First Unitarian Church of Worcester

"Where Love Is" sermon by Rev. Barbara Merritt delivered on January 25, 2009

2009-02-19T16:23:00.002-05:00

First Reading: -from Song of Solomon, Chapter 8

Set me as a seal on your heart,
as a seal on your arm;
For love is strong as death,
relentless as the nether world
is devotion;
its flames are a blazing fire.
Deep waters cannot quench love,
nor floods drown it.
Were one to offer all he owns to
to purchase love,
he would be roundly mocked.

Second Reading: — from Inaugural Address 2009 by President Barack Obama

It is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

Sermon: “Where Love Is”

The inauguration of the President of the United States is inspiring to witness – the ordered, powerful transference of power reminds us of what the human spirit is capable of. What co-operation looks like. The high calling of citizenship.

But especially this year, I was aware of the many secret service officers walking beside President Barack Obama as he and the First Lady walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. Apparently double the normal force. Twice as many people as usual who were needed and were willing to take a bullet for their new President. They were willing to die defending the life of their new leader. And during the President’s inaugural speech, the camera focused on one African American sailor, who was standing at attention in the crowd, his rifle pointed down. This image was broadcast right at the moment when President Obama was talking about service and duty and responsibility.

Later that evening, I heard the PBS film maker, Ken Burns interviewed on TV – and he talked about Obama’s reference to hope and virtue. Hope, we have been told, has been the hallmark and calling card of Obama’s campaign. And now hope was linked with virtue. As Ken Burns noted: “Virtue only occurs in the present – and virtue is an action. Something that is embodied in the world.”

Etymologically the word virtue is about the way you conduct your life. Your virtue is what excellence, strength, worth and courage look like when you walk out into the world. It is not just the capacity to imagine value or integrity, it is the ability to apply it, to practice it. Virtue has been called a habitual excellence – an activism, an engagement that is always at play. But this is a particular kind of work, not grudgingly accepted, but seized gladly.

I hope you got to see the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s face as he performed the beautiful new arrangement of “Simple Gifts” at the inauguration. His was a portrait in joy. Ask yourself, “Where does such a gift come from?” How does such a virtuoso (the same root as virtue) rise to such heights of musicianship and genius?”

Friends, who visited Tanglewood this fall, went to a Saturday morning rehearsal in which Yo-Yo Ma was the principal player. Usually these rehearsals last one hour. After playing once through the entire concerto with the orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma was soaked through with sweat. He announced that they would play the entire piece again, and then again. A rehearsal that might have ended at 10:30 a.m. lasted until 1:00 p.m.

My friends wondered out loud, “Did Yo-Yo Ma, arguably the best cellist in the world, need to practice?” And the answer is clearly that he seized such an opportunity gladly. It was a chance to serve, to work with his instrument and his fellow musicians. That was his privilege, his responsibility, his calling.

If you wish to play well, you will have to become fully engaged. You won’t be able to “phone in” your commitment. If you wish to love, if you wish to serve – if you want to be in right relation with your friends, your community, your church, your country, your world – you are going to have to bring all your heart, and all your mind, and all your soul to the task.

There is no clearer parable in the Bible about the nature of this service, that each of us is called to give, than the story Jesus told about the Good Samaritan. You all know it. The oppressed and despised member of the racially mixed Samaritan tribe was walking down the road when he came upon a man badly beaten and robbed. And where the more privileged and prestigious members of that society had failed to assist their fellow human being, the Good Samaritan stopped and saved this man’s life – took him to an inn and paid for his stay so that he might recover.

We know the tale so well. But we don’t consider our part in the drama.

If I were to do a midrash, a creative commentary and elaboration on the parable, I would have a good time imagining what was going through the minds of those who left their fellow traveler bleeding on the road and hurried on. I would divide the uninvolved, the disconnected, the estranged and/or the cowardly pedestrians into three groups: the blamers, the distracted, and the fearful.

The blamers are always among us. They say, “Tsk, Tsk. What has society come to! Why can’t the authorities keep robbers off the road? What did this man do to provoke such a brutal attack? Surely my younger, stronger, more affluent travelers can clean up this mess! (I helped someone ten years ago, I’ve paid my dues when it comes to assistance!)” The blamers are certain that someone else must take responsibility.

Then there are the distracted. They are very busy and very important, and have schedules to keep – and other priorities. If only you knew what was on their plate, you wouldn’t dream of asking them to assist a stranger!

Finally, there are the fearful. They have just been presented with the hard evidence that there are robbers on this road. They need to rush to safety. They aren’t brave enough to stop on such a perilous journey. They need to protect the little they have (and they certainly don’t have the resources to take on the long term rehabilitation of this seriously wounded man.)

But why stop with imagining those who could not and would not help? Imagine how terrible it would have been if love and rescue came along (in the form of the Good Samaritan) and the robber’s victim rolled up into a ball and said, “I don’t trust Samaritans. Go away!” What if the injured man was a Unitarian and wanted to know whether the Samaritan was smart enough to help him, or strong enough, or experienced enough (wanting to assess the qualifications of his rescuer, rather than receive his help.) Or worse still – what if the victim of the assault had already given up hope and had shut his eyes, and withdrawn and refused to be moved or touched or carried or cared for? What a tragedy that would be, if love was there and ready to help, but the man had decided he was going to die and refused to accept any assistance whatsoever!

We have all known fellow travelers (and frequently that traveler is ourselves) whom life has beaten up. Sometimes it was our parents who delivered the blows. Sometimes we get beaten up by hurricanes, or ice storms, or tsunamis. Sometime people are beaten at work. Quite a few of us are being beaten up by this economy, and many of us are newly aware that there are robbers on Wall Street. We can be beaten by the death of those we love, by illness, or injury, or heartbreak. We can be beaten up by armed conflict or prejudice, or disabilities. And all of these forces (and many more) may appear to diminish our capacity to see love, or to accept kindness, to embody virtue, or to believe in what is true. Hardship can leave us asking only one question: “In this broken and often cruel world, where is love?” Where is the love that can rescue the oppressed or heal me? (music, a duet from the musical Oliver)

Where is love?
Does it fall from skies above?
Is it underneath the willow tree
That I've been dreaming of?
Where is she?
Who I close my eyes to see?
Will I ever know the sweet "hello"
That's only meant for me?
Who can say where she may hide?
Must I travel far and wide?
'Til I am bedside the someone who
I can mean something to ...
Where...?
Where is love?

Who can say where...she may hide?
Must I travel...far and wide?
'Til I am beside...the someone who
I can mean...something to...
Where?
Where is love?

The journey on which we find out the answer to that question is often a hard journey. At least it has been for me recently. May you never be awakened at 1:30 in the morning, as my husband and I were awakened Thursday morning ten days ago, to a doctor in the emergency room of the hospital saying that our youngest child has been seriously injured in a bicycle accident, and is about to be taken into surgery. We were told that David’s injuries were not life threatening. What had happened to our 21 year old son was that a cable came loose on his bike while he was riding down L Street in Washington, D.C. He had been thrown over the handlebars going about 25 miles per hour. The face plant that resulted broke both his upper and lower jaws, fractured his nose and most of the bones in his face, and took out most of his teeth. Luckily, there was no brain damage, no danger to his eyes, no involvement of the spinal cord.

Five hours of surgery later, eight metal plates now holding his face together, and four days in intensive care his recovery is proceeding – but it will take at least a year to heal from this accident.

I drove down in the middle of the night, absolutely convinced that I would bring him home as he recovered from this horrific event. But David disagreed. And within 24 hours I understood why. He was lovingly surrounded by his apartment mates, his ultimate Frisbee team, and a collection of classmates and friends that offered him support, comfort and courage.

When I arrived in the waiting room of the ICU at George Washington University Hospital, there were ten classmates sitting in the lounge waiting to get a chance to see David. There were four in his room (even though there was a two person visitor limit in ICU) – and the parade of friends never stopped for the six days he was in the hospital. Many friends came to see David, and most came more than once.

They came because as young adults they had some important questions to ask of David (and of themselves.) What does it mean that someone young and handsome can be so disfigured so quickly? Is he OK? Would I be OK? Can I show up for him? Would my friends show up for me if something this terrible happened to me?

What surprised me, what surprised them was that David was “cool”. He was rather relaxed (and part of the credit must be given to the pain killers he was on.) But still he met his visitors with courage and humor and the assumption that they would still like him, love him and keep him company no matter how beaten up his face was (and believe me, it was bad.)

And after his well-wishers learned that, that this was survivable and that you (and your friends) are capable of a strength and a love you didn’t know you possessed; they wanted to come back to that hospital room because there was joy there – good company – life – grit. David said he was considering getting a “grill”; a set of metal teeth. His older brother walked in, and after the shock of seeing the black eyes and the swollen face and the conspicuous absence of teeth, Robert said, “Well, there is no question as to who is now the good looking brother!” And David replied, “Well, you had to wait awhile, didn’t you?”

In that hospital room I found out the answer to the question, “Where is love?” It was in those young adults and their willingness to enter the room and embrace their friend when he was broken and bruised and damaged. It became clear to me that David wasn’t coming home to recover with his mother and father. He needed to stay in Washington, D.C. where his beloved community was – where he could maintain his adult status – where he would heal and return to his life.

And now: the confession. I don’t know what David knows. If this accident happened to me, if my face had been destroyed, I would want to put a bag over my head and say to my family and friends, “I’ll see you in a year.” Because sometimes I’m afraid to be seen in public if I’m having a bad hair day. Some of us know that we are loved and whole and accepted (no matter what) and some of us don’t. But I’m in awe of David who understood that the door needed to remain open. He needed to let people in. He didn’t have to be afraid to let his friends see him just as he was. And they did rescue him. And they rescued one another. They discovered that a college friendship can be deeper and more enduring than they thought. All they had to do was show up. And all David had to do was to let them in.

Which I believe, with all my heart, is what we are trying to create at 90 Main Street. A place where love is. A place where people show up and where we learn how to let love in. A place where we are constantly reminded that we cannot be so broken that we cannot be made whole again. A religious community where your truth is welcomed and so is your neighbor’s. A congregation where we are called on to practice virtue – to act on behalf of homeless children and their families – to be community where we are given constant opportunities to remove all the rusty locks that keep others out. A place where no matter how injured we are (economically, emotionally or physically) we find here music and hope, encouragement and acceptance. And a newborn “confidence, the knowledge that God has called us to help shape an uncertain destiny.”

Together – this is not only the price and the promise of citizenship. It is also the price and the promise of discipleship.

This beloved community will not envelop you like a warm blanket or a gentle fog; especially if we have our eyes tightly shut and we are holding our breath, and thrashing out at anyone who comes near, or locking our hearts against strangers.

Love cannot force its way into our brains because love will not use violence or force to knock down our defenses. No, here we are invited to open our eyes, to open the door of our heart, to ask for help, to let other human beings close to us. We are called to gladly seize the opportunity (and the privilege) to serve.

Then we can find where love is and that “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character” than “giving our all to a difficult task.”

One night in Washington, D.C. last week I was driving to my friend’s house after a 10 hour day a the hospital in the company of 11 of David’s 21 year old friends. I think I was as tired as I have ever been, and I became hopelessly lost. The further I drove the worse it was. I spent time in Rock Creek Park and behind the National Cathedral, and in a neighborhood with roads so twisty that I no longer knew north from south or east from west. It felt like I had stumbled into a Buddhist Hell Realm –“abandon hope, all you who seek the kingdom of Connecticut Avenue.” But as I crested a hill there was a policeman quietly parked at a corner. I drove up behind him, got out of my car, and said, “I am so lost! Can you tell me where Connecticut Avenue is?”

And he looked at me with pity and said, “Sure – lots of people in Washington, D.C. are lost! Just take this left, the next two rights, then go around the circle, take the second left, then turn right…” And then he saw my expression. And he said, “Don’t worry. Follow me. I’ll lead you out.”

What I believe is that none of us are so lost that God can’t lead us home. None of us are so broken that we can’t be made whole. The work we are called to do is a privilege – the service we can offer to one another is a blessing. And our losses and our triumphs are a part of a much larger story than we can imagine. So we sing – gladly. And we move forward – together.

"The Spirit of Adventure" by Rev. Barbara Merritt September 14, 2008

2008-10-16T16:06:00.003-04:00

FIRST READING
- from Psalm 46

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be shaken, and though the mountains plunge into the depths of the sea; though the waters roar and are troubled, though the mountains shake with the surging water.There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God. God is in its midst.

God shall help her, at the break of dawn. The God of Jacob is our refuge.

He will make wars to cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow, and cuts the spear in sunder.

Be still, and know that I am God.”

SECOND READING
-from “A Failure of Nerve” by Edwin Friedman

The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 describes Europe as depressed. It described a civilization with little vision or hope. Referring to what they called “the calamity of our time,” the publishers actually left several pages blank so that readers could record “the rest of the events until the end of the world.”

Contributing to the general malaise was a combination of political, social, economic, and theological “downers.” Late fifteenth-century Europe, despite its glorious cathedrals, emerging artists, and developing network of universities, was a society living in the wake of the plagues, the breakdown of the feudal order, and the increasing inability of an often hypocritical and corrupt church's capacity to ring true.

There had not been a major scientific discovery for a thousand years. Then, as if suddenly, Europe is all agog. The depression lifts like a morning mist, novelty begins to shine everywhere, and the seeds of the Renaissance that had been germinating here and there for two hundred years sprout vigorously. The imaginative gridlock that had largely beclouded Europe's inventiveness for more than a millennium dissolves forever.

Europe's imaginative capacity was unleashed not by the discovery of learning, as those with a vested interest in learning would have it, but by the discovery of the new world. The effect of America's discovery on the European imagination was as though God had been hiding a piece of land bigger than the known world since the dawn of creation. The qualities of bold and adventurous leadership that enabled Europe to escape its doldrums are exactly the leadership qualities necessary for breaking the imaginative gridlock of our civilization today. The spirit of adventure must triumph over the concern for safety and certainty...

Prince Henry the Navigator was, perhaps, the first to fund research. Taking advantage of recent developments in technology, such as new rigging of sails, revised construction of ship hulls, and more refined instruments of navigation. Prince Henry began to send expeditions down the west coast of Africa.

As a result of Prince Henry's efforts, Portuguese mariners made a new landfall further south down the west coast of Africa, including the crossing of the equator and the rounding of the Cape. To appreciate the boldness of this venture and the fears that had to be overcome, it is important to realize that the distance from Iberia to the southern tip of Africa is double the distance that had to be traversed to cross the great blue sea to America. The east-west bulge of Africa is almost one thousand miles long; as one approaches the equator the North Star appears to sink into the sea (perhaps the origin of the myth that here lies the end of the world); and there is strangeness everywhere. Around Cape Bojadar at the edge of the Sahara, the red sand turns the water blood red for miles. Much further down the coast, the enormous rush of the Congo River's descent creates a condition where the surface of the Atlantic is sweet for almost fifteen miles out.
Prince Henry inspired an expedition to cross the equator, and instead of falling off the end of the Earth, everyone came back to tell their tale. The breaking of this emotional barrier was similar in what it unleashed to breaking the sound barrier, the four minute mile, or the shift to government by compact rather than divine right…”

“The Spirit of Adventure” by Rev. Barbara Merritt

Ed Friedman loved to tell stories. Here is one:

“On the third day of Creation, just before all forms of life were about to multiply, the Holy One said to his creatures: I see that what some of you treasure most is survival, while what others yearn for most is adventure. So I will give you each a choice. If what you want most is stability, then I will give you the power to regenerate any part you lose, but you must stay rooted where you grow. If, on the other hand, you prefer mobility, you also may have your wish, but you will be more at risk. For then I will not give you the ability to regain your previous form. Those that chose stability we call trees, and those that chose opportunity became animals.”

So, seeing only human beings in attendance this morning, I'll say, “Welcome adventurers! Welcome to all of you who chose risk and mobility and opportunity and moving forward on uncharted seas.”

The problem is that most of us don't describe ourselves as explorers and adventurers and great risk-takers. We assume that the Starship Enterprise is the vehicle that goes “boldly where no one has ever gone before,” not us. We go to the movies and watch TV if we want to see excitement and high risk games and heroic expeditions.

Most of us are more conscious of seeking stability, security and happiness. Most of us have fairly well-established routines. We can remember engaging in some pretty high-risk behavior when we were teenagers (even though we're in anguish when our own teenagers do the same.) But we're now adults: more mature - trying to get along, hoping that our lives might go a little more smoothly and serenely. To which Ed Friedman says, “Think again!” His recent book, published posthumously, is a stunning reframing of not only the problems of leadership in hospitals, corporations, religious organizations and families, but I believe it also asks each of us to re-examine our spiritual assumptions. This rabbi, family therapist and consultant to NATO forces and to universities doesn't have every thing figured out, or have the secret formula for turning around the management of a failing institution. In truth, I think he gets quite a lot wrong.

But its what I think he gets right that fascinates me. He was a genius, a truly original thinker. And he offers a new and bracing paradigm with which to understand our existence here on earth. His thesis is that what makes great leaders is also what makes healthy families. What allows individuals to thrive and grow is also what allows nations to thrive and grow. After decades of experience working with families, and churches, and synagogues, and hospital boards, and government bureaucracies, and multi-billion dollar corporations, he kept seeing that there was something about what health looked like that had a common denomination in all the various forms and institutions. It turns out to be a kind of courage. He calls it nerve or the spirit of adventure, and the capacity to develop one's individuality and integrity.

I offer to you a brief summary of what I perceive to be Friedman's top ten characteristics of what health (in the largest sense of the term) looked like.

1) A healthy sense of adventure - where you remain open to new un-thought-of possibilities where you're curious about what unknowns lie ahead, where you are willing to try things you've never tried before.

2) Self-differentiation - you know where you, as a person, end and where another human being begins. This is more than a strong sense of yourself as a unique child of God. He states that in his extensive work with families, the greatest gift a mother or father can give their children is when the parents have made the children least important to the parent's own sense of salvation. In other words, Friedman defines this kind of maturity as a willingness to take responsibility for one's own emotional well-being and destiny.

3) Which leads us directly to the third quality of leadership and health - the least amount of blaming. Life, at its best, is actually not about finding out what is wrong with your co-worker, or your parents, or your community. The active, effective leader is always taking personal responsibility to improve whatever circumstances arise.

4) That is possible because of the fourth quality - vision - the capacity to see, not only new ideas and new concepts, but Friedman claims that vision is actually an emotional phenomena. When everyone else seems to be screaming at you, “Don't board the ship! The equator is the end of the world; you won't be able to function in anything else but in the way but in the way we've always done it before” - a leader sees farther than the known horizon.

5) A fifth quality is an appreciation for the serendipitous - for the unexplained and the unexpected gift. Friedman is especially eloquent that when the explorers first discovered America they were quite focused on finding the silks and the riches of the Near East. It never occurred to most of them that what they found in America might be more significant, more important. Columbus died believing that he had landed, not on a new continent, but in Japan. Serendipity, Friedman says, is the best antidote for anyone that assumes we know everything already.

6) A growth response to challenge. Challenges are not the enemy, or a sign of defeat, or impenetratable obstacles. They are merely problems to engage in and solve.

7) Playfulness. If you're not having fun, you're likely to run out of energy. . .and become paralyzed by your own fears. This concept of staying “non-anxious” is one of Friedman's great contributions to leadership theory. Life is definitely going to change. Learn to move with some playfulness. Don't be afraid of mistakes. Don't forget your own resiliency.

