
and I look out over your faces.
I see there people I have come to know well in these four years
I see folks who I’ve never seen before
who come hear in need or in hope of some awakening
I see children of all ages and of many colors
I see a people who need, and who give, and who love, and who mourn, and who dream.

I think sometimes, when I am sneaking a look at you,
of words by my colleague Barbara Pescan,
a prayer for those gathered in worship, it is titled:

In this familiar place, listen:
to the sounds of breathing, creaking chairs,
shuffling feet, clearing throats, and sighing all around
Know that each breath, movement, the glance
meant for you or intercepted
holds a life within it.

These are signs
that we choose to be in this company
have things to say to each other
things not yet said but in each other’s presence still
trembling behind our hearts’ doors
these doors closed but unlocked
each silent thing waiting
on the threshold between unknowing and knowing,
between being hidden and being known.

Find the silence among these people
and listen to it all—breathing, sighs,
movement, holding back—
hear the tears that have not yet reached their eyes
perhaps they are your own
hear also the laughter building deep where joy abides
despite everything.
Listen: rejoice. And say Amen.

“Together! the inducements shall be greater.”

Together,
we will strengthen and expand our religious education programs for all ages.
We’ll keep paying a fair wage to our Director of Religious Education.
We’ll pay our director of ministry to youth more so she can offer more programs for our growing high school program and so she can begin programs to serve our own young adults and outreach to Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals at that bastion of liberalism – the Air Force Academy.
We’ll keep paying our fair share to support Unitarian Universalism in our region and across the country.
We’ll pay the bills of our new church home.
And for many more things, my salary among them.
So in advance, thanks.

Together! the inducements shall be greater.

Being a religious liberal isn’t easy.
Being a religious liberal in northern Colorado Springs really isn’t easy.
I wouldn’t want to do it alone.
I would want to join with others.
That, of course, is what those whose new membership
we honored today have done –
they have joined with others.

Together! the inducements shall be greater.

It is my deepest conviction that human beings belong to one another.
We do not spring from no-where,
independent and unrelated.
We come into the world as the children of people,
we live in the world with many others.
This is challenging.
Other people are not always easy to be with.
The temptation to go-it-alone is strong.
But out there on the open road,
not only do we need one another to survive,
but we are so embedded in community
there is no alternative.
As has been said,
culture is to humans
what water is to fish.

The point is this:
Given the fact that we do live with others,
we can choose how to do so.
We can choose sleepwalking.
Where our relationships with others live only on the surface.
Where we never really share our best selves with others.
Where we stumble about in a stupor,
ignorant of both the worlds beauty and its great need.
That’s a choice.
The other way is to live awake.
To live awake is to risk –
to make relationships that matter –
even though they can not last forever,
since nothing does.
To live awake is to laugh heartily.

To live awake is to decide,
since I live with others,
since the world is wonderful and beautiful
and also horrific and desperate,
all at the same time,
and since I am a part of this whole,
I will give of myself to the world.

As you think about how you will use your life:
including, but not only,
your connection and commitment with this church,
but also how you will live in your families and communities
your workplaces
your politics
your giving,
I’ll ask you to keep in mind these words by Harry Emerson Fosdick:

The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water.
It flows down, clean and cool,
from the heights of Herman
and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon.
The Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it,
the Sea of Galilee has an outlet.
It gets to give.
It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again
to fertilize the Jordan plain.
But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror.
For the Dead Sea has no outlet.
It gets to keep.

We are for service.
We are for each other.
We are for what is holy and wondrous.
We are for justice, compassion, and love.
This is what we are for.
And that will require us to wake up
and take our chances on the open road,
where together! the inducements shall be greater.
Amen. Blessed Be.