8) Work with what is strong in you and others. Don't get manipulated and sabotaged by the weak, by the victims, by those highly reactive, sensitive individuals who are more than willing to take you on as a hostage. This requires some explanation. He uses a football metaphor. If you are trying to move the ball down the field, a strong and winning team ought not to give all its attention to the complaints of the coddled, pampered athlete. So Friedman quotes a football coach: “When I coach, if receivers complain that the quarterback throws the ball too hard, I don't go to the quarterback and tell him to let up. I tell him to throw it as hard as he can, and I then tell the receivers they had better hang on to his passes if they want to hang on to the team. If those who cover punts complain that the punter kicks it too far, I don't go to the punter and tell him not to kick it so far. I tell the punter to kick it as far as he can, and I'll try to find players who can get down the field and cover his kicks.” What is obvious in football may not be so obvious in your family. Friedman tells us that there will always be those individuals and families and systems that are “a panic, in search of a trigger.”

9) Stamina. Friedman says that life isn't about quick fixes and fast solutions. You have to be willing to stick around, and to stay close and keep at it. He offers two examples of how we've lost sight of the stamina required. “The most pernicious violence on television is actually in the story line - how the simplistic concept of human struggles 'does violence' to the nature of life. The most insidious message that children - and adults - get from the average television program is the notion that motivation is singular, that all questions have answers, that justice always triumphs, that love conquers all and that life is unambiguous.” And his second example, (I'm a bit sheepish to admit) I've fallen into personally. It happens once every four years. He writes: “There is a collective irresponsibility on the voters seeking magical, quick-fix answers to a complex range of the problems of existence. Instead of focusing on their own response to the challenges of change, those voters find fault in their political stars.” Stamina to the contrary, means you keep working even in the face of rejection and resistance. He claims if you're actually trying to change the status-quo, sabotage and push back is a sign you are doing something effective. He writes that, “No one ever moved from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on.” There will be hardships and setbacks. Expect them. Keep going.

10) It is Friedman's tenth principal that I find most challeng-ing. He says, “To be an effective leader (or a good partner or a good disciple), there must be a willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. If you are going to cover new territory, you're going to have to stand out front. You're going to have to cross the equator. He said that not only must you not be afraid of taking up that posture, you must learn to love it.

You won't find a religious tradition anywhere that teaches that this kind of courage is not essential in the life of the spirit. The Psalmist claims that even though the earth shakes, and the mountains tremble, and one hurricane after another brings along its surging waters to our shores, we must not be fearful.

Jesus promises that if you want to follow his teachings, you will discover that even though the birds of the air have been given nests and refuges and places to rest for the night, you, as his follower, will find nowhere to lay your head.

The Buddhist teaching is clear. As Joko Beck writes, “Life is a series of endless disappointments and it is wonderful, just because it doesn't give us what we want. To go down this path takes courage.” Rumi says, “You whose fear makes you incapable of climbing this small hill on your path; there are a hundred thousand mountains in front of you. Begin now!”

But, if you are like me and not especially gifted with courage, you'll have to ask, “Why do I have to cross the equator? We've already figured out what's on the other side of the globe! There are no new worlds to discover in my time. Just a few blank pages left to fill in at the back of the book. Just a few more years. I just need to get my kids through school or get to retirement or figure out how to survive at work.”

These voices in our heads! Strong in the 1400's. Strong in the 21st century. They sing, “there are no new worlds left to discover!” Allow me to mention three. One in the world. One in this community of Worcester and one in yourself.

In the world - global warming. This is a challenge we have to meet. We have to figure out how to reduce our excessive and wasteful consumption. We have to find a way to co-operate globally. We have to take responsibility, corporately and individually. As Friedman says, “This is not about finding the right answers, right now. It is about asking the right questions” New questions - new frameworks - a whole new world - understanding to develop.

In the community. One thing we know, poverty is increasing in Worcester. Our neighbors are in trouble. This church, with Jericho Road and other volunteer opportunities, is always asking (and will always be asking): “How can we use our real strengths to bless the world? How can we be more effective as an agency of change?” Again, what are the new questions we haven't asked ourselves before, that might make a real difference?

And in our own hearts and minds and souls. Spirituality is not about finding a cozy, safe religious community where all your troubles will disappear and life will finally become predictable, comforting and soothing. (I can see, even now, how some of you might be figuring out how to make a swift exit out of the back of the sanctuary.) No, Annie Dillard is correct in that if the church is teaching what the church ought to be teaching, you ought to be wearing a motorcycle helmet when you come to the sanctuary. Because, like it or not, life is an adventure. And you will be asked to cross what looks like the end of the world - over and over again. With the death of those you love, with the changes in work and health and family. With raging oceans and trembling mountains.

Where I find Friedman most helpful is when he tells me what is blocking my passage into new worlds. What are the habits that can get me in the most trouble when I go forth onto any number of adventures? For some reason, I find Unitarians to be especially susceptible to at least three myths that can keep you stuck.

The first myth is that what is missing is more data, better techniques and new information. Friedman claims that this obsession with gathering data, this unending treadmill of trying harder to gather facts and interpretations and research, is more often than not, an avoidance of emotional risk-taking, and decisiveness, and responsibility that will result in transformation and empowerment.

The second myth (and this one really hurts) is the belief that “toxic forces can be regulated through reasonableness, love, insight, role modeling, inculcating of values, and striving for consensus through empathy, team building and camaraderie.” Ouch! Friedman says that the only way to meet destructive and fearful forces is with strength, integrity and courage. Moses was never going to convince Pharaoh with data, reasonableness or team building. He had to actually lead his people out into the wilderness. It was a dangerous and difficult journey to their freedom.

Finally, Friedman warns us that this quick fix mentality that we are so fond of (that seeks “symptom relief, rather than fundamental change”) will not serve us well. Think 40 years in the desert. Think of the 223 years that First Unitarian in Worcester has been trying to create a spiritually liberating community. Think of a lifetime of seeking to reach God and truth and reality. Come to church not to find the answers. Try to leave here asking better questions.

I've never heard better ones than those Micah asked: “What does the Lord require of thee - but to do justly? and to love mercy? and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Who knows what new possibilities lie beyond our sight and current understanding? Who knows what strength will be required of us the days ahead? All I hope is that you never lose sight of your own great courage. And that you never forget what a tremendous adventure your life has been and can continue to be. May you discover, again and again, the courage to overcome all the barriers and blockades and “ends of the world” that you encounter on your own surprising and glorious journey.

"A Heretic's Welcome" Sermon by Rev. Barbara Merritt Sept. 7, 2008

2008-09-25T16:45:00.002-04:00

FIRST READING

-from Philippians IV, 8
—
“Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

SECOND READING

-from “Socrates’ Defense” by Plato

The Greek poet, George Seferis wrote: “There are always but two parties, Socrates, and his accusers. One must choose.” I read to you from Socrates’ Defense as he faced his own accusers in ancient Athens. Socrates was on trial for heresy for which the penalty was death.

“I do not know what effect my accusers have had upon you, gentlemen, but my own part I was almost carried away by them—their arguments were so convincing. On the other hand, scarcely a word of what they said was true.

What did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accuser: ‘Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example.’”

Socrates responds by saying, “This is what I do. I go about seeking and searching in obedience to the divine command, if I think that anyone is wise, whether citizen or stranger, and when I think that person is not wise, I try to help the cause of God by proving that he is not.

Perhaps someone will say, ‘Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?’

I might fairly reply to him, ‘You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. A person has only one thing to consider in performing any action—that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good person or a bad one.

The truth of the matter is this. Where a person has once taken up his stand, either because it seems best to him or in obedience to his orders, I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger.

Suppose you said to me, ‘Socrates, on this occasion we shall disregard your accusers and acquit you, but only on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this quest and stop philosophizing. If we catch you going on in the same way, you shall be put to death.’

I should reply, ‘I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you, and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy.’

Please do not be offended if I tell you the truth. No one on earth who conscientiously opposes either you or any other organized democracy, and flatly prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life...the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong, which is far more fleet of foot.

If you expect to stop denunciation of your wrong way of life by putting people to death, there is something amiss with your reasoning. This way of escape is neither possible nor creditable. The best and easiest way is not to stop the mouths of others, but to make yourselves as good as you can.

Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.”

SERMON

“A Heretic’s Welcome” by Rev. Barbara Merritt

Where were you this summer? On a beach enjoying a cool ocean breeze? Or working in your garden? Did you travel far or stay close to home? What work did you accomplish? How playful were you able to be? Did your summer include visits with friends and family? Did you get to worship in your own way—here or elsewhere? Part of being together in religious community is sharing stories about where we have traveled outside this sanctuary.

My own summer included a family reunion in Sedona, Arizona, and some wonderful days in Maine. But the vast majority of my summer was spent in the 16th century in Europe. Not by choice, mind you. I was assigned last spring a major academic paper on The Effect of the Radical Protestant Reformation on the Unitarian Universalist Church of Today. To do that, I had to read four very long books on our history; on our founders and martyrs and original visionaries who first imagined the kind of a church where all souls would be welcomed and find encouragement.

It is not a bad idea to go back to the beginning. Ed Friedman (one of the great systems analysts) claims that the vision of the founders of any institution (or indeed any school of thought) transmit their genius and clarity through generations and centuries. It is almost like an intellectual form of DNA—replenishing over and over again. But it is not only ideas that get transmitted. There is also an emotional climate that filters through the ages, measured in the way people imagine their surroundings, take risks, self-differentiate and trust new possibilities.
Doing intensive historical research also carries the additional bonus of discovering arcane (but fascinating) details about the ordinary. For instance, the word influenza—I always assumed it was just another word for the flu—but it literally translates “influenced by the stars.” Back in the 16th century, the source of illness was believed to be astrological.

And these pulpit Bibles that sit at the front of almost every Protestant Church. I never gave it too much thought. There have been pulpit Bibles at First Unitarian Church for 223 years. (I
assumed they came with the candlesticks.) But back in the 16th century, when Martin Luther said that the basis for religious was not the Roman Catholic Church, but the Old and New Testaments, Bibles were expensive and rare. So in Protestant Churches, the Bible had to be visible and accessible so that everyone might be able to see for themselves. “Feel free—anytime.”

The churches and synagogues and temples have been trying to make truth accessible since time in-memorial. We often choose different bells, books and rituals. But all religious groups ask, “How can we share the truth we have discovered?” “How can we reach out to the larger community?” “How can we let people know that they are welcome here?” One of the questions that has arisen here at 90 Main Street is, “How we can better relate to a vital and expanding Hispanic community in Worcester?” How can our free church tradition be accessible to that particular demographic?

May I suggest that we at least might begin with the announcement that our founding, visionary, martyr, Michael Servetus was Spanish?! Michael Servetus, born in Spain in 1509, was the only man that John Calvin had burned at the stake as a heretic.

What I learned this summer was that there were literally hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the 1500’s who were slaughtered and tortured and burned for their religious convictions. What you believed about the church, the Bible and the appropriate time for baptism would often determine whether you lived or died, whether you could remain in your home and whether or not you could continue to work.

So why does history record, focus and revisit the violent clash between John Calvin and Michael Servetus? Why did this one burning of a theologian get so much attention then, and deserve so much attention now?

Some historians believe that John Calvin was “the last great medieval mind” and that Servetus was one of the “first great Renaissance/Enlightenment minds.”

Now until my current in-depth reading, I had always thought that John Calvin was a rat-fink for burning my guy at the stake. But now, after further research, what I think about Mr. Calvin can not be said from the pulpit. Well, I can at least give you a sense of what I think of John Calvin. He was a creep, a bully, a hypocrite, a malevolent, hateful, despicable, heinous, loathsome, reprehensible, revolting, vicious child of God.

Now, I have been told that only human acts are evil. We cannot (and should not) judge the person himself or herself. But the moral philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote that hypocrisy is, in truth, “the most hateful of vices because it desires to appear virtuous and convinces itself that it is virtuous, all the while destroying all possibilities for integrity with duplicity and lies.” She says (and I quote), “It makes the hypocrite rotten-to-the core.”

I knew since I was a child that Servetus was tortured and killed by Calvin. So Calvin killed someone in a particularly cruel way. It happens. What I didn’t know, until July, was that Calvin actively collaborated with Calvin’s own worst enemy, the Catholic Inquisition, to try to get the Inquisition to do his dirty work for him. The Inquisition was busy killing tens of thousands of Protestants (Calvin’s Protestants) when Calvin (hearing that Servetus was being held on trial by the Catholic Inquisition for heresy) sent his personal correspondence with Servetus to the Inquisition to provide conclusive evidence that Servetus should be destroyed by the Catholics. (In Calvin’s defense, he claimed that he had not personally put the postage on the letters that were sent. His first lieutenant had actually delivered the package.) This act of collaboration with the enemy would be the modern-day equivalent of George Bush calling up Osama Bin Laden and saying, “I know you’ve killed quite a few of my people, but there’s one really bad Pakastani that I think we can both agree is harmful to the order of the state. While you are in the region, would you mind killing him for me?”

Luckily for Servetus, after the Catholics had found him guilty of heresy and condemned him to die, he escaped. Unluckily for Servetus, he decided to go to Geneva. Calvin had him arrested, tried and burn. So why did Calvin hate Servetus so desperately?

First and foremost, this was about authority and the source of authority. Servetus in his writings, in his books did not just claim that the trinitarian formulation of creedal confession was not biblical. Servetus said something far more threatening. He said that neither the church, nor the state could decide what was true or false. Neither was the Bible an infallible source of truth.

For Servetus, truth rested within the human heart, mind and soul. It was the conscience that would lead us in the right direction. It was the choices human beings made that mattered.
Servetus wrote: “All seem to me to have part of the truth and a part of error, and each discerns the error of others and fails to see his own.” (Some things never change.)

But Calvin believed that allowing human beings to decide for themselves what was true and real, and what was false and in error would result in anarchy for the state, the complete destruction of the civil order, and would reduce the church to being “small and impotent.” (So, he was right on the last one.) Servetus’ humanism represented for Calvin the destruction of everything he knew and loved. And yet that was not the worst of Servetus’ sins in Calvin’s eyes.

They clashed about the nature of God. For Servetus, God was gracious and expansive and accessible—present in the individual soul. Servetus wrote, “One soul is a certain light of God, a spark of the spirit of God, having an innate light of divinity.” According to Servetus, God was to be found within and everywhere in the creation. Servetus wrote about Christ and the holy and true: “He descends to the lowest depths and ascends to the highest and fills all things. He walks upon the wings of the wind, rides upon the air and inhabits the place of angels. His place is not any particular part of heaven...he dwells within us.” For Servetus, human beings were meant to find union with God. Human beings were meant to participate in the divine nature.

Contrast Servetus’ mysticism with Calvin’s understanding of the Almighty. For John Calvin, God was distant, unapproachable, absolute sovereign and wholly other. God created human beings to be totally depraved—born in original sin and sometimes predestined to damnation. Completely determined not only in their final destination, but each soul had been either selected for salvation (or condemned to everlasting hellfire and damnation) since before the creation began. And you didn’t get to know whether you were a goat or a sheep—saved or damned until you died. The idea that God was close, loving and accessible drove Calvin “round the bend.” At the trial Calvin described himself screaming at Servetus. These are Calvin’s own words: “When Servetus asserted that all creatures are of the proper essence of God and so all things are full of gods (for he did not blush to speak and write his mind in this way) I, wounded with the indignity, objected: ‘What, wretch! If one stamps the floor would one say that one stamped on your God? Does not such an absurdity shame you?’ But he answered, ‘I have no doubt that this bench or anything you point to is God’s substance. This is my fundamental principle that all things are a part and portion of God and the nature of things is the substantial spirit of God.’”

Servetus went so far as to say that God was in children. Calvin insisted that children were completely evil. I read from the book, The Hunted Heretic, a biography of Servetus: “When Servetus declared that children could not commit a mortal sin, Calvin answered, ‘Servetus is worthy that the little chickens, all sweet and innocent as he makes them, should dig out his eyes a hundred thousand times.’” Calvin was a little twisted. I don’t think Calvin was a nice man, but I’ve told you that already.

The issue of when to baptize and christen was a big question back then. I am pleased that this morning after church (and many other times this fall) we will be welcoming little children into the world. In our christenings and welcomings and baptisms we welcome each child of God as innately good, as innocent and loved souls not as “condemned and predestined and depraved.”

Servetus was also condemned to die because he was declared to be an Anabaptist—a person who believed that one’s commitment to God had to come as an adult, as a choice, an important choice. Back then if you believed in adult baptism or re-baptism as it was called, you were a heretic and tens of thousands were killed in Calvin’s Switzerland and in Germany and throughout Europe.

To be fair, the Anabaptists didn’t just say that only an adult could commit his or her life to Christ. They said that infant baptism was satanic. There was a lot of name calling back then. And a lot of conviction that if you were on the right side of God, you would be saved and civilization would flourish. If you were on the wrong side you would go to hell, and you would destroy your church, your country and western civilization.

In the end Servetus begged for religious tolerance and as Calvin writes, “the plea for toleration was itself a confession of guilt.” So this is how Servetus died on October 27, 1553, and I quote from Fail, an eyewitness source: “Servetus was led to a pile of wood still green. A crown of straw and leaves (sprinkled with sulfur) was placed upon his head. His body was attached to the stake with an iron chain. His book was tied to his arm. A stout rope was wound four or five times around his neck. He asked that it should not be further twisted. When the executioner brought the fire before his face, he gave such a shriek that all the people were horror-stricken. As he lingered, some threw on wood. In a fearful wail he cried, “O Jesus, son of the Eternal God, have pity on me. At the end of half an hour, he died.” Servetus’ biographer, Roland Bainton adds: “Servetus might have been saved by shifting the position of the adjective and confessing Christ as the Eternal Son rather than as the Son of the Eternal God. That expiring cry was therefore one last gesture of defiance to human folly and confession to God.”

Returning to the 21st century where Servetus’ world view has triumphed—except in one arena: the source of ultimate authority. Many still consider it heretical to allow mere human beings to decide what is true and what is not—what is real and what is false. Some hold that the Bible is the infallible source of truth or the Koran. Some look to the church or the mosque or the temple.
The terrible ongoing conflict about abortion in our country is not about whether you think abortion is moral or immoral. (We are, of course, free to make our own decisions about that.) The argument between the pro-choice and the anti-choice forces are about who has the authority to make this decision to terminate a pregnancy. The anti-choice forces claim it must be mandated by the state. The pro-choice say that the decision must be made by the individual who will bear the child.

Even in 2008, Unitarians and Universalists are usually considered heretics by the orthodox, indeed by most religious people. We continue to insist on this radical principle that the source of ultimate religious authority is not in Rome or in Washington, D.C., not in bishops, not in this pulpit, not in these Bibles. The source of truth and goodness and divinity is within your own heart and mind and soul.

I hope you come here on Sunday mornings to be reminded of your own powerful spiritual center; of your strength, of your courage. Remember that what is holy holds you up day after day. In the floor boards—in the wind, in every breath you take. Because every Sunday you will be sent forth, out into the world to do what Socrates says is ultimately important, “trying to act rightly, devoting our lives to goodness.” With this gift of our own powerful and sustaining legacy of heresy, may we continue to dedicate our lives to the pursuit of truth and goodness.

"Your Resurrection" by Rev. Barbara Merritt Worship Service on Easter, March 23, 3008

2008-04-18T14:58:00.002-04:00

First Reading
John 21: 4-8

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, “Children, have you fish?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked; and jumped into the sea. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.

Second Reading
“Huckleberry Finn”
from an essay by Azar Nafisi an Iranian Professor of American Literature

A small boy named Huckleberry Finn contemplates his friend and runaway slave, Jim. Huck asks himself whether he should “give Jim up” or not. Huck was told in Sunday school that people who let slaves go free go to “everlasting fire.” But then, Huck says he imagines he and Jim in “the day and nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.” Huck remembers Jim and their friendship and warmth. He imagines Jim not as a slave but as a human being and he decides that, “alright, then, I’ll go to hell.”

What Huck rejects is not religion but an attitude of self-righteousness and inflexibility. I remember this particular scene out of Huck Finn so vividly today because I associate it with a difficult time in my own life. In the early 1980s, when I taught at the University of Tehran, I, like many others, was expelled. I was very surprised to discover that my staunchest allies were two students who were very active at the university’s powerful Muslim Students’ Association. These young men and I had engaged in very passionate and heated arguments. I had fiercely opposed their ideological stances. But that didn’t stop them from defending me. When I ran into one of them after my expulsion, I thanked him for his support. “We are not as rigid as you imagine us to be, Professor Nafisi,” he responded. “Remember your lectures on Huck Finn? Let’s just say, he is not the only one who can risk going to hell!”

A mysterious connection links individuals to each other despite their vast differences. No amount of political correctness can make us empathize with a child left orphaned in Darfur or a woman taken to a football stadium in Kabul and shot to death because she is improperly dressed. Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic of imagination creates this shock of recognition. Without this empathy there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented.

I believe that it is only through empathy that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child, or an Iraqi prisoner becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared—like Huck Finn—to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?

Sermon
“Your Resurrection” by Rev. Barbara Merritt

On Easter Sunday, throughout the world, there are a great many people who in liturgy, song, and ritual announce that “Jesus was crucified, dead and buried—he descended into hell, the third day he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God. Or so states the Apostles Creed.”

In the free church, you can reject that dogma, or you can believe it completely. But whether you understand Jesus to be resurrected is not the focus of an Easter celebration at the First Unitarian Church.

What I want you to imagine is your own resurrection. What sort of ongoing life can you look forward to? If you go to hell, even just for a day or two, will there be any transformative event afterwards? Does anything important about you survive tragedy, defeat or death?

I, myself, discovered a personal immortality when I was still an agnostic in college. In my junior year at the university, I took an advanced course in the Greek philosopher, Plato. And the professor, paraphrasing Plato, said very simply, “If you identify with what is transitory and fleeting in yourself, then you will have to die. But if you identify with what is eternal in you (in a spirit of love and truth, which transcends the material body) then you will have immortality.” I remember leaving the classroom metaphorically ten feet off the ground. My imagination had been given a spacious new way to consider life and death. And I suddenly understood a new possibility; that death did not necessarily mean the end of the consciousness or the soul.

Many of us might assume that the religious imagination is something that can be safely relegated to scripture and theologies. But if you pay attention, you will discover that all kinds of disciplines are struggling with describing the nature of reality, and the possibilities that await us all.

And not just ancient philosophers.

I heard a lecture a few weeks ago where the speaker said that “ironically, it may be science that eventually may be responsible for the discovery of God.” Even now, scientists in the realm of theoretical physics are imagining co-existent realities, realms that exist apart from the material world. Scientists, who spent a great many centuries tied to a mechanistic model of cause and effect and observable data, are now saying, “Maybe there is more?” Maybe there are things we can’t measure because we have been thinking in too small and rigid a framework. (Maybe, we might consider fishing on the other side of the boat.)

How you imagine the world has a huge impact on how you experience the world.

In the gospel according to Matthew, there is one line near the end of the last chapter describing the disciples experience of the resurrected Jesus: “They saw him, they worshipped, but some doubted.” So apparently even if the risen Christ is standing right in front of you, that does not necessarily mean you are going to give up thinking about the world that way you always have. Our doubts, our fears, our habitual thinking may be hard-wired. Or perhaps we are mentally stuck, only temporarily in a particular pattern of thought. Can anything break us open to what is new and unexpected? I love the description of Jesus’ fishing lesson to his friends after the resurrection. I swear, the more I read the gospels, the more convinced I am that they were written by early Unitarians.

Jesus has already shown himself to his disciples indoors. Then, on another occasion, he has even allowed the doubtful Thomas to stick his hand through his body. John claims Jesus showed himself over and over again to his skeptical disciples; so many times in fact, that they are not even written down.

Then Simon Peter says, “Ok, time to go fishing,” After a night of unsuccessful fishing, Jesus appears to them again and speaks to them from close to the shore directly asking, “Have you caught anything?” And the disciples (who like all disciples, are as dumb as posts) are reported to have come to this conclusion: “The disciples knew not that it was Jesus.”

Now, I guess at this point, Jesus could have preached a sermon to them, or scolded them, or pointed in a vigorous manner at himself. Instead, he asked for them to do something differently, to lower their nets on a new side of the boat. Now you can just hear the rational arguments: Why change? (Same water on the left as on the right; same Sea of Tiberius; the fish didn’t bite last night, or this morning—why would they bite over there, when nothing is going on over here.) We human beings have strong convictions that we know exactly how the universe operates, and if we only keep doing what we have been doing, eventually things will improve. But Jesus says, “No, do something new.” Change your orientation, imagine that a stranger on the shore might know something that you don’t. And when the disciples moved to the other side, it wasn’t only their nets that became full of fish; their eyes opened, and their hearts awoke and they understood that there were miracles in every direction.

Easter is a story, an important story, about how all of us can see things we’ve never seen before, how we can move past the old, imprisoning assumptions, and beliefs. How the world keeps getting larger, if you pay attention.

Huck Finn is a resurrection story in this context. Huckleberry Finn absolutely believes that he will be “damned to the everlasting hell-fires” if he breaks the law and help a runaway slave. It is not his beliefs that change—he knows about hell (he’s tasted a little of it here on earth.) But he is willing to take the leap of action and say to himself “it doesn’t ultimately matter what I believe. What matters is how I act. And I love my friend Jim, and I will act on his behalf.” As Professor Nafisi observed in the second reading, “the magic of imagination creates this shock of recognition.” And from this empathy, this connection with one another, even with strangers on the other side of the globe, we may just risk hell and then find ourselves entering heaven.

It is not ultimately about what we think; it is about what we actually do.

An eloquent speaker illustrated our predicament to me recently when described a scenario something like this:
“You love your physician. You admire her skill, her devotion to her patients, and her formidable training. You consider the medical building in which she works to be somewhat of a shrine. You gently touch the threshold of the doorway as you enter, in acknowledgement of the great work of healing that occurs in the building. You listen attentively to everything your doctor says to you. You appreciate the thoroughness of her check-up, and the intelligence with which she lays out a plan for your treatment. You believe that she is the “bees knees” a stellar professional. You have faith in a noble and great physician. The one thing you won’t do is take the medicine she prescribes.”

Now, such a foolish patient can only be pitied. But you’d be surprised how many people believe that a church building is sacred ground: that one should listen to the teachings of the saints, that one should hold in very high regards the creeds and rituals and ethical teachings of synagogue and churches and temples. But they can’t quite see that it might be necessary to act differently…to change…to enter into relationships in new and transformative ways. Maybe just believing in the goodness of churches will make a difference? Maybe some one else can do the spiritual work required? Maybe I need to only admire good and trustworthy people and don’t actually have to become one myself?

Which brings me directly to the topic of Your Resurrection. Not Jesus’, not your neighbor’s, but yours.

My colleague and dear friend, The Reverend John Robinson, put it eloquently:

The congregations sing, “Christ the Lord is ris’n today.” Is!” “Today!” They do not sing “Christ was raised one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-six years ago, today.” No, they sing a present fact, a fact that is known in the human heart and spirit that opens itself to the life and wonder of this world around us. Each moment of our lives is a rebirth, if we are but awake to the living that breaks in around us each moment.

The musician listens for the pure note and tunes his or her instrument to it. All too often we hear and tune our lives to the dissonant cacophony of shouted claims around us: to earn more, to spend more, to seek the comfortable, the easier, to the shouts of the television and politicians and causes, to the warnings and fears that beset us. Too seldom do we set our tune to the clear true note which rings still within us.

But each year we are reminded that something “is ris’n,” (call it Christ or what you will), in our lives “today.” To know it we must listen, be awake to be alive.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, wrote that “the splendor and grace of Easter is meant to raise us, to open our imaginations.”

I don’t know what your personal resurrection means. It might be completely in the realm of the material world. Today, you might commit to be an organ donor—to give the gift of life and sight and hearing to someone who lives on after you die. Today, you might decide to give a scholarship to encourage the next generation to learn, to contribute, to have hope. Today, (or as soon as the ground thaws—say, late May) you may plant a tree, or write a check to UNICEF, or work for the political candidate that you believe can improve the world.
Your personal resurrection may be the way you get up from your pew this morning. Hopefully, with a willingness to fish in a new way—willing to take a second chance—willing to change the way you act. Deciding that, “all right then, this may just take me to hell,” but I’m willing to risk it all to help a friend, to close the distance, to make my love real, incarnate, visible, and constant. “I’m willing to keep changing.” “I’m willing to risk it all.”

The Worcester poet, Stanley Kunitz, in a few lines of his poem entitled “The Layers,” describes the lifelong journey from hell to an ongoing and constantly surprising resurrection.

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Small deaths, large deaths, great losses, small defeats; they will not be the end of you. Not when you remember that you are in the resurrection business. Always turning your imagination in the direction of radical change, real joy, and the triumph of the spirit.
When we sing together as a community about joy and resurrection, and the “triumphant song of life,” we are doing more than providing a thunderous alleluia chorus. We are also bearing emphatic witness to one another’s struggles. This is not just about my resurrection. In truth, we can’t do this resurrection work alone.

We are calling out to one another: “Have courage! Keep going! Sure, you might go to hell, but it will be worth it. Keep acting on behalf of love and hope, and on behalf of truth and goodness.” And somehow, a mystery will sustain us all. A miraculous abundance will astonish us, and we will find ourselves in the presence of God.

Today there is every reason to be joyful.

"Right Relationship" by Rev. Barbara Merritt Worship Service of Feb. 24, 2008

2008-04-18T14:14:00.002-04:00

First Reading
from Isaiah 42 & 58

Here is my servant whom I upheld,
my chosen one with whom I am pleased,
Upon whom I have put my spirit,
he shall bring forth justice to nations,
I, the Lord, have called you for the victory of justice,
I have grasped you by the hand;
I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people,
a light for the nations,
To open the eyes of the blind,
to bring out prisoners from confinement,
and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.

Would that today you might fast
so as to make your voice heard on high!
Is this the manner of fasting I wish,
of keeping a day of penance?
That a man bow his head like a reed,
and lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
This, rather is the fasting that I wish:
releasing those bound unjustly,
untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed.

Second Reading
“Stranger on the Bus” by Lawrence Kushner

A light snow was falling and the streets were crowded with people. It was Munich in Nazi Germany. One of my rabbinic students, Shifra Penzias, told me her great-aunt, Sussie, had been riding a city bus home from work when SS storm troopers suddenly stopped the coach and began examining the identification papers of the passengers. Most were annoyed, but a few were terrified. Jews were being told to leave the bus and get into a truck around the corner.

My student’s great-aunt watched from her seat in the rear as the soldiers systematically worked their way down the aisle. She began to tremble, tears streaming down her face. When the man next to her noticed that she was crying, he politely asked her why.

“I don’t have the papers you have. I am a Jew. They’re going to take me.”

The man exploded with disgust. He began to curse and scream at her. “You stupid bitch,” he roared. “I can’t stand being near you!”

The SS men asked what all the yelling was about.

“Damn her,” the man shouted angrily. “”My wife has forgotten her papers again! I’m so fed up. She always does this!”

The soldiers laughed and moved on.

My student said that her great-aunt never saw the man again. She never even knew his name.

You are going about your business when you stumble onto something that has your name on it. Or, to be more accurate, a task with your name on it finds you. Its execution requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice. You step forward and encounter your destiny. This does not mean you must do everything that lands on your doorstep, or that you should assume every risk or make every self-sacrifice. But it does mean that you must tell yourself the truth about where you have been placed and why.

You don’t exercise your freedom by doing what you want. Self-indulgence is not an exercise of freedom. But when you accept the task that destiny seems to have set before you, you become free. Perhaps the only exercise of real freedom comes from doing what you were meant to do all along.

If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything. We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.
Even on a bus in Munich.

Sermon
“Right Relationships” by the Rev. Barbara Merritt

This morning it is my troublesome responsibility to report to you that there are real problems with the professional staff that serves this church. I don’t mean that among the people that you employ for the benefit of this parish there are a few difficult issues. No, there is a systemic problem that affects everyone on the payroll: full-time and part-time, professional and administrative and janitorial. Despite a very clear and well-researched personnel policy manual, the discrepancy between policy and practice persists.

It became glaringly evident last week when our sexton Jim came to me and said that he absolutely refused to accept over-time pay for additional hours worked here over the last few weeks, and that if the personnel policy said that he had to, then we needed to change the policy. Donna, our newsletter editor, refused to take President’s Day off, which is an official First Unitarian holiday, specifically named in said “Personnel Policy.” Why? Because we’ve had a number of snow days when she couldn’t come in, but worked at home. Will, our Choir Master, has put in so many volunteer hours over the years that it is ridiculous. (Just ask him how long it takes to make a CD.) Abby, our RE Assistant, is paid for 10 of the hours she works here on behalf of our kids; the other 10 hours she donates and will not accept money for. Barbara Foley, our Parish Administrator, has been woken up at midnight and come down to the church to fix the alarms. None of this is in the job descriptions.

I could go on and on. But one must ask, Rev. Schade is their supervisor! What kind of behavior is he modeling? Well, Tom refuses to take a raise, and he and Sue are among our most generous pledgers. And me? Well, I work part-time theoretically. As of 2008, I get 10 days off a month. Well, that didn’t happen in January. I only got 7. So I made a really conscientious, determined effort in February. This month I will be taking 5 days off.

Is it in the water? Are those who work here totally unaware of job descriptions, or the precarious economy, or that normal people take the vacation days that are given? Is it possible statistically to hire all work-a-holics in every position in an organization?

The answer to all those questions is, no. I have figured out who is to blame – and it is you. The congregation. When the staff at First Unitarian works with a group of people where the membership and the leadership are generous and committed with both their time and their money; when you spend your day in the company of those who serve freely and cheerfully (and with enthusiasm and good humor) it is contagious! There is no resisting the pull to help in any way you can. There is a culture in this church which inspires visitors, long-time members and those of us on the payroll. This culture is one of service.

Now in Judaism the faith community is by-in-large an inherited relationship, a covenanted body that extends through history and is passed on from generation to generation. The free church, in contrast, has been called a “chosen faith.” Most Unitarian Universalists (even those of us whose parents and grandparents were Unitarians) still imagine ourselves as being in an entirely voluntary community. We come here freely; we can leave freely; and while our children are invited and encouraged to “keep the faith,” they are under no obligation to do so.

Nevertheless, once you sign our membership book, the congregation you walk with is not custom-ordered to your particular political and spiritual preference. What you see is what you get. You are stuck with some who prefer the choir staying with the classical repertoire and some who want more gospel and jazz. In this parish there are some who will spend their vacation helping Katrina victims in New Orleans and some whose lives are already so overwhelming that they can’t volunteer for a single committee, or even attend a coffee hour. The essential question at First Unitarian is not, “What’s in it for me?” The central question is, “What am I here on earth to do?”

Good company is a powerful spiritual force. When any one person focuses his or her energy on caring for their neighbor, offering their talents and working to bring about a better world (and to be a better person) this individual commitment has a profound affect on everyone around them. And I would add, the greater the service and the love we bring, the greater the influence on our surroundings.

I will be the first to admit that a congregation is an odd setting in which to attempt to change the world. Rabbi Kushner, the eloquent author of the reading about the bus in Munich, also serves a congregation near Boston. And he writes about congregations:
“The power of congregational life comes precisely from this involuntariness of association. We look about the room and realize these people are not friends or even acquaintances; we do not agree with them about much; these are simply people we are stuck with. This generates a kind of love both more intense and more complicated than the voluntary variety. These members of our community, just like the people in our family, literally make us who we are.”

People come here to worship and to hopefully move closer to God, to truth, to reality and their own deepest sources of inner strength. This wonderful gift of being “stuck” with one another broadens our horizons and helps to develop “who we are.” And the more time you spend in “good company,” I suspect, the more you will find that you are developing a better prospective, clearer priorities and increased hope. As you engage in all kinds of relationships (congregational, work, family and friends) your aspirations naturally increase to live in right relationships, in harmony, in relationships which are sustainable, life-giving and creative. How do we go about creating such relationships? Who gets to define what is a “right relationship” versus a wrong relationship?

Through the laws of biblical Judaism, the answer is a clear one. God decides. And God issues commandments – very detailed instructions about exactly how you are to relate to your neighbor. The word “relationship” doesn’t appear once in the Bible. Not in the Jewish scripture. And not in the Christian one either. But the words “righteous” and “right” appear hundreds of times: “righteous” meaning that the nature of our interactions with our neighbor needs to be ones of honesty, goodness, excellence, virtue, and what the ancient Hebrews called “holiness.” Kushner said it beautifully. “The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.”

Judaism is explicit on this point. What is at the heart of reality has a relationship with each one of us. There is a sacred responsibility between each of us. Especially between those of us who have been blessed with some affluence or resources: we have been given the responsibility to care for the imprisoned and those who live in darkness. Our responsibility is towards those who are burdened, oppressed, hungry, homeless, naked, and perhaps most challenging, our own blood relatives. Do that and you are promised, “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your wounds shall quickly be healed.”

The modern problem with the prophets of biblical Judaism is that they “commanded.” The prophets weren’t big on “advice” or “suggestions.” They never asked, “Have you ever considered ‘holiness’ as an option?” They thundered! They demanded obedience. They said there would be hell to pay if we didn’t take care of these relationships entrusted into our care. We are many millennium away from such language. We may appreciate it as beautiful poetry or inspiring moral teaching, but we would rather participate in the life and troubles of our neighbor on a voluntary basis.

And too often we volunteer to live alone: apart, separate, unengaged, unconscious or as John Muir described us, “like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” How have we lost our sympathy, our understanding that we are all in this together? Three ways quickly come to mind. Best illustrated by three stories.

First Story: The Black Sheep and the White Sheep by Catholic priest and writer, Anthony DeMello.

A shepherd was grazing his sheep when a passerby said, “That’s a fine flock of sheep you have. Could I ask you something about them?” “Of course,” said the shepherd. Said the man, “How much would you say your sheep walk each day?” “Which ones, the white ones or the black ones?” asked the shepherd. “The white ones.” “Well, the white ones walk about four miles a day.” “And the black ones?” “The black ones too.”

“And how much grass would you say they eat each day?” “Which ones, the white or the black?” “The white ones.” “Well, the white ones eat about four pounds of grass each day.” “And the black ones?” “The black ones eat about four pounds of grass each day.” “And how much wool would you say they give each year?” “Which ones, the white or the black?” “The white ones.” “Well, I’d day the white ones give some six pounds of wool each year at shearing time.” “And the black ones?” “The black ones too.”

The passerby was intrigued. “May I ask you why you have this strange habit of dividing your sheep into white and black each time you answer one of my questions?” “Well,” said the shepherd, “that’s only natural. The white ones are mine, you see.” “Ah! And the black ones?” “The black ones too,” said the shepherd.

And then DeMello adds, “The human mind makes foolish divisions in what Love sees as One.” The first rupture of relationship comes when we separate and divide.

Second story: appearing in a new philosophy book entitled, Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, DC.

Melvin was dying. He was old, very old, He had seen much suffering in his life. Trudy, his wife, was seated on the edge of the bed, wiping his brow. They had lived together for more than seventy years.

“Tell me, Trudy, do you remember the Depression years when we barely had enough to get by?” he asked her.

“Of course. I remember. I was with you through all that,” Trudy answered.

“Do you remember the lean years after the war, when I was working two jobs and going to school?”

“Of course. I was with you then too, my love.”

“Were you with me when I lost my job?”

“Of course, my love. I’ve been with you. Always.”

Melvin was silent for a moment. Then he looked at his loving wife, “You see Trudy, I think you were bad luck.”

The second rupture of relationship? Blame and criticism, pushing others away and projections.
And the third relationship killer? Something called the inner tyrant—insisting that you get to call the shots, that you must be the one in control, that you get to be the judge and the jury on your own life, and everyone else’s.

This story is true. One of my nephews was asked by his mother (when he was 3 ½ years old), “Please pick up your toys now.” And he turned to his Mom with hands on his hips and said, “You’re not the boss of me!”

What happens when we get older? When adults say to God, say to their neighbor, say to their spouse, say to their boss, “You’re not the boss of me!” While no one ought to be bullied or pushed around, sometimes we take our independence so seriously that we forget that we are called to work with, to comfort and to adjust. But the little, inner tyrant only wants to have its own way.
Divisiveness, blame and arrogance all cut at the root of our connectedness with one another and with God. All of the common human failings call us to repentance. All remind us that we need to turn in new directions. Ashes and sackcloth and traditional fasting will not do. We are called in this Lenten season to return to what is most essential. And when it comes to right relationship there are three actions that can begin to heal our wounds: service, sustainability, and vulnerability.

Beginning with service. Bob Dylan wrote, “You are going to have to serve somebody…well it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody!” But why stop with those two choices? You can serve your own selfish, small agenda or you can serve the Beloved Community. You can serve the least of them or the most powerful. You can serve the highest and most enduring vision you’ve ever encountered, or you can sit at the altar of your television set, and serve the gods of entertainment. When we serve and how we serve and who we serve – these are choices we make with every breath we take.

Next: sustainability. Right relationship takes us immediately into our responsibility for the environment. Once we become conscious that our well-being (and our neighbor in Africa’s well-being) has everything to do with how our resources are used and allotted. (And that there are consequences to what we eat, and how we travel and what we buy and what we throw away) then we find ourselves within a “luminous organism of sacred responsibility.” This becomes our vocation and our privilege.

And the final remedy to bring us back into right relationship would be vulnerability. A subject that I know almost nothing about. Vulnerability is the capacity to face the challenges of your life with an open heart, with trust, with a willingness to take great risks, and to move closer to everyone you meet.

It is a mystery. It happened on that bus in Munich between strangers. It may happen in coffee hour after church today. It is the ongoing miraculous decision not to be afraid, guarded, independent or alone. It is to let the marble fall away from our shining surfaces and to greet one another as just one more struggling soul whom we have the opportunity to bless.

Right relationship, that is our calling. That is our sacred responsibility. That is what will teach us to live in peace.

"A Wretch Like Me" by Rev. Barbara Merritt November 25, 2007

2008-01-23T11:03:00.000-05:00

First Reading
Matthew 18: 23-33

“Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you seventy-seven times.”

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of the servant released him and forgave him the debt.

But that same servant, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.” Then his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.

When his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy unto you?”

Second Reading
from “My Name Is Waiting” by M. Shawn Copeland

I am a child born of the union of tradition and crisis. Sorrow is my grandmother; suffering and striving my aunts; begin anew my great-grandmother. My name is waiting.

My name has lived my life under the whip, under the lash; my name has lived my life within walls, within bondage; my name has lived my life through exodus, through sojourn.

I have waited in the desert of Syria, in the streets of Egypt, in the land of Babylon. I have waited in the cloisters of France, in the rice-paper houses of Japan. I have waited in the slave ships bound for hell, in the barrios of southern California.

I have waited in the tin shanties in Soweto, I have waited in the showers of Buchenwald; I have waited in the hills of the Dakotas.

I have waited in fields and vineyards, picking cotton and beans and grapes, cutting cane. I have brought down my hoe on hard ground; I have gripped the plow firmly; I have forced fruit from the earth.

I have waited in houses—washing, cooking, cleaning. I have sheltered the orphan, welcomed the stranger, embraced the lonely. I have lived alongside pain and disease, poverty and misery, anxiety and affliction. I have pleaded and hurt; I have known the coming of despair; I have given birth.

I have waited in the journey. My throat has grown parched thirsting for truth and justice. My feet have grown bloody cutting a path across the precipice, making a way where there is no way. I have slept under gathering clouds with hope; I have rested near fresh water with faith; I have eaten and grown strong with love.

I have known blood and want and pain and joy. I have drunk water from the well; I have walked the threshing floor; I have been to the mountaintop.
I am waiting.

Sermon
“A Wretch Like Me” by the Rev. Barbara Merritt

At the turn of the last century, a writer named Ambrose Bierce was probably the greatest cynic about American society in general, and human nature in particular.

He told the story of Satan, God’s archangel, and his spectacular fall from grace into Hell. Bierce used information gleaned from the Unitarian poet John Milton that Satan’s sin was much worse than mere rebellion. Satan rejected human beings. Satan thought that God was making a terrible mistake in creating such a creature.

According to Ambrose Bierce, this fallen angel was “halfway in his descent from heaven when he bent his head in thought and at last went back up to God saying, ‘There is one favor that I should like to ask.’

‘Name it,’ responded God.

‘Humanity, I understand, is about to be created. They will need laws.’

God replied, ‘What wretch?! You their appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with the hatred of their souls, you ask for the right to make their laws?!’

‘Pardon,’ answered Satan, ‘what I have to ask is that humanity be permitted to make their laws themselves.’ It was so ordered.”

Like any good story, this explains a great deal. Human laws are a reasonable reflection of human beings. Sometimes noble and inspiring and consistent and helpful. Sometimes tragically flawed, often used unfairly and oppressively, and more often, frustrating and obstructive.

At the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, it took my breath away to see the signs, laws posted by the government only a few decades ago: whites only—colored drinking fountain. And editorial cartoons where the segregationist South is portrayed as the innocent victim of an evil and bullying Federal Government.

There are times in history where we tend to look at events and shake our heads, and say, “How could they have been so wrong?” More rarely we say, “How could we have been so wrong?” But almost never do we say about ourselves, “How is it that I am so wrong right now?”

At this particular moment in American history, we may see foreign policy as wrong, and our political leaders as wrong, and domestic energy policies as shortsighted and ultimately harmful. But we tend to see ourselves as good, as well intentioned, as trying our best and hard working. We work to gain self-esteem. We hope for the respect of others.

And Unitarian Universalists adopt this optimistic view of human nature as our first principle, “The inherent worth and dignity of every human being.” This is a good principal, possibly even a great principle. It is a transformative alternative to the doctrine of original sin. We have rejected a religion of self-hatred, of shame, of belittling ourselves or others. We dismiss any theology that claims that we are inherently evil, condemned at birth or destined to fail. Unitarian Universalists for centuries have proclaimed a God of love who embraces every person, good, bad or indifferent, and we maintain that eventually every child of God will be saved: the atheist and the undecided, as well as the devout and the observant.

“And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”(Julian of Norwich) But like every good thing, when taken to extremes, we can get into trouble. In our passion to vanquish original sin, we went way over to the other side saying, “Actually there is nothing wrong with us; we’re all good. Unitarians are just a nice, creative, engaging and wonderful gathering of folks.”

T.S. Eliot grew up as a Unitarian, the grandson of a famous St. Louis Unitarian minister. When he converted to the high Anglican Church of England, he left us with a description of the typical Unitarian church about 70 years ago. “To be a Unitarian was to be noble, upright and superior to all other human beings. Unitarians believed that they were already enlightened. The enlightenment for them was an intellectual achievement. Unitarians were put on earth to better the lot of humanity, to be a good and inspiring example. Unitarians were expected to be dutiful, benevolent, cheerful, self-restrained and unemotional. They attended church to set a good example to others.”

Ouch.

Would that we could say that we’ve made great progress in embracing our complexity and our frailties over 70 years, but one glance at our hymnal will tell you otherwise. “Man is the earth, upright and proud.” We are the earth, upright and proud. “Forward through the ages, hearts of one accord, manifolds the service, one the sure reward.” And my personal favorite, and I mean that honestly, it is my personal favorite. “We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken. We’ll build a land where the captives go free.” We’ll create a perfectly wonderful world—that’s our job! And it’s not all bad to try to take some responsibility to improve the earth, even if the words to our hymns do show a little arrogance, a little too much optimism and a truly breath-taking naiveté. But sometimes when I’m preaching about how we haven’t been making much progress with “creating a perfect world”…and I search for hymns about human inadequacy and failure and defeat and need…then I discover there aren’t a whole lot of hymns on that subject.

It was pointed out to me in St. Louis at Prairie Group that whenever UUs sing Amazing Grace (as we will for our closing hymn this morning), we are given an alternative wording. There is an asterisk attached to the word “wretch” and if you look below you will see that you don’t have to claim to be a “wretch.” When you sing with your brothers and sisters in this sanctuary, you may substitute the word “soul.” That saves a “soul” like me. Please note that the word “wretch” doesn’t mean what you assume it means (terrible person, completely awful or contemptible.) The word “wretch” came from the Old English meaning: lost or in exile. We ask for grace to save those of us who are lost; those of us who are not sure how we fit in; those of us who are a “stranger in a strange world”; those of us who don’t feel completely at home. Who in our midst does not know what that feels like? Who doesn’t need grace, help and forgiveness?

UUs tend to be in our comfort zone when we are feeling successful, effective, hard working and right (progressing in the direction of becoming smarter, stronger and more evolved.) But we don’t always get to live in our comfort zone. Sometimes, lots of times, we are confronted with our need: our falling short of the mark, failing to meet our own expectations let alone the expectations of others. We are incapable of doing what we want to do. And we are not usually happy to discover just how complicated we are: good and bad—lost and found—winning and failing.

One alternative for those of us who do not wish to be conscious of all that complexity going on with ourselves is to project our shadow onto someone else. A few years ago the political far right demonized Bill Clinton. And I couldn’t understand then how they could focus so much hatred on a nationally elected leader. But now the left seems to be doing exactly the same thing with Bush and Cheney (at least I am.) It is not easy for me to remember that they are children of God, let alone affirming and promoting their inherent dignity and worth.

Another popular alternative to embracing our inner confusion is to simply try harder. We say: “I’ll be so good, I won’t need to be forgiven. I’ll be so disciplined and strong, I won’t need any grace.” For these deluded souls Jesus offered a rather harsh teaching parable. He is telling Peter that human life is not about an occasional forgiving act, but rather a lifetime of forgiveness (70 x 7.) Jesus describes a servant in dreadful circumstances (who owes a vast sum, in today’s numbers about $300,000) who pleads for mercy for this huge and unpayable debt and receives forgiveness. But then he is so unconscious of the value of what he has been blessed with, that he refuses to offer forgiveness to the one who owes him a small sum (equivalent to about $56.) That first, foolish servant only experiences the king as cruel, demanding and quick to judge and throw him into prison, when what he expects is justice. It seems that reality only appears to be merciful when you are able to plead for mercy. But when you can’t ask or when you can’t hear someone else’s asking, you will live in a prison of your own making with high stonewalls and heavy metal locks. It is our own delusions of autonomy and independence and self-righteousness that entrap us and convince us that the world is a harsh, angry and brutal realm. When we don’t know how to ask for help, when we don’t learn how to offer mercy to others, we are in prison.

The song, “Amazing Grace” offers the secret to our freedom. There is a grace that reaches those of us who are lost, who live in confusion, who don’t know which way to go. “A wretch like me” is a phrase that has two meanings. The first (and most common) is that I describe myself as a wretch—just as I would say about a “vegetarian like me” or a “blue-eyed person like me.” But there is another hidden meaning in the phrase that speaks to our mutuality. That “save a wretch like me” can mean a grace that saves someone else whom I identify with …that saves a guy named Ralph or Henry or Bill…that saves a sister named Mary or Jane or Ellen. If grace can save them (as flawed and as confused as they are) then there is some hope for me. In this second interpretation, I begin to identify with all those who are lost and waiting, those who are struggling, occasionally failing, those who ignore my feelings.

This identification with those who lose, I believe, is at the heart of the Red Sox Nation. Our recent successes not withstanding, the reason people all across the nation (and indeed around the world) root for the Red Sox is not that we are the ones that always win. It is that we went so long without winning. And now our recent success is all the more sweeter. It’s almost as if to find what we really want, we have to go some of the way on the path of failure and losing and falling short.

I must learn to see not only my own inherent worth and dignity. I must also learn to see my own inherent limitations and capacity for delusion. And we need to see those limitations in the people we live with and work with and who cut us off in traffic. We must continue to picture seeing them as children of God and forgive them 70 x 7. (Which I suppose must necessarily include the car and driver I gave a rather unpleasant and unfortunate gesture to on 495 on Friday afternoon.) We wait with all of God’s children for mercy, for grace, for the strength to continue.

We are complicated souls, every one of us. What makes us loved and loveable is not how good we are. (We are good and bad.) What makes us saved and savable is how open we are to receive the love and the mercy that is offered.

One poet in particular lived in Indian, in the 17th century. Sarmad was a mystic who was claimed by Jews, Hindus and Moslems as a faithful member of their tribe. Well now, 400 years later I want to claim his as an early Unitarian, as one of us, especially when he wrote: “Never, by God, will I pretend devotion. And no where will I beg, but at the door of Reality.” That could be our new UU motto: “Nowhere do we beg, but at the door of Reality.”

Samad wrote:
Every moment and everywhere
I am aware that your grace and forgiveness
outweigh my transgressions.
My misdeeds cannot outdo your compassion –
I am never concerned with the mercy of God.

God knows my rebelliousness and his clemency
My feet have worn these chains of selfishness for a lifetime –
I have hope for a thousand salvations
in a single act of God’s grace.

Sometimes my heart pines for the world –
Sometimes for the world beyond
My eyes well up with tears –
I am drowning in a sea of regret.
My only wish is that even for one breath –
I may not forget God –
But alas, with every breath, I am negligent.

And finally:
Every moment now, I am keeping the account –
my rebellion and your mercy.

The poets I love speak the same language. I skip ahead four centuries to end with a new poem by the contemporary poet Mary Oliver.
Lord God, mercy is in your hands
Pour me a little
And tenderness too
My need is great.

When I first found you
I was filled with light
Now, the darkness grows
And it is filled with crooked things
Bitter and weak
Each one bearing my name.

She writes: “Belief isn’t always easy. But this much I have learned—to live with my eyes open. I know what everyone wants is a miracle—kindness is a miracle.”

May you know kindness. My you offer kindness to others. And may grace save us, now and always. Amen.

A Broken Hallelujah by Rev. Barbara Merritt December 9, 2007

2008-01-16T15:30:00.000-05:00

First Reading
from Isaiah Chapter 9

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

For thou has broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor…

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Second Reading
from “A Prayer of Praise” by C. S. Lewis

When I first began to draw near to belief in God (an even for some time after) I found a stumbling block in the demand so clamorously made by all religious people that we should “praise” God: still more in the suggestion the God Himself demanded it. We all despise the person who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence, or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand. Worse still was the statement put into God’s own mouth, “What I most want is to be told that I am good and great.”

It is perhaps easiest to begin to understand praise with inanimate objects. What do we mean when we say that a picture is “admirable”? The sense in which the picture “deserves” or “demands” admiration is this: that admiration is the correct, adequate or appropriate response to it; that is if we do not admire, we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers, we shall have missed something. Many objects both in Nature and in Art may be said to deserve, or merit, or demand admiration.

But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their beloved, readers praising their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and spacious minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read.

Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. The worthier the object, the more intense this delight would be. Praise not merely expresses, but completes the enjoyment. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good she is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch. If you hear a good joke, you must find someone to share it with.

Sermon
“A Broken Hallelujah” by the Rev. Barbara Merritt

A close friend gave me a CD of her son’s a cappella group at Bowdoin College. On it there was one song I loved, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It had vaguely religious words—hallelujah, King David and countless references to brokenness. But what I really loved was the haunting melody.
So last August through a choir member (because I didn’t have the courage to ask Will Sherwood directly), I inquired whether the choir could perform this piece. Now Will, while not being a great fan of popular music, is still a “sport.” And he agreed, and the choir agreed and we chose December 9th for its premier performance. I was a happy camper until I actually started looking at the lyrics last week. And the more I looked, the more nervous and bewildered I became.

To begin with: even though there are only a few verses, there is a lot of pain expressed—pain and failure and disappointment. And then I found some extra verses (apparently it took Cohen five years to write this song, and he wrote some 80 verses.) In one of them, he declares: “love is not a victory march. . .it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah…”

Well! What exactly are we praising in this little ditty? So I thought I had best read some of what others had written about Hallelujah. In the magazine Rolling Stone, the reviewer wrote: “The dark poetic music of Leonard Cohen should be listed on the table of periodic elements. . .when you discover it, it suddenly seems as necessary as oxygen…Hallelujah is concerned with the sanctity of real life and the dangers of real love.” So far, so good.

Then in the online magazine Stylus, someone wrote: “In Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen explains Judeo-Christian theology, desperation and sex, as well as faith in times of crisis and in times of calm.” Now I’m really getting nervous.

One blogger claims that Hallelujah is “the best song ever written.” Another calls it just pop music written by a melancholic composer. Bob Dylan told Leonard Cohen that he especially liked the lines: “even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!” One blogger wrote “this song addresses the doubts and mistrusts of all relationships, from the supposed ultimate relationship between the creator and the created, all the way down to earthly relationships.” Another wrote at some length: “No other story explores as deeply the relationship between romantic love, pain, music and spirituality. Romantic love is heralded as the widest gateway to pain. The song is an ode to the brokenness that comes through love, rejoicing in the beauty of this paradox.” He continues: “The minor fall and the major lift—the fall produces a minor tone, distinguishable to the ear when it stands alone, but together with the major lift it completes the chord that pleases the Lord. And that ending lift would not be possible without a place from which to rise.” And he goes on: “The betrayed, hurt, broken lover responds not with anger, helplessness or jaded indifference, but rather with a simple and honest declaration—‘Glory to the Lord.’”

I had read just about enough! Praise in the midst of a broken world and a broken heart? Sing hallelujah in the darkest season of the year? I turned to my etymological dictionary. What exactly does “hallelujah” mean?

The word consists of two parts. The first, “hallelu” is the imperative commanding form of the word “to praise” and the last part, “jah” is an abbreviation for Yaweh. Hallelujah is the commandment to praise, not the invitation or the suggestion. It is the sacred obligation—the requirement to praise—it doesn’t matter whether you understand your circumstances to be holy, or wholly broken—everyone of us is called to sing hallelujah, and it can be a loud and happy song in a major key, or it can be a quiet, persistent melody in a minor key.

In all human circumstances, we are commanded to appreciate. Isaiah described where we stand “in the darkness.” And to people like us—imperfect, stumbling and lost—people who live in the land of the shadow of death—to such people comes a great light. And the yoke of our burdens will be broken. And unto us a child is given—someone wonderful—a Prince of Peace.

This week our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate Hanukkah. Long ago in the midst of a broken and devastated temple, at a time of war and defeat and oppression, the light in the oil lamps kept going. Those who light candles in the darkness of December are saying: “You win your freedom by acts of praise, with persistent courage, always appreciating what is essential, what endures.”

And the Christian tradition asks us to reflect on the ancient story of the birth of Jesus. But we are not asked to celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem, or in a quiet monastery of purity and calm. We are invited to celebrate in shopping malls where, it turns out, a depressed and desperate teenager may decide (with an AK47) to end it all and take out a few random innocent victims as he goes. But I don’t have to tell you that this is a genuinely broken world. Here, and in Iraq, and in the Sudan, and in Los Angeles, and in Worcester, Massachusetts in hospitals and prisons and nursing homes and in the ordinary routine of going shopping. This is the world, the reality, where “love in not a victory march.” Surely, you recognize this world we inhabit. Where no one (for very long) is a stranger to a broken heart. And we go back and forth between appreciation and disappointment, gratitude and complaint—things going smoothly and things falling apart. But what startles me, and I suspect startles many of you, is that in the midst of this realty we are called to appreciate, to celebrate and to sing with the angels: “Peace on earth, good will to all.”

Leonard Cohen himself commented on what he was trying to accomplish in his song Hallelujah. He said, “It is a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion. It is a rather joyous song.” And it is this “rather joyous song” that tells us something true about what human existence is all about. Cohen begins with King David, one of the greatest poets of all time, the possessor of the secret chord that “pleased the Lord.” This baffled King sang hallelujah, and at the very same time a woman broke his throne. Bathsheba revealed to King David his all-too human nature. It turns out that even a king who possesses the perfect pitch and deathless prose will have to come to terms with his own fallen nature.

Cohen then speaks to the believers and the skeptics, to those who accuse and to those who defend, and he proclaims: “It doesn’t matter what you heard—whether you’re singing a holy hallelujah or a broken song of praise—there is a blaze of light in every word.” And he ends the song with a most humble admission:
I did my best, it wasn’t much
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
He says when it’s all said and done; I want only to appreciate what is. I want my eyes to see and my voice to sing out in praise:
Even when it all goes wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
That is, I believe, the task of human life. That is our prayer that we may be allowed to appreciate what is.

Galway Kinnel said it far fewer words than Leonard Cohen in a poem he called Prayer:
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

“Whatever is is what I want.” No longer at war with reality. No longer hoping to get through this life with your heart or your mind intact. But always singing.

December is the right time to raise our voices in songs of praise. It hardly matters what you can find to praise—the sunlight or an evergreen, candlelight or a potato latke, the harmony of the choir or the loveliness of a Christmas carol.
Sing out—it is commanded of you.

Stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on your tongue but Hallelujah.

"The Heart of Unitarian Universalism" a sermon by the Rev. Barbara Merritt

2007-11-08T14:56:00.000-05:00

First Unitarian Church of Worcester
Worship Service of October 21, 2007

First Reading
Matthew 5: 3-10

Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn:
for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek:
for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:
for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart:
for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Second Reading
from “Salvation from Hell” by Rev. Burton Carley

The other day I was asked if Unitarians offered “salvation from Hell.” Such questions are usually hostile. However, I remembered a scene from the novel by Georges Bernanos, The Dairy of a Country Priest. The priest encounters a woman who is completely turned in on herself. She has been abandoned by her daughter and betrayed by her husband. Death has claimed her young son. With so much loss and grief her heart has hardened. So the priest urges her to unlock her hardened heart, pleading: “Hell is not to love anymore.”

I told the person seeking to trap me that indeed Unitarians offered salvation from hell, for to tuck ourselves away in a little ego-world of our own is hellish. To deceive ourselves into believing that our world is the world is hellish. To not have opportunities to be of service is hellish. To have to think alike to receive love is hellish. I said, “Yes, we offer salvation from hell.”

Sermon
“The Heart of Unitarian Universalism” by the Rev. Barbara Merritt

This week I attended Berkshire Group, a professional study group. The theological focus this time was entitled “From Fear to Hope.” How do we (as individuals, as a faith community, as a country) escape the paralysis of fearfulness, cynicism and isolation and move towards courage, action and engagement?

We had one new member (one who had never attended Berkshire Group before) who was not only an ordained UU minister, but also a professional quilter. Judith had never been to Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut and had never seen the kind of room we would gather in. Nevertheless, she brought a small patchwork square with autumn leaf outlines beautifully scattered and quilted on the cloth. It fit perfectly on the round table at the center of our circle. It was the focus during worship and during lulls in the conversation.
I asked her, and I ask you, “How did she know that there would be a place for her art? How did she have the confidence to enter a new group, offering something to us that was important to her? How did she know that we would need her gifts?”

When most religious scholars consider the question, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” they become quickly frustrated. How can any one describe what religious liberals think, when we all think so differently? Especially when Unitarians put so much emphasis on the rational, on the abstract, on the intellectual pronouncements of purposes and principals, how can we describe this faith, to ourselves or to others? What makes us tick? What fires our enthusiasm? What allows us to endure?

This morning, I have no intention of focusing on what we think about ourselves or what others think about us. Instead, I want to consider what we do together, what we care about, what we trust, what truths call to us, what lies at the heart, at the core of our tradition.

Even if your Unitarian Universalist roots go back for generations, there is something of a mystery about this faith. Even when we disagree about so much (politically, spiritually and culturally,) we stand together in our hopefulness. Unitarian Universalism calls each of us to enter more fully into our own lives and our own strength.

If you are a relative newcomer to Unitarian Universalism you ought to be asking, “Is this my tribe? Are these people who will encourage my spiritual journey? Can this be my religious home?”

Rather than list ten doctrines of this faith or ten principals or ten beliefs that all Unitarian Universalists share, I will be attempting something different. Call them ten weird spiritual practices of Unitarian Universalists, or ten temperamental characteristics, or ten Unitarian Universalist blessings. I am not saying that any of these may not appear in other more orthodox traditions. What I do know is that these ten weird things make us somewhat unusual. They are some of the peculiar religious gifts that we celebrate and encourage. They are central to our tradition and our inheritance of over 500 years of the free faith. Even in the midst of all the frustrations and limitations of liberal religion, they keep most of us coming back. (I’m certain that I’ve left some important practices off this list. . . please feel free to reflect on others.)

The first is complexity—the blessing of complexity. While other traditions try to keep it simple (accept Jesus as your savior and all will be well), Unitarian Universalism claims that the religious journey is full of detours, switchbacks, zigs and zags, ups and downs, moments of blissful clarity and episodes of great confusion and uncertainty. Parker Palmer (a religious liberal from the UCC tradition) calls this mysterious movement “seasons.”
“‘Seasons’ is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all—and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.”

In the Beatitudes, Jesus captures just how wide a range this complexity embraces. You are blessed if you are poor in spirit, humble, not knowing. You are blessed when you are rich in spirit—when you are able to be merciful, when you are able to pursue righteousness—practicing right relationship. You are blessed with the privilege of grief—you are able to mourn only because you are able to love. You are blessed when you make peace—with your family members, with your neighbors, with a stranger. You are blessed in the simplest cry of your heart for your hunger to be filled and your thirst to be quenched. And you are even blessed when it doesn’t feel like you’re blessed at all—when you are persecuted and reviled for following the truth that has been given to you. Jesus describes an extremely complicated understanding of how you will find comfort in the seasons which bring you the best of circumstances, as well as in the seasons which deliver the worst.

Here in New England, we almost have a remedial education on trusting the complexity and the shifts of the seasons. Have you noticed how magnificent the autumn colors are right now? Listen to the words of Unitarian poet, May Sarton.
“It is all a rich farewell now to leaves, to color. I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of the season how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep. . . .I think of the golden leaves and the brilliant small red maple that shone transparent against the lake yesterday. . . . Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

The first blessing is complexity.

The second blessing is the practice of intellectual humility. I believe that every Unitarian Universalist ought to be able to affix to the end of every faith statement, every political pronouncement and every commentary and/or judgment on ourselves or others the words, “of course, I could be wrong.” We have institutionalized skepticism here. Unitarians have carved out an honored place for doubt and uncertainty. Your fallible and limited assessments (and mine) are acknowledged in the liturgy, the prayers and the organizational polity of this community.

Which brings us to the third and increasingly weird blessing (especially as secular society claims that it is entirely unnecessary.) The free church says, “It is in community, in relationships that we will come to know God, truth and reality.”

Particularly, American 21st culture says, “bowl alone, shop alone, watch TV, rent a movie—go on a walk in the woods, read a novel.” The goal is autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency. But the limitations of the private imagination are considerable. When you feel lost and frightened, and at a complete dead end, you will need the help of a friend, Sometimes a single sentence can turn us back around in the direction of hope.

This process was explained in a book by William Lynch, which described “Imagination as the Healer of the Hopeless.” He wrote that we can only find out who we are and where we are meant to go in the art of “collaboration or mutuality.” He writes:
“Hope not only imagines; it imagines with. We are so habituated to conceiving of the imagination as a private act of the human spirit that we now find it almost impossible to conceive of a common act of imagining with. But what happens in despair is that the private imagination, of which we are so enamored, reaches the point of the end of inward resource and must put on the imagination of another if it is to find a way out. Despair lies exactly in the constriction of the private imagination. . . . Hope cannot be achieved alone. It must in some way or other be an act of community, whether the community be a church or just two people struggling together to produce liberation in each other. We tend always to think of hope as that final act which is my own, in isolation and in self-assertion. But hope is an act of the city of humanity meaning. . . . nothing less that that people can depend on one another.”

So life is complicated, and we are often wrong and actually don’t know all that much about reality—but we are not alone. We don’t have to depend on our private imaginations. We are in community.

Which brings me to the fourth blessing—service. Being of service to one another. The paralysis of inaction is to be overcome by doing, by action, by re-covenanting, by getting up again after we fall. Unitarians know in our bones (it is written in our DNA,) in our personalities and temperament that we were put on this earth to do certain things. This morning we contribute to a school on the other side of the world. This afternoon we welcome homeless children and their families into the church. Our choir makes beautiful music and releases a CD next week celebrating our relationships with the earth. Next week is the UNICEF Carnival. And people will be knitting and dancing and the Zen group meditates together every Monday. The list is endless because we are here on earth to serve God, to help our neighbor, to do what we can. If someone asks you to help and you can, the only answer is “Yes.”

The fifth blessing is especially weird. It has to do with our understanding of the location of the sacred, the holy moment—the ultimate and critical moment. For many of the world religions the most important moment is the day and time of conversion. For others it is the moment of death—when you meet face-to-face with God. Unitarian Universalists are taught to not look back to when we first felt called to our spiritual path. We are not taught to look forward to some future epiphany or revelation. The holy moment is now. The day that matters, that offers hope and new possibilities, is this one. Holy ground is (at the moment) 90 Main Street. This afternoon it will be wherever we are standing, or sitting, especially as we watch the Red Sox.

To review—at the core of us, we are called to be complicated, skeptical, in relationship, active and focused on the present moment and location.

The next three strange spiritual practices are about where we look for help.

A physicist colleague told me (and my physicist husband confirmed) that the whole universe is made up of only three things: matter, energy and information. Information (in this instance) doesn’t mean additional faiths, data or book learning. It means the capacity to discern patterns. The ability to organize, to understand, to grasp the way matter and energy interact. It is what happens when you click on your email and magically (in an instant) even those of us with over a thousand emails in the in-box can switch from who to date.

Similarly, our view of the world is often filtered through the patterns we impose. Depending on what part of my brain is fired up at the moment, I can (at one moment) see the world as a beneficent and beautiful place (perfect for spiritual growth and loaded with opportunities for more abundant life.) But then there is this other part of the brain—and when it is organizing information it sees mayhem and destruction, tragedy and disappointment. One of the reasons I come to church is for the music. When the choir sings in four-part harmony, we are listening to a pattern that reminds us of a deeper harmony. With melody and the thunderous chords of the organ, we are being surrounded by information that tells our hearts and minds and souls that beauty is real, that there is order and comfort and peace. We Unitarian Universalists worship together and work together in order to be reminded of transformative patterns so that we might glimpse some of the order and the beauty that flows through our lives.

And that takes us to the seventh thing we care about—stories. Stories from every spiritual tradition. Stories from secular culture. Stories we tell one another from our own lives. Stories about the Red Sox (and what a win this evening will mean.) Stories about our work, our families, our travels. Stories about raising children, about how the creation began. Stories tell us that we are not alone in the ways we struggle, the ways we search for meaning, the ways we process information and matter and energy. My hope is that you might never enter this building without hearing a story from the pulpit or from a congregant—a story that reminds you of what is important.

So we look for patterns, and we listen to stories and then perhaps the most important place we seek our understanding is in our approach to the future. As we walk out into an unknown destiny, the best Unitarian Universalists practice I know of is to remain open and curious. Open and curious. Not assuming that we know what will happen next. Some fundamentalists on TV promise that if you only believe the future will hold only abundance, prosperity and happiness. Some newspaper columnists try to convince us that the future is bleak, that the world is literally going down the tubes and that it is too late to make a difference. We Unitarian Universalists choose a middle path. It ain’t all good and it ain’t all bad—and we are willing to suspend our judgments. Instead we state our intentions to go into the unknown with the curiosity and the openness of someone who is not afraid to be vulnerable and not ashamed not to know.

The last two weird spiritual practices of Unitarian Universalists are actually more a question of temperament than of conviction.

Number nine is restlessness. We will never be content to only know what we know now. We want more truth, more love, more compassion and more clarity. If you are blessed with this particular hunger and thirst, the saints say that you will not be satisfied until you meet with God, face-to-face. The saints say that restlessness and longing are the surest signs of blessing and grace. (Don’t let anyone tell you that your restlessness is not a holy gift.)

And finally we reach number ten. Unitarian Universalists are all about free choice. The freedom to choose our own path to what is ultimately true. Our freedom is to choose who we will be in the world, who we will marry and who we will not marry. Unitarians say that it really matters how we choose to focus our lives And that our choices reveal what we value and what is ultimately important to us.

The Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davis told a story from the Native American tradition which, for me, says everything about how we conduct our spiritual lives.
“An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, ‘A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride, and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too. The children pondered this for some time and then one child asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old Cherokee simply replied: ‘That depends on which one I feed.’”

No matter where your spiritual journey takes you today, may you find a nourishment for your soul, for the truth that will set you free. And may you know, that in the midst of your complicated, limited, confusing life—you are blessed—you are loved. The gifts you bring are essential to the well being of the world.

"Mother Teresa and the Absence of God" by Rev. Barbara Merritt

2007-11-08T14:36:00.000-05:00

First Unitarian Church of Worcester
Worship Service of September 23, 2007

First Reading
from Psalms 42 & 88

As the deer longs for the running waters,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
Athirst is my soul for God, the living God.
When shall I go and behold the face of God?
My tears are my food day and night,
as they say to me day after day,
“Where is your God?”

Why are you so downcast, O my soul?
Why do you sigh within me?
O Lord, my God, by day I cry out:
at night I clamor in your presence.
I am a person without strength,
whom you remember no longer
and I am cut off from your care.
You have plunged me into the bottom of the pit,
into the dark abyss.

My eyes have grown dim through affliction;
daily I call upon you, O Lord;
to you I stretch out my hands.
Why, O Lord, do you reject me;
why hide from me your face?
I am afflicted and in agony.
Companion and neighbor you have
taken away from me;
my only friend is darkness.

Second Reading
from “Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light” edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk
(Selections from the letters of Mother Teresa)

There is such a terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.

There is such a deep loneliness in my heart that I cannot express it.

Within me, everything is icy cold.

There is that separation, that terrible emptiness, that feeling of absence of God.

God is destroying everything in me.

No faith, no love, no zeal.

Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place.

Sometimes the pain is so great that I feel that everything will break.

The smile is a big cloak which covers a multitude of pains.

Lord, my God. The child of your love—and now become as the most hated one—the one You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I wait—and there is No One to answer—If there be God, —please forgive me.

Love—the word—it brings nothing. Before the work started—there was so much union—love—faith—trust—prayer—sacrifice—In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being—of God not really existing. If there be no God—there can be no soul—If there is no soul then Jesus—You also are not true.

In my heart there is no faith—no love—no trust—I want God with all the powers of my soul—and yet there between us—there is terrible separation.
The work holds no joy, no attraction, no zeal.

Holy Communion—Holy Mass—all the holy things of spiritual life—of the life of Christ in me—are all so empty—so cold—so unwanted.

I can speak to no one and even if I do—nothing enters my soul—If there is hell—this must be one. How terrible it is to be without God—no prayer—no faith—no love—The only thing that still remains—is the conviction that the work is His—And yet—in spite of all these—I want to be faithful—I only ask Him to use me.

If my separation from You—brings others to You and in their love and company You find joy and pleasure—why Jesus, I am willing with all my heart to suffer all that I suffer—not only now—but for all eternity.

Sermon
“Mother Teresa and the Absence of God” by the Rev. Barbara Merritt

My favorite coffee used to be Celebes Kalossi—rich, smooth, not at all bitter—the perfect Indonesian bean to brew for the perfect cup. So what if it costs $13 a lb. in 1978? It was worth the price—until Mother Teresa convinced me to give it up. I was reading an article, back then, about Mother Teresa. And in that essay she asked all of us who did not live in slums and in extreme poverty, “Could you give up one luxury for the sake of the poor? In solidarity with those who have nothing? If you are a wealthy Indian woman with a hundred silk saris, could you sacrifice one?” I thought her logic was impressive. We who have hundreds of luxuries, could we at least be conscious of those who have so little? She didn’t even say to sell the item or send the money to the poor. But she hoped that one single symbolic sacrifice of one material object of comfort might help us to recognize all we had received and to be more generous in sharing our resources. I looked around my life, at all my various and endless attachments (and I also noticed that there was lots of other good coffee) and at that time I made a promise, “No more Celebes Kalossi.”

I have kept that pledge, but even now when I am shopping at the local coffee roaster’s and I see the freshly roasted Celebes sitting there, I mutter something about Mother Teresa. I buy something else.

I have always been a great admirer of this Catholic nun working in an enormously patriarchal system, she managed to establish a new order that was completely devoted to alleviating the suffering of the poorest people on earth. By the time her life ended in 1997, there were over 300 missions throughout the world and over 1,000 nuns and brothers dedicating their lives to this compassionate work. What I wasn’t aware of (until this new book came out on September 4, 2007) is that after she had her call, after her visions and her assignment from God to do this work, the institutional church put her off for years. There was enough discernment, beaurocratic red tape, delays and procedures that a normal person would have given up.

But Mother Teresa was not “normal.” She was stubborn, dedicated, courageous and doggedly determined. Her letters to her bishop said, “Whatever you say, I will obey.” Only when she didn’t get the answer she wanted, she simply wrote him another letter. Dozens of them. And no argument that he put forward that these things take time appeased her in the least.

I loved the stories in the biographical notes. When a bull in the street threatened her students, she was the one who chased it away. When thieves broke into the convent, she was the one who drove them out. And when riots broke out in Calcutta and hundreds were killed, she describes her response:
“I went out from St. Mary’s. I had three hundred girls in the boarding school and we had nothing to eat. We were not supposed to go out in to the streets, but I went anyway. Then I saw the bodies on the streets, stabbed, beaten, lying there in strange positions, in their dried blood. We had been behind our safe walls. We knew that there had been rioting. People had been jumping over our walls, first a Hindu, then a Muslim. . . . We took in each one and helped him to escape safely. When I went out on the street, only then did I see the death that was following them. A lorry full of soldiers stopped me and told me I should not be out on the street. ‘No one should be out,’ they said. I told them I had to come out and take the risk; I had three hundred students who had nothing to eat. The soldiers had rice and they drove me back to the school and unloaded bags of rice.”

Almost everyone is familiar by now with her extraordinary work with the poor and the dying and the suffering. She has become almost a synonym for the ideal of compassionate service. We use her name as an unreachably high standard of commitment. In her lifetime she was recognized, honored and revered.

What I never gave much thought to was her interior spiritual life. I assumed that her being a devout Roman Catholic nun meant that she and I would have very little in common. I assumed that because she once heard God speaking to her that her visions and sense of union continued throughout her life. I assumed her joyful and cheerful personality was a reflection of a joyful and rich prayer life. Like many religious liberals, I fell for the myth that those who have an orthodox faith and a creeded belief structure are blessed with a kind of comfort and solace that isn’t available to skeptics and nonbelievers.

With the publishing of her letters this fall, we discover just how wrong we all were about Mother Teresa. Not even her closest friends and confidants were aware of her internal agony. Only a few confessional priests were allowed to see what was going on inside.

The important question is being asked (sometimes quite loudly,) “Mother Teresa begged that these letters be destroyed. How can they print what is so very private? How can they violate her trust so publicly?” While Mother Teresa was explicit about her own desires concerning those letters, I am certain that she would have agreed to the decision to publish. Because no matter what she wanted, she always said to God, “If you can use me (a nothing like me) to be of service, to assist another human being—then that is all I want.” She called herself “God’s little pencil.”

Well this little pencil’s spiritual life is now being compared to St. Augustine’s Confessions and to St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul. Her letters are like she was: honest straightforward, humble and generous to others. They reveal her willingness to attempt to live the words of the Lord’s Prayer—“Thy will be done.”

She summed up her life’s aspiration: To accept what God gives and to give (with a big smile) what God takes. Now most people try their best to accept what reality gives to us. But personally, when I find that reality/God or truth has taken away my health, my delusions, my wealth, my peace of mind, my plans, my congenital preferences or my car keys—I don’t release them with a big smile—I howl in protest. And I’m not the only howler. (I won’t be naming names, but you know who you are. . .)

The new book, Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light is not, I believe, as good as it should be. The editor is “on assignment!” He is selling her official sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. His commentary is all attempting to shore-up his case, and his agenda is transparent.

But her own words are stunningly direct. Her spiritual dedication is heroic and her confessions of doubt and failure are deeply comforting to all struggling souls (which means, to all of us) Christian, Jew Buddhist, agnostic, all souls. If I were to choose only five lessons to learn from the interior life of Mother Teresa these would be the five I would want to remember.

First, she was extraordinarily humanistic. She said our assignment as human beings was “to learn how to suffer and at the same time, how to laugh.” She believed that God took real form when one human being helped another. She maintained that the only way for most people to experience God’s companionship is when human beings offer compassion , care and attention. Her work was based on the premise of the inherent worth and dignity of every child of God—including the dying, the oppressed, the physically and mentally ill. When she was with the destitute and the unwanted she sensed God’s presence. She wrote about Christ in all “his distressing disguises.”

“Our poor people,” she said, “are great people, a very loveable people. They don’t need our pity or sympathy. They need our understanding, love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor they are somebody to us, that they too have been created by the same loving hand of God, to love and to be loved.”

Her friends described her as full of fun, down-to-earth, authentic in her presence and willing to do anything to help. After accepting the Nobel Prize, when she went to one of her missions, she would also help dry the dishes after dinner.

The second remarkable aspect of her life was her willingness to confess her limitations, her failures and her pain. Especially in this Jewish season of Yom Kipper—her cries for atonement—at-one-ment—with God are profoundly moving. Her spiritual longing was not answered in this life.

She gave up on the world and its material comforts. How fascinating to read that unlike many ascetics who choose “poverty” because wealth makes hem ill at ease, Mother Teresa admitted early on, “By nature I am sensitive, love beautiful and nice things, comfort and all that comfort can give.” Yet she chose a path of complete poverty—the lifestyle of the poorest. And then just as she began her great work, as she answered and obeyed God’s command, all religious and spiritual consolation and comfort was taken from her. The church and its liturgy became meaningless to her. Her prayer life was a disaster. Her companions gave her no solace. And from 1948 to her death in 1997, almost 50 years, the dark night of the soul did not leave her (with the exception of one month and one day, when she felt God’s reassurance.) She never doubted the authenticity of her original mystical experiences and call. Neither did she pretend that she felt God’s presence when she didn’t.

The third lesson is the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of the spiritual life. According to her experience it is possible, indeed inevitable, that if you long for God or truth or love you will by necessity be acutely aware of the absence of God and truth and love. To feel separate from God is in the nature of being in relationship with God. If this sounds contradictory and confusing and bewildering—welcome to spiritual practice 101.

She put it most eloquently. “You have no love, and all you can do is love. Sometimes I find myself saying,’ I can’t bear it any longer.’ With the same breath I say, ‘I am sorry; do with me what you will.’” “Pray for me,” she wrote, “. . . to be in love and yet not to love, to live by faith and yet not to believe—to spend myself and yet be in total darkness. Gone is the love for anything and anybody, and yet I long for God.” Even as she won the applause of the world and the respect of millions, she always felt like a failure—rejected and unwanted by God.

The fourth lesson is exceptionally difficult. She made her peace with the darkness within her. She wrote to Jesus (who she felt had abandoned and forsaken her.) “Please do not take the trouble to return soon. I am ready to wait for you for all eternity.” And after dozens of years of internal agony, she finally accepted the spiritual exile as her gift from God (a painful gift to be sure—but one that allowed her to identify with and serve those who society had rejected and declared to be unwanted and unacceptable.) So Mother Teresa was a humanist. Her confessions are breathtaking. Her experience of the holy was paradoxical and ambiguous. And she made her peace with the absence of God.

But it is the fifth lesson that I find most useful to Unitarian Universalists. She claimed that how you are feeling and what you believe are ultimately unimportant. What matters is how you act. Even in the midst of terrible despair and great spiritual pain, she went out in the world and did what she believed she was called to do. She kept her vows. She went to church. She kept in relationship with priests and bishops. She went on retreat. Apparently, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like having no faith, no love and no prayer life get in the way of being of service, founded new missions and offered encouragement and hope to those who needed the strength.

Are you thinking that Mother Teresa was a little odd, a little mentally or spiritually unbalanced, or some kind of religious aberration who just didn’t understand or grasp the reality that God really did love her (and was close by)? Or do you think that she could not accept that God wasn’t real and she couldn’t even give up the fantasy? I suggest you do a little research in the writings of the mystics. Do a literature scan of what others have experienced as they attempt to seek God and truth and reality, and to be of service to humanity. And not just David’s lamentations in the Psalms.

Rumi, the Persian mystic, wrote extensively on the heartbreak of this spiritual work. God admits, “I grant that indeed you have become stony and locks have been put upon your ears and hearts. But we have nothing to do with any acceptance. . .our business is to do God’s will and fulfill love’s command. If God asks us to sow in a tract of a sand—we sow.” And the disciple’s response? “How should I not wait bitterly on account of God’s deceit—since I am not in the circle of those intoxicated with God? How should I not mourn, like night, without God’s day?”

Or consider Attar’s description in the Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds. “Until the falcon reaches his aim he is agitated and distressed. If a fish is thrown onto the beach by the waves, it struggles to get back into the water. Is a lover ever patient? I have read a hundred books on patience and still I am without it.” Attar claims that eventually we will finally come to a place on our spiritual journey where we can say with certainty: “I know nothing. I understand nothing. I am unaware of myself. I am in love (but with whom I do not know.) My heart is, at the same time, both full and empty of love.” This is a perfect description of Mother Teresa’s heart and a way to understand our own hearts, our own struggles, our own journeys into dark nights that can go on for years and decades. And yet, what does that matter if we continue to seek, to serve, to be used to alleviate suffering, to call one another to the noble task of recognizing and working on behalf of every child of God?

At the very end of her life Mother Teresa said that she thought Jesus was “a bit too demanding.” But then, so was Mother Teresa. I read a part from her letter to President Bush (senior) and Saddam Husein right before the first Gulf War. One of her missions was in Baghdad.

I come to you in the name of God, the God that we all love and share, to beg for the innocent ones, our poor of the world and those who will become poor because of the war. They are the ones who will suffer most because they have no means of escape. I plead to you for those who will be left orphaned, widowed, and left alone because their parents, husbands, brothers and children have been killed. I plead for those who will be left with disability and disfigurement. They are God’s children. I plead for those who will be left with no home, no food and no love. Please think of them as being your children.

You have the power to bring war into the world or to build peace. PLEASE CHOOSE THE WAY OF PEACE.

You may win the war but what will the cost be on people who are broken, disabled and lost? In the name of God and in the name of those you will make poor, do not destroy life and peace. . . .let your name be remembered for the good you have done, the joy you have spread and the love you have shared.

We pray that you will love and nourish what God has so lovingly entrusted into your care.

May God bless you now and always.

A good closing: May God bless you now and always.

May we love and nourish what has been put into our care, now and always.

Amen.

"Joy, Peace and Love" a sermon by Rev. Barbara Merritt

2007-11-08T12:59:00.000-05:00

First Reading

from the Book of Revelations

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away…And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with all people.They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more…And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain…Behold, I make all things new. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

Second Reading
“A Word on Statistics” by Wislawa Szymborska

Out of every hundred people,those who know better:fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:almost all the rest.
Ready to help,if it doesn’t take long:forty-nine….
Able to admire without envy:eighteen
Those not to be messed with:four and forty.
Living in constant fearof someone or something:seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone,turning savage in crowds:more than half, for sure.
Those who are just:quite a few, thirty-five.
Balled up in painand without a flashlight in the dark:eighty-three, sooner or later.
But if it takes effort to understand:three.
Worthy of empathy:ninety-nine.
Mortal:one hundred out of one hundreda figure that has never varied yet.

Sermon

Two stories from Louisiana, both reported on National Public Radio. The first is about the mental health crisis going on in New Orleans since the close of Charity Hospital. A police officer described picking up a schizophrenic who was jumping on top of parked cars. He was brandishing several long carving knives and in addition to many other knives they found when they patted him down, they found nine sharp ice picks.

Because these are no longer any public psychiatric beds in New Orleans, they took him to the closest private hospital. The nurses there assured the police officer that the mentally ill man would be looked after. The police officer was gently, but firmly ushered out the door.
She went to a nearby hardware store to pick up something she needed, and when she returned to her squad car (15 minutes later) there was the same schizophrenic man walking proudly down the street. She asked him, “Did you see a doctor?” He said, “No.” He did volunteer that everyone of his knives and ice picks had been returned to him, and he walked on.

A hospital administrator is another private hospital in New Orleans explained that because that state provides no reimbursement for charity psychiatric treatments, his hospital would be out-of-business in a month if they treated the poor. A judge in New Orleans was recommending to family and friends that if someone without insurance needed psychiatric residential treatment, it was his advice that they make sure that the individual commit a crime; then they would be eligible for the only public psychiatric beds, now located in the local prison.

This is the world we inhabit.

Moving on to Jena, Louisiana, where when high school boys fight (as often high school boys do) the African-American boys are charged with aggravated assault and sent to prison—and the white boys in the same fight are put on academic suspension. You might have assumed (as I had assumed) that such overt racism was a thing of the past in this country. Apparently, it is not.

This is the world we inhabit.

If this suffering and tragedy were only found in other neighborhoods, or internationally, it would be bad enough. But the brokenness follows us home. It crops up in our own hearts, in our own families, in our own places of work.

A Boston folk singer, Bob Frankie puts it this way:
"There is a hole, in the middleof the prettiest life
So the lawyers, and the prophets say.
Not your mother, or your fatherOr your sister, or your lover
Are ever going to make it go away.”

The poet Zimborska puts it more eloquently—sooner or later 83% of us are going to be: “balled up in pain, and without a flashlight in the dark,” and 100% of us are mortal 100%.

This is the world we inhabit.

So what kind of delusion religious fantasy is being entertained in a sermon entitled, “Joy, Peace and Love”? Is it some kind of weird throwback to the 1960’s where a few brought forward the notion that “Flower Power” would bring us out of Viet Nam and restore civil rights to the marginalized? Or is this a remnant of an earlier American Unitarian optimism that proclaimed that humanity would just keep getting better and smarter and more considerate as time and history progressed? Or has your minister just spent too much time out in the sun this summer? Hopefully, the answer is “none of the above.”

The subject of this sermon arose out of a novel I read entitled, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. And the character who recited these words, an African-American woman in the early 1960’s in the deep south, had learned the phrase from former slaves. In the worst of human circumstances, in the bondage of slavery, they had recited these words, “What is bound, will be unbound. What is cast down will be lifted up. This is a promise.” This is the promise that kept people’s courage and hope and determination alive in these very harshest of conditions. It allowed, not only their survival, but it also spoke to their souls—to that part of themselves that knew they were destined for liberation, for freedom and for joy. It is a radical promise, and it is this promise that I believe is at the very heart of this liberal religious community.

When Jesus was speaking to his listeners in Jerusalem, he was not talking to people with easy and comfortable lives. They knew all about warfare and oppression and tragedy and loss. And he promised that all that was wonderful and life-giving and meaningful was meant for them: “Enter into my kingdom with joy.” “Peace I give unto you”. “This is my commandment, that you love one another.” How do these words fall on the ears of those whose life experiences have known little more than hardship, separations and fear? Hunger and thirst? Death and sorrow?

Isn’t it somewhat of a mystery that even upon the occasion of the death of those we love something in us wakes up and pays attention when we hear the promise in Revelation, another image of healing and reconciliation and peace? The words from Revelation resonate far past the rational mind. Who would not like these words to be true? “Humanity shall hunger no more—neither thirst any more—and God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. Behold I make all things new!” Something stirs in us when we hear these words. Even if it is only that we wish it could be true. Even if it is only that we hope that it might be true.

Some religious communities are organized around creedal confessions. (Believe this, and if you do—you’ll be saved.) Some religious communities are organized around certain cultural and liturgical traditions. (Engage in this ritual—say this prayer—follow this custom and you will be saved.) What I believe holds the Unitarian Universalist tribe together is something else. It is the core human hope, that what we are created for is joy, peace and love—not in some heavenly after life—but right now. And the moments when we experience this powerful reality are more true and memorable and meaningful than all the moments of frustration and disappointment and aggravation and despair. But perhaps I need to define these terms.

Joy first. Yesterday I had the privilege to conduct the memorial service for a member of this parish. Katharine Poor would have been 88 today. She lived a long and full life and hadn’t been around Worcester for awhile. But, despite enormous tragedies, including the death of a young daughter, Katharine knew how to find joy. She wrote in her instructions for her funeral: “There is something about the generosity of a blueberry bush that is moving in a deep and primitive way.” She found joy in the blueberry bushes growing outside her window—and she wrote: “Note to self: Pay attention to music as it’s being played, to the scenery as you walk, to the person who is speaking, to the book you are reading, to the taste of food and wine, to the views at the window, and the changing light.” Her innate enthusiasm, her ability to recognize beauty and her appreciation of human beings and of life itself teaches me something about where joy is to be found. I suggest we begin with blueberry bushes and then perhaps that demanding practice of being appreciative (and grateful for) those who bless our lives.

Defining peace? If the situation in Iraq is not breaking your heart, then you are simply not paying attention. There are some ways we can engage in peace-making here at home.·

Scott Ritter, one of the early voices against the War as a weapons inspector, will be in this sanctuary on Thursday, September 20th at 5:30 p.m.
There is a Peace Group in this church.

It is my conviction that all of us are also given daily opportunities to work for peaceful resolutions of conflicts at work, at home and with family and friends (in the ongoing and perennial practice of forgiveness.) There is peacemaking to be done in the community. Each of us are called to do what we can to create a fairer and kinder world in Louisiana and in Worcester and in the Middle East.

But finding peace in our own hearts and minds and souls may prove to be the larger challenge. Consider the anguish of Mother Teresa’s interior life. Just in case you were harboring the fantasy that if you could only do more good works in the world you would be granted interior peace. Just in case you assumed that a disciplined prayer life would put your soul at rest. Just in case you imagined that completely dedicating your life to God and to the elimination of suffering would bring you contentment, make sure you read Mother Teresa’s private letters.

When it comes to peace (inside or outside) there are no guarantees or solutions. What turns out to be real are moments. Moments of peace. Moments of peace (and grace) when the choir sings—when you laugh with a friend. Moments of peace when a cool and gentle breeze touches your face—when you get a glimpse of beauty. Maybe there are more of these moments than we imagine? And our task is to learn how to notice them. Appreciate them. Receive them.

Which brings me finally to love. I read Annie Dillard’s new novel this summer entitled, Maytrees. The main characters are moved to exquisite bliss and ecstasy by love and nearly destroyed by that same love. They ponder what it means to love.“The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.”And the husband finally figures out that love was not ultimately an “irresistible passion.” (That kind of infatuation love he claimed had a shelf life of 18 months at best.) What love turns out to be, at least according to Annie Dillard, is the “natural wish to help someone find comfort.” To care for and to comfort. This definition of love makes love not into a feeling, but to be an engaged action. An act of the will. An act, I might add, to which every human being is invited to participate in any way we can. To help others find care and comfort—the most mysterious of vocations.

Rumi, the Persian poet and mystic, claimed that if you are hungry then you can be sure that bread is real (there is something that will satisfy your hunger.) If you are thirsty, you can be sure that water is real (there is something that will quench your thirst.) It follows: if your desire is for joy, peace and love, you can be absolutely certain that you are destined to experience them. They are real. They are worth searching for. They are worth hoping for and working for. Even on those days when they seem hopelessly out of reach. Even in those seasons where we can’t see them, or touch them, or even believe in them.

Joy and Peace and Love. They are more powerful than the strongest prison. They will eventually break the shackles that hold us in bondage. Joy, peace and love will give us the strength, the energy to fight for the rights of the mentally ill, to diminish the terrible racism in our country, and to keep working for peace—external and internal. They are our rightful inheritance. They are our ultimate home and refuge.

Joy and Peace and Love. Meant for you. Meant for each of us—now and forever. Amen.

Polarized Politics and Celebrity Candidates -- A sermon by Rev. Tom Schade

2007-10-10T14:41:00.000-04:00

Polarized Politics and Celebrity Candidates

Sermon October 7, 2007

Tom Schade First Unitarian Church.

I am going to talk about politics today.

OK I am not going to talk about politics today; I am going to talk about how we talk about politics these days.

Let’s start here: politics is very polarized these days. The two parties used to be broad coalitions and are now becoming more ideologically unified bodies. Almost all Democrats across the country are more liberal that almost all of the Republicans and almost all Republicans are more conservative than almost all of the Democrats.

Why is this happening? We could talk about that for a long time. It’s been a long chain reaction. When African Americans migrated North and became voters, they ended up as part of the urban Democratic party. The Democrats became the champions of African Americans and allies in the civil rights struggle that brought voting to the Southern blacks. Southern whites then became Republicans. And now, New England and Northeastern Republicans are disaffiliating with the Republican Party and slowly becoming Democrats. So the parties are becoming more ideological. My point is that the polarization of politics is a historical process and not just a breakdown in manners and civility.

Despite the polarization of our politics, almost everyone agrees that the nation is in a moment of crisis. The Conservatives think that we involved in a global struggle against Islamic Radicalism, a new world war that will last for decades, and which requires extraordinary levels of governmental activity and vigilance to protect us. And yet, conservatives worry that the country as a whole does not support the struggle and want to go wobbly and throw in the towel. If you Accept the conservative’s premises, the fate of the nation is hanging in the balance.

According to the Liberals, this administration is systematically violating the Constitution, and is moving us toward an authoritarian state that bears no resemblance to the constitutional democratic republic that the United States used to be. We are becoming what we are fighting against. And so, if you accept these liberal premises, the fate of the nation is hanging in the balance.

And according to some of those who avoid being liberal or conservatives, the political life of the nation has degenerated into such a polarized partisan battleground that the extremes of both left and right dominate the scene, the center does not hold anymore, and the country is becoming ungovernable. Accepting these centrist premises, the fate of the nation hangs in the balance.

So if so much is at stake, isn’t it fair to ask whether our national political discussion – the information and analysis that is being supplied to us – reflects the seriousness of the situation?

On a personal level, where you and I live, though to be interested in politics, even a little, comes down to one thing. People who are interested in politics consume information about current and political events. This is what the daily work of citizenship comes down to: reading the paper, reading magazines, listening to the radio, reading books, following websites that talk about politics. This is where it starts. And then, based on the information that they gather from information suppliers, they are then are perhaps moved into more political activity, contributing money, getting involved in campaigns and ultimately voting.

Are we getting the information we need? Are all the forms of media helping us sort out what is going on and determining what is called for at this hour of national crisis.

I don’t like it when people talk about “the media.” That is because there are lots of ways that political information is being communicated and each of them seems to have different rules and create a different response.

I divide the information providers into two general groups who engage in two different kinds of talk, or dialogue, or conversation.

First of all, I think that there is a private sphere of talk and public sphere of talk. And the difference is who the imagined audience of the information is, are they individuals? Or are they a imagine broad national audience?

What do mean by private individual audience? I read a political websites on my computer, this is a private and individual experience. I am by myself when I consume this information. I am in private. I don’t share what I am reading with others and get their opinion on what is being said while I am getting the information.

I think that talk radio is a similar kind of experience. Where do people listen to the radio? The most common place where people listen to the radio is their car. You commute, you listen to the radio. Likewise is a usually private, personal experience.

It’s my observation that political talk in this private sphere can be very partisan, and is often extreme, and loud. Conservatives call liberals appeasers, unpatriotic and appeasers. Liberals say that the administration is an authoritarian criminal gang and a personality cult around the great leader George W. Bush. When you consume this information, you don’t have to think about the fact that others might disagree with your position.. There are forms of media that are like private rooms where you can talk trash about the people who disagree with you, rather than talk with them. The big three for this kind of political talk are websites, talk radio and books. You must have noticed the huge market for sharply partisan books. You read a book by yourself. I think that cable TV is more private than broadcast TV.

I say this cautiously, and I want people to hear exactly what I am saying. This kind of political talk is pornographic. Not because it is about sex; it is not about sex. But because it designed to be consumed in private and to stimulate very strong and powerful emotions that don’t have to be balanced with other concerns.

A lot of people worry about this, all this bile and vitriol and uncompromising political talk and information going on. And many a sermon has been preached on this coarsening of our political discussion.

But I am more concerned about what is happening in the other sphere of political talk: the public sphere. I am including in what I call the public sphere, The major newspapers, including the famous OP Ed pages columnists, Time and Newsweek, the broadcast news organizations, NPR, and PBS, all of those institutions which imagine themselves as speaking to the nation as a whole, and who aspire to be objective, non-partisan and unbiased. I am alert to the expectations of this kind of talk about political events because as a minister, this is where I am supposed to be; this is the space that I am supposed to occupy, when I mount this pulpit.

In a polarizing political environment, the media in this public sphere is under a constant critique of its bias. The left thinks that it biased toward the right; the right thinks it’s biased toward the left.

So the problem for the public sphere is “How are you supposed to talk about the fate of the nation in a non-partisan, objective manner in a thoroughly polarized political environment? I think that it is an impossible task.

The solution to this problem that has been adopted by our national media has been to move out of the line of fire by focusing their political coverage on the personalities of political figures, especially the candidates for President.

For quite a while, it was a common saying that one ought to “vote for the candidate, and not the party” especially among the more middle-class and educated voters. It is the watchword of the independent voter, or to put it more succinctly, the unaffiliated voter. One of the features of this polarized political opinion is that while the number of unaffiliated voters continues to climb, the number of voters who are actually undecided about the major issues of the day is very small. Not many people haven’t come to a conclusion about the war in Iraq, for example.

In order to seem neutral and non-partisan, the big public media have separated issues from politics and candidates.

On the one hand, we get articles about “the issues” which usually imply that none of the candidates are addressing them with any seriousness. And on the other hand, we get articles and stories about the personalities of the candidates. What we don’t get is substantive articles that explore the positions that candidates take on the issues, whether they are based on a true analysis of the situation, and what the probable results of their policy would be. Much of the media simply does not have the expertise to make that analysis. In fact, they don’t seem to have the expertise to analyze the competence of the experts that they bring in to talk about more complicated matters.

In fact, the public sphere media has generally concluded that it does not much matter what a candidate says or advocates about the issues. By the time they win the Presidential election and try to get a proposal through Congress, they are not going to actually implement what they advocate during the campaign, but some compromise. So what actually matters is the character of the candidate.

So the Big media tries to tell us about the character of political candidates, and to do this they rely on the “telling anecdote.” They look for some incident or observation about a candidate that supposedly reveals his or her personality and character. John Edwards spent $400 on some haircuts. Fred Thompson wore Gucci loafers to the Iowa State Fair. Rudy Guiliani said that people who own ferrets have a mental problem, Hillary Clinton wore a blouse that exposed a little cleavage on the Senate floor, and she sometimes laughs loudly. Barack Obama doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin, Mitt Romney transported his dog in a carrier on the roof of his car, George Bush, Sr. asked a waitress in a New Hampshire truck stop for “another splash of coffee”, Al Gore said that ‘he invented the internet.”, Ronald Reagan ate jelly beans and George H.W. Bush ate pork rinds and on and on and on and on.

There is a word for this kind of talk. It’s gossip. And gossip is the main currency of political reporting in the big mainstream media these days. Everything gets reduced to gossip, and to people’s reactions to the gossip. I recall watching one of the Democratic Debates in which the first question to John Edwards was whether the fact that he spent money on a haircut undercut his concern with poverty. It wasn’t a question about poverty, or why he thought it is a crucial issue, or what he would do about it, it was a question about what he thought other people might think about what he thought about poverty now that they know that he has money for expensive haircuts. Somehow his haircut is a telling anecdote which reveals his character. No one cares how much Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney spend on their hair; their hair doesn’t reveal their character in the eyes of the reporters with them.

The gossip becomes the basis of the analysis of the political situation. Candidates are reduced to caricatures of themselves. Late night comedians recycle joke after joke about the candidates that is based on this gossip. Like Chevy Chase endlessly pratfalling while impersonating Gerald Ford.

The problem, of course, is that while it would be considered bias to say Candidates’ A proposals on health care is better than Candidate B’s, it is not bias to endlessly repeat stories that say that candidate C is a hypocrite, or a bore, or a prima donna, or is vain, or lazy.

And once the caricature is set, it is easy to find more telling anecdotes that confirm the original story line. Look at what happened to Dan Quayle. No matter what he did or said, every time he said something poorly, or was mistaken about something, it was another telling anecdote that confirmed the caricature of Dan Quayle, a stupid Vice-President. The media is doing the same thing to George W. Bush. The media looks for incidents that confirm what they have already decided is his most important attribute.

Candidates become celebrities and then they become like contestants on a long running Reality Show that is our political process.

We are all complicit in this. We trade in the gossip and the caricatures ourselves. We love Maureen Dowd when she gossips about politicians we don’t like and turn the page when she mocks someone we do. We talk in this shorthand among ourselves and it saves the trouble of looking more deeply.

I am asking you to examine your heart and conscience, regarding your practice as a citizen. Are you giving the state of the nation, and our political process the kind of careful and thoughtful consideration it deserves? Are you just going along with the caricatures of candidates that come to you from Jay Leno and David Letterman? Are you content with bouncing along with jokes and the gossip that dominates our political life?

We come into this sanctuary each week and worship. As we worship, we step back from our lives, from what we say and what we do, and how we spend our time and money and where we place our attention. We ask ourselves, am I living my life, conducting my business in harmony with my highest ideals and the requirements of God, Truth or Ultimate Reality? It is hoped that we are called back to our best selves as we sit here.

God is On My TV Again! Sermon by Rev. Tom Schade

2007-10-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

from Psalm 91

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress;
my God, in whom I trust.’

Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your dwelling-place,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.

For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.

Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name.
When they call to me, I will answer them;
I will be with them in trouble,
I will rescue them and honour them.
With long life I will satisfy them,
and show them my salvation.

God’s On My TV, Again!
Rev. Tom Schade
September 30, 2007

Grace Anadarko is a detective for the Oklahoma City Police force. Not really, she is a fictional character, the protogonist of a TV drama on TNT called “Sav-ing Grace.” She is played by Holly Hunter and Grace Anadarko is a wild woman. She drives an old Porsche, she drinks way too much, she is having an affair with her partner, who is a married man. Not surprisingly, she has other one-night stands with cute guys she meets in pool rooms, and a co-worker who is grieving the death of his pet cat, and she has apparently slept with most of the other male characters in the show at one time or another. She takes no criticism and gets into shouting arguments and fights with people who are try-ing to help her. She is so infuriating that you can hardly watch her.
And let us say that if you think that this is the kind of girl you can take home to meet your mother, your mama twenr’t much like my mama.

One night, driving home in her old-beatup Porsche and probably over the legal blood alcohol limit, Grace hits a pedestrian and kills him. Kneeling over the body on the side of the road, Grace cries out, “Oh God, Please Help Me Now!.”

And with that anguished cry from the terrified and broken heart of a helpless sinner, Earl shows up and asks, what can he do to help? Earl is an angel; Earl looks like a middle-aged cowboy and chews tobacco, but he is an angel. He unfurls his wings on command, and can take Grace into his arms and deliver a jolt of spiritual ecstasy that is completely convincing to her. He is the real deal, a last-chance angel, sent by his boss, who is God, to answer the pleas for help from those who are the straight path to hell and are desperate enough to seek help.

God is On My TV Again. God, angels, Satan, and the souls of the dead or ghosts, are all over my TV and in the movies and in popular literature. There seems to be an endless market for speculative literature and drama about who God is, and what God is like, and how does God affect what is going on here on Earth, and how God use angels to work His will, and what is the path that the soul follows when it leaves the body and enters the life beyond the horizon of what we can see and know. And evil, satanic evil is also on my TV?

All of this writing and thinking is speculative and playful. So all kinds of ideas and theories can be offered and thought about. And it is a rich vein of material.

Everybody has seen “It’s Wonderful Life” the Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed movie, in which an angel appears to show a desperate man the real meaning of his life and save him from despair and suicide.

One of my favorites in this genre was a great movie by Albert Brooks called Defending Your Life, in which the souls of the departed undergo a trial, where they have to defend their life in at a hearing, where they have their entire life of a kind of heavenly video. If you can show the judges enough moments of your life when you acted courageously and selflessly, well then you get to move on, otherwise, it’s back to Earth for another round of learning.

And just on Monday night, the Monday Night at the Church group watched a film with Jon Voigt, called “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” The film is an elaboration on It’s A Wonderful Life, in that it speculates that the five people who will meet in heaven will reveal to you the whole truth about your life, and all the people who shaped your life and whose life you shaped for good and ill. You learn some of the awful consequences of some your actions, and you learn why some of the people who hurt you acted in the way that they did, and somehow this process of learning the whole truth of your life brings you to a greater compassion, self-acceptance, forgiveness and redemption. You are saved.

So not only is God on my TV, again, but there is a theme to these movies and TV shows about God. What we specifically want to think about it is how is God going to evaluate each of our messy and imperfect lives.

Most of the popular literary and dramatic theological speculation is about what academic theologians call “Soteriology” or theories of salvation.

And I think that there is two reasons for this: one is that it is personal – what is going to happen to me? Who doesn’t think about that?

And the other reason is that of all the teachings of the Christian tradition, this is the one that has been hardest to understand and explain. The church has said from the time of the apostles on that “Jesus died for our sins, and through his death, we have been saved.” That is quite a statement, and so people ask: Well, how does that work? He died on the cross two thousand years ago, and so I am saved from the sin that I committed just last week. His death didn’t seem to stop me from sinning. Will I not be punished for that sin? Explain it to me. What does that mean for what I think, what I do, how I live my life?”

I think that the Christian tradition has never been able to be completely convincing on this subject, and that is why there are liberal churches like ours, and why so many of the mainline Protestant churches are trying to desperately re-formulate the doctrine, and why so many people have voted with feet to leave the Christian tradition behind and become unchurched, or “spiritual without being religious.”

And because the Christian tradition has trouble really answering the question of how God evaluates our lives, popular literature and drama have taken up the challenge of trying to sort it out. Nothing new here. People have been working on this for a long time: I mean, after all, what was Dante doing when he wrote the Divine Comedy? He was trying to explain the process of salvation, what God wants of Us, of what we are to do to meet Gods approval, and how God was going to deal with our souls to bring us into salvation. How is God going to deal with our many shortcomings, imperfections, mistakes and sins.

These are not unimportant questions. In fact, I think that these questions are even more pressing than ever today for many people. Here’s why. We live now in a very permissive culture. There is a lot less hard and fast rules and a lot less social sanctions for all kinds of behavior. It is assumed that young adults are going to drink and party through their late teen years and early twenties. There is some concern about high schoolers, but for college age kids, it is assumed. It is assumed that young adults are going to be sexually active before marriage. Crime and violence, likewise, are behaviors that we expect from the young; we don’t approve, but assume in some sort of way. We count on a “live and learn” process to bring people to maturity.

I am not trying to start up a new morality crusade when I say this. What I want us to recognize is that many, many people they reach a point in their life when they are carrying around a lot of memories and baggage from their earlier ex-periences. They remember nights when they drank too much and made fools of themselves; they remember sexual encounters which were ill-considered, or disrespectful, or regrettable in some way. They remember making big mis-takes, some which were costly and people got hurt. They remember reckless actions which resulted in accidents and suffering. They remember outbursts of anger and violence in which they hurt others. Consequently, they feel guilty and even ashamed of themselves.

It stands to reason that a culture which allows people the freedom to make their own mistakes will produce a lot of people who are trying to live with their misakes, and to draw a line under them, and move on from them.

Conventionally, theologians would call these mistakes and missteps “sins”, but we resist that language today. Frankly, it seems simple-minded, as though the whole system of salvation is a simple matter of rules, and breaking the rules, and being punished for breaking the rules. Think about it for a minute. If a parent took their 5 year old child to a kindegarten or dayschool, and the teacher explained that their philosophy was that they told the kids the rules, and if the kids break one of the rules, then they are going to get smited, unless they beg for forgiveness, and then even, they might still get smitten.

Surely, if we can expect a kindegarten teacher to be more sophisticated in dealing with children’s behaviorial issues, we ought to expect God to be at least that sophisticated and nuanced in dealing with us.

So, how does Earl, the last chance angel work with this wild child of God, Grace Anadarko? Well, its kind of hard to tell. Earl doesn’t seem to do much of anything except challenge Grace. He says that he would like it if she just went a day or two without lying all the time. But he is not smiting her. But somehow, he is leading her through a process by which she will see the truth of her life, and the fact that it is, to use Kathleen Norris’s words – a road not wide enough to sustain her life; it is sufficient only as a way leading to death.”

Occasionally, when she doubts him or gives him a hard time, he shows her a bit of religious and spiritual ecstasy.

And one more thing, Earl does not seem to be too involved with the good vs evil struggle on Earth. He is also, it turns out to be, also the last chance angel for some of the gangbangers, drug dealers and criminals that Grace and the OKC police are up against.

And it is also true, as it is universally across popular culture whenever God shows up on your TV, that Earl and God are not interested in where people go to Church, or even go to church at all, or what they believe about religion.

Earl is patient and Earl, the last chance angel of the Lord, seems to be content to just be around while Grace loosens all the knots that have bound her to the self-destructive life that she is living. Earl lets her work this stuff out.

In popular culture, salvation is mostly a process of healing, it is a therapeutic process. In contrast, it often appears that more churchly understandings of sin and salvation are more judicial. The sinner has broken the rules, is convicted and sentenced to die, and then at the last moment, the highest judge might ex-tend mercy.

No, popular culture imagines a much more personal process, a process in which Grace confronts all the particular traumas of her life, and learns to put down the baggage that she has been carrying, and moves toward a healed life.

God on my TV works his grace in a much more particular, personal and indi-vidual way, letting each person work through all their experiences and letting them see their lives whole.

It is a remarkable understanding of grace, and one that I think reflects what we know is the truth about human beings and how we/they grow and change. And whatever is true is of God. It is all quite remarkable. It means that the process of overcoming our sins and shortcomings is as personal as each life and as unique as a fingerprint. That each of us in on our own spiritual journey, and that the great powers of benevolence at the heart of creation is at work in our most individual experiences. Amazing.

But why shouldn’t grace be amazing?

Silent Majority -- Sermon by Rev. Tom Schade 9/16/2007

2007-09-18T19:45:00.000-04:00

I want to lift up, again, these words by the Rev. Barbara Pescan*, on what we are trying to do and be. “We also want to develop for ourselves a reliable practice of our faith, and to find ways to serve a hurting world with kindness. We want to do something more than be buffeted by events; so we can be something more than observers. We want to trust life even when we cannot define what is wrong and then fix it.”

There are four things being said here, in her words.

One: We want to develop for ourselves a reliable practice for our faith –

Two: We want to serve a hurting world with kindness.

Three: We want to do something more than be buffeted by events, so we can be something more than observers.

Four: We want to trust life even when we cannot define what is wrong and then fix it.

Is that how we feel right now – that we are buffeted by events and so all we can do is to be observers, and that is not enough for us.

I, myself, after this last week, am so angry I could just scream.

I, like a majority of our fellow citizens, according to the polls, want the United States to make a swift and orderly withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, to stop trying to occupy that country. We invaded that place in 2003, overthrew its government, and have been unable to establish a viable government in its place. Now we find ourselves in the midst of a civil war. I think that our policy is essentially, that we will fight anyone who wants to fight us, and we will fight alongside anyone who wants to fight with us.

I know that not all of you have the same frustrations about the war in Iraq as I do, and that’s oK. This parish does not have a foreign policy, and I am one of your ministers, but not your foreign minister. I am just letting you know what it has been like in the neighborhood of my brain these days.

I have spent my summer seething,

Magazines and blogs and newspapers re-reading,

Policies and rationales I can’t believe in,

Waiting for someone to just start leading,

And yet somehow, Iraq just keeps bleeding.

The thing is stuck; the votes’ not there.

When I read Barbara Pescan say that we don’t want to be buffeted by events, so that we cannot be anything other than observers, this is the experience that I bring to those words.

If you do not share that particular dissatisfaction with our current reality, I am sure that there are other ways in which you feel buffeted by events, and forced into being a silent observer. You may never even think about politics and current events, but there are many other situations and circumstances that impact all of our lives over which we all seem to be powerless. Here in New England, it’s the issues of land use and transportation which translate into ever lengthening, draining and expensive commutes. It’s all the interlocking problems of our health care non-system, which is touching in some way or another, every person in this room. Our commutes, or our health care, both are affected by a set of political and governmental decisions that are hidden, opaque, and seemingly beyond our power to influence.

It is a common experience that we are buffeted by events, that there is no path open to be more than an passive observer. That one’s voice no longer matters, or has never mattered. There is no way to influence those who make the decisions. Symbolic actions are futile and ignored. To take the example of the war, I have, more than once, thought this summer, “one more day like this, I am putting on my marching shoes again,” and then one day, I did that, and went down to the Boston Common Park Street station, and hung out on the outskirts of a small crowd of the usual suspects saying all the usual things, and went home feeling more silent and more powerless than before.

Powerless. Unheard.

Welcome to the world of the silent majority.

Welcome to the world that Barbara Pescan describes as a world that resists our power of analysis and our capacity to fix.

Just to name myself as powerless over major, crucial and life and death issues about which I have deep and passionate opinions, well it makes me crazy, crazy enough to hear voices in my head.

One of those voices just laughs at me and mocks me. It says:

Tom, you’re an idiot. Of course, you are powerless. But’s its kind of cute that you didn’t figure that out. If you weren’t white, middle-class, straight male with a professional degree, you would have seen the reality of situation a long time ago. So learn this lesson – not only are you powerless, so is everybody else.

And another voice judges me and says that I am just lazy and uncommitted.

You say you are powerless, Tom, as a way of avoiding responsibility, because you are too comfortable to do anything that requires getting up off your lazy butt.

And another voice says “so what?”

Tom, maybe now is the time to just read a good book, try your hand at writing some poetry, go see an exciting movie. Watch the Red Sox and the Yankees play ball, there is enough hope and glory, terror and tragedy and the cosmic struggle of good and evil there for anyone. Forget the end times, it’s the playoffs.

And yet another voice says:

Tom, now is the time that all good folks dig deep, and come to the aid of their country. There is always something that you can do. If you cannot exercise power, you can still be a witness. You just need to summon up your moral courage and get out there, even if you feel foolish and uncomfortable, and even if it doesn’t seem to be having an effect. A wolf alone in the forest howls at the moon, it’s a lonesome sound, full of pain and terror, but soon enough, he hears another howl across the ridges and hills. If nothing else, Tom, stand in the backyard and howl.

These are the voices in my head, as I consider the possibilities of powerlessness, the life of the silent majority.

I quote the Czech playwright and President Vaclav Havel in our order of service this morning. “There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth.”

I am asking us to stop for a moment, put aside all the voices of judgment and excuse that we hear in our internal dialogues, and just live for a while with the facts as they are. There is a great suffering going on, I will not try to quantify it for that creates something to argue about, and I will not dramatize it, since this is not about the power of my imagination or my words, I will not try to break your heart. I just ask you to take a moment, perhaps while you are driving, perhaps before sleep, perhaps this afternoon between the Patriots and Red Sox and ask yourself, suppose that was my family, suppose we lived in Bagdhad?

And as pass through this period of the High Holy Days, leading to Yom Kippur, to take one’s moral inventory, and to let yourself sink to the bottom of one’s misery to understand the truth.

This is life, life beyond our ability to define what is wrong and then fix it.

The quotation [“There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth.”] comes from an essay by Havel entitled “The Power of the Powerless.” We can learn much from the experience of the Eastern Europeans. They lived as a silenced majority in a system which functioned as though it really knew what people thought and wanted. Havel speaks of “living in the truth.” He imagines a man who runs a vegetable stand who one day no longer puts up in his store, the poster that comes with his fruits and vegetables, calling on the workers of the world to unite. He does not mean to be a rebel, but he does not really believe the sign, or at least, does not believe that it is a necessary part of the work of selling fruits and vegetables.

What Havel is identifying with this story is the importance of the independent mind, which persists in living “in the truth.” This is the power that the powerless have

The Free Church Tradition, which is the kind of church that this one is, originated in social circumstances where people felt frightened and silenced and powerless. And at the heart of our church is a covenant, a voluntary agreement among equals that we will unite to worship God together while preserving the spiritual liberty and independence of each other. That we will encourage each other to live in the truth, to love the truth, and still trust life.

As I look at what is going on in the world, and what is here in the church, I can see that we will have quite a year ahead of us. The conflict and controversy over the war in Iraq will continue throughout the year. There is also the related question of a military campaign against Iran, which is being openly called for by many of those who advocated for this war. In addition, by the time we gather in the courtyard for the end of the church year picnic in June of 2008, we will probably know the two parties’ nominees for the President of the United States. It is going to be a year in which there might be great political contention, and while no, this church takes as few political stands as it can, it is not an isolated oasis where news of the outside world never disturbs our contemplations.

As I am sure that you have heard, this week, Scott Ritter, the US weapons inspector who correctly analyzed that Saddam Hussien did not have active weapons of mass destruction, will be speaking here at the church. He will be talking about Iran, which is a certainly a topic much in the news now. He is being sponsored by the Building Peace group here at the church. Let me make this clear: groups and subgroups of members within the congregation are welcome to invite speakers that they think would be of interest to the Worcester community to make presentations here. They need to work through the Lay Leadership Committee. But there are not political guidelines about what is acceptable and what is not.

As we make our way through the year to come, so let us be open and lively. Let us be a place where the wider community can come to be engaged with the issues of day, in an environment where people are respected.

I used to think that the spiritual task of being a citizen was maintaining my motivation. How was I to find a source of moral power within myself that would keep involved and committed. Where would I find the strength to resist all the seductions and pleasures of life. Where would I find the strength to keep looking at how people suffer? How was I to find a persistent source of optimism, so that I wouldn’t burn out? The spiritual task was to keep one’s spirit up.

Now, I am coming to see that the spiritual tasks of citizenship is l accepting powerlessness over many things as the human condition. In order to let the truth of the world come into me, I must stop asking “what can I do?” whenever I confront suffering. It is only when we sink into deepest misery, sometimes, that the truth comes.

We are not alone. We have each other. We have formed a community that will sustain us, and strengthen us, whenever we face the truth with courage and humility. And we are strengthened by the religious tradition that has formed us.

Among the greatest gifts of the Biblical tradition is its reminder that it is in the moments of deepest pain, suffering and hopelessness, when we are floundering in the deepest water, that there is a solid bottom. Scripture calls it “waiting upon the Lord” Barbara Pescan calls it “trusting life’, but it is the same thing, so hear again these words, written from the period of deepest powerlessness of the ancient people of Israel.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases – Life is always trustworthy

God’s mercies never come to an end ---- life will remain trustworthy

They are new every morning --- even when it breaks your heart, life will prove itself again tomorrow.

The Lord is my portion, says my soul, and therefore I will trust in him.

Or as Rev. Pescan says: “I mean an open-armed stance to Life. I mean Love: not a smarmy love but an open hearted response to all of Life, whatever comes – if what comes is love, a pain in the neck, a diagnosis, death, the difficult, the beautiful, even the profane. We take it all, refuse none of it and do something with it.”

Note: Rev. Barbara Pescan is one of the ministers at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Evanston, Illinois. She was chosen to be the speaker representing those celebrating the 25th year of their ordination at the 2007 Ministry Days at General Assembly. This sermon is inspired by, and quotes her words, from that service

"Choosing Resurrection" by Rev. Barbara Merritt April 8, 2007

2007-05-24T16:32:00.000-04:00

First Reading: - Luke 23: 39-43

One of the criminals hanging in crucifixion railed at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Then save yourself and us.”

But the other one rebuked him: “Have you no fear of God, seeing you are under the same sentence? We deserve it, after all. We are only paying the price for what we’ve done, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He then said, “Jesus, remember me when you enter upon your kingdom.” And Jesus replied, “I assure you today you will be with me in paradise.”

Second Reading: — “An Athlete of God” by Martha Graham

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire.

I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived: the human body. It is the instrument which holds in its memory all matters of life and death and love.

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths. It takes about 10 years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. There is the study and practice of the craft in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body is shaped, disciplined, honored and in time, trusted. The movement becomes clean, precise, eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it. The legends of the soul's journey are retold with all their gaiety and their tragedy and the bitterness and sweetness of living. And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and in the act of dancing.

In a dancer there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength. In a thinker there is a reverence for the beauty of the alert and directed and lucid mind. In all of us who perform there is an awareness of the smile which is part of the equipment, or gift, of the acrobat. We have all walked the high wire of circumstance at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as the acrobat does. The smile is there because he is practicing living at that instant of danger. He does not choose to fall.

lyrics to “Lord of the Dance” by Sydney Carter

I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the Moon and the Stars and the Sun
I came down from Heaven and I danced on Earth
At Bethlehem I had my birth:

Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body and they thought I'd gone

But I am the Dance and I still go on.
They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the Life that'll never, never die.
I'll live in you if you'll live in Me –
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He.

Sermon: “Choosing Resurrection”

As far as I can determine, an early religious liberal (someone who lived in the first century after Jesus lived) snuck into the home of whoever was copying the final version of the gospels and did a “Unitarian edit” on the story of the crucifixion in Luke. Here is my “midrash”, my commentary on that passage.

The religious conservatives and fundamentalists at that time were all declaring that what counted was faith: what mattered was that Jesus was the Messiah; what counted was the belief that he was your personal savior; what mattered was the willingness of the Christians to partake in certain prescribed rituals of baptism, communion and church membership in order to reap the benefits of eternal salvation.

The way I picture it, this unknown and stealthy Unitarian quietly pasted in the story of the thieves on the cross and then made a swift retreat. And he or she got away with it! It was written into the sacred text. You don’t believe me?

Look at it! The first thief asks Jesus, “Aren’t you the Messiah?” (Here is a criminal who apparently believed the stories he heard.) Then that thief added, “I believe you have the power to save yourself and to save us – so do it!” Not only does this thief believe that Jesus is the “promised one,” he also believes in his supernatural powers and that Jesus will be his personal savior. The first thief thinks that Jesus has all the power that a savior would have, and eagerly looks forward to the rabbi using it on his behalf.

The second thief is a humanist – honest, straight-forward, enormously concerned with how human beings treat one another. Even though the second thief is undergoing the same painful crucifixion as Jesus is, the first thing he does is to attempt to protect Jesus from the loud mouth on the other cross. This is an amazing relationship to take to Jesus of Nazareth. Not, “Will you save me?” But, “Allow me to help you.” This second thief seems to be saying, “Whenever I see another innocent human-being being harassed and/or mocked and/or criticized, I will ask the accuser to reconsider. “Are you not in awe, at least of God? We are all under the same sentence of death.” (A sentence that is no longer abstract or far away, but right now.) And then the second thief says something even more remarkable. He says, “This agonizing death I am now undergoing, I deserved it.” And he says to the other thief, “So did you.” This is a criminal who takes responsibility for his actions and makes no pretense of innocence or injustice or victimization. He recites the law of karma, “We all have to pay the price for what we have done.” And then what he says about Jesus is so simple, so truthful, so self-evident. “This man has done nothing wrong.” Human beings: we are usually able to recognize right and wrong– good and evil – innocence and blame. And the criminal says to another human being, “I’m not good, but I can see that you are.”

So what does a “not good” criminal ask from Jesus? He doesn’t ask for eternal life or salvation or the forgiveness of his sins. He doesn’t ask for another few good years on earth, or for a miracle, or for a painless death. He asks for something natural and human and seemingly small. He says, “Jesus, remember me when you enter into your kingdom.” Remember me. May some of the love that I see in your eyes take in the mystery of my existence. May some of whom I have been live on in who you are.

Jesus’ reply is that of a Universalist. “I assure you (you don’t have to worry) today you will be with me in paradise.” Not in three days, not after some time in hell or purgatory . . . . “today you will be with me in paradise.”

I can’t help but think that at that very moment the thief was in paradise. Despite the cross, the pain and his criminal past, he had just found out that there was a kind of holy love that would not forget him, and that would take him as far as he wanted to go.

This story in Luke is not about the supernatural or about miracles or about accepting Jesus as your personal savior. It is about what it means to be a human being and the awesome power of love and remembrance. It is about paradise being possible today.

If you need a visual, look at the lilies assembled at the front of the church. Most of them have been given in memory of people who once lived and who are no longer with us. Some have been given in memory of those who are still very much alive and are not forgotten, like young, 16-year-old Andrew who is fighting leukemia. What I love about lilies in general (and Easter lilies in particular) is that they look like trumpets. And what I hear them trumpeting is, “You have been loved and you are remembered.” “I have lived and I remember.” “Love is stronger than Death.” “The promise of spring and new life are real.” And, “Yes, the darkness has come close and the suffering and the cruelty have been terrible, but Easter is also real.” And the dance goes on . . .

If the lilies don’t speak to you, then look in your own heart. Think of whom you remember. Consider those friends and family who no matter how far they wander, into whatever kingdoms they go to, you will not forget them. Because you have broken bread together. Because you have blessed one another. Because you have encouraged and cared for and loved one another. That love is so persistent that it may “go on forever.” That love is stronger than death.

On Easter morning we choose to remember that kind of love. Together we turn in the direction of a rising sun. We sing the Hallelujah Chorus and we wear a new hat and we might carry home a fragrant lily. And hope that it doesn’t freeze on the way to the car. You see, the problem is that the Easter celebration (as well as the Passover celebration, a story of liberation and hope and freedom) ??? all these narratives occur in the same old complicated world.

Today, a time of great promise and great disappointment, a time when we remember miraculous goodness, but are also haunted by memories of terrible cruelty and harsh circumstances. We remember not only great blessings, but also great loss. Today, like everyday, we must choose, “In what direction shall I face?” Where will I put my attention? What is my ultimate goal while I am on earth?

Martha Graham offers a wonderful metaphor concerning that choice. She claims that the athletic, aerobic, trained professional dancer lives fully even at the moment of danger and “chooses not to fall.” Now all of us know (and Martha Graham admits) that dancers fall all the time. What does she mean by that phrase? She acknowledges that dancers suffer from exhaustion, injury and frustration. She puts it in even stronger terms. “Mature dancers after 10 relentless years of training . . . suffer small deaths on a daily basis.”

The way she describes the life of the body, I would hope someday to describe the life of the spirit, not in the brevity of a 10-year training period, but over a lifetime. The spirit is “shaped, disciplined, honed and in time, trusted.” In your interactions with all other children of God you will become clean, precise, eloquent and truthful. You will walk on the high wire because there is no other place to walk. You will acknowledge the pull of gravity and continue to practice living in full awareness of constant danger. As we walk on that tightrope we will do two things: 1) we will smile, and 2) we will not fall. And all would be well except for the fact that I, like many of you, am not an athlete for God. I wish I were. I pray that someday I might be. But despite years of work and meditation and sobriety, panic and distraction move in quickly.

I have been reading Anne Lamott’s new book, Grace, Eventually. She claims that according to her sponsor in AA, for every year you’ve been sober you get one second before the panic crushes you. She’s been sober 20 years – thus when faced with a problem, a crisis, an irrational situation she doesn’t panic for 20 seconds. I would like to extend this particular warranty to one second for every year you’ve been attending First Unitarian, for every year you’ve followed a meditation practice, for every year you’ve been in therapy: one second per year.

What happens when you lose your focus? Lose your balance? Lose your faith? I read from Ms. Lamott:
“The lunatic employees of the Swing Shift take over. This is the committee inside me that is sometimes dumb and dangerous with bad judgment, and often obsessed with thoughts of personal greatness or impending doom. Like, for instance, the unbearable truth that all the people you love most will die, maybe in painful circumstances, and soon, probably sometime next week.”

Anne Lamott confesses that she is not a good dancer, let alone a great dancer. She is not an athlete for God. But she does volunteer to dance with some developmentally disabled adults in her neighborhood. They have Down Syndrome. They are mentally disabled. They are autistic people living together in a group home. And in the awkward movements of the damaged residents as they attempt to dance, to twirl, to respond to the rhythm of the music she recognizes her own life:
“I noticed all sorts of parallels: the off-rhythm gait, the language you can’t quite catch, the lack of coordination, the odd effects—too friendly or too far away—the bad teeth, the screwed-up relationships or no relationships at all, the not-fitting-in-ness. It’s incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.”

Allow me to repeat: “All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, and are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.”

We keep going. I am fond of quoting Lao Tzo, who when asked to say in one sentence what the Tao was, replied, “Walk on.”

That I believe is the dance of Easter, where you occasionally move with grace and eloquence as a professional mature dancer in one of Martha Graham’s Dance Company productions. But more likely you (like the rest of us) find only a few inches of light to stand on.

To choose resurrection is to choose not to fall. And when we fall, as all dancers do, to choose to get up again and to help others to get back on their feet. As people who have loved and have been loved, we keep moving in the direction of joy and possibility and truth. Personally, I think it is a good idea to remember that life is always performed on a tight wire with gravity always pulling at us. On this unlikely platform we are called to smile with the persistence of a focused acrobat who practices living in the face of danger. Together with the openness of the heart of a Down Syndrome young man all of us are invited out onto the dance floor. We agree to sing, to rejoice, to move forward.

Knowing that paradise is possible today – for thieves, for acrobats, for thee and for me. Again we choose to join the happy chorus that the morning stars began. Choosing to remember, the triumphant song of life.

"Contagious Living" Sermon by Abigail Hannaford-Ricardi April 15, 2007

2007-05-17T09:30:00.000-04:00

FIRST READING:
Psalm 139 (13-16)

For thou didst form my inward parts,
Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise thee for thou art fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well,
My frame was not hidden from thee,
When I was being made in secret,
Intricately wrought in the depth of the earth,
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance:
In thy book were written, every one of them,
The days that were formed for me
When as yet there was none of them.

SECOND READING:
“He is a Miracle” by Abigail Hannaford-Ricardi

I’m going to tell you about my son Terry today, and hopefully you don’t feel like you’ve just sat down for a 24 hour bus ride next to the granny with the wallet photos. Rest assured I don’t carry a wallet - not enough room for photos. That’s why I’ve got 12 volumes of scrapbooks about my kids. This second reading is from a scrapbook page I made two Thanksgivings ago. Terry is my hero, and I don’t say that lightly. There is no living human being whom I admire more than Terry. I’d like to share with you my top ten list of why he is a miracle and my hero.

1. HE IS ALIVE: Terry was born to a homeless, IV drug user who received no pre-natal care. Since doctors didn’t know the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, it was a vaginal delivery. He underwent withdrawal from cocaine and opiates (which is lethal to 3-5% of newborns if untreated). Terry was born with a cytomegalovirus infection, and worst of all he was one of only 10% with the infection who has the actual congenital CMV disease (similar to Rubella syndrome). 20% of children born with the disease die and 90% of those who survive are severely disabled. Terry suffered damage to his brain, heart, liver, blood, eyes and ears. Despite being full term, Terry spent six weeks in the neonatal ICU, and was then discharged into a medical foster home and provided with 40-70 hours per week of home nursing care.

Today Terry is an alive and active teenager.

2. HE CAN EAT: When Terry moved into that foster home, a suction machine and feeding pump went with him. Failure to thrive and malnutrition are some of the leading causes of death in congenital CMV disease. Despite advancing the caloric density of his formula and feeding him through a tube Terry had poor weight gain. When he came to us at age three and a half he was still on an all liquid diet. He was diagnosed with severe failure to thrive and at his four year old physical he weighed just 25 pounds (in the 0% and below the 50% for an 18 month old).
Today Terry’s weight and height are in the normal range. He has a voracious appetite. If any of you don’t know who Terry is, just look around during coffee hour for the person eating the most cookies and I guarantee you that will be my son.

3. HE CAN SEE: When Terry was in the neonatal unit he was noted to have eye shaking. Later he would be diagnosed with scarring and incomplete closure of the eyes, outward eye turn, missing nerve tissue connecting the eyes to the brain, and suspected damage to the vision processing areas of the brain. Those of you who knew us when we first started coming here will remember that Terry used to have to touch vocal cords in order to identify people.

Today Terry can identify people in photos and read alphabet letters just ¼ inch high. He is a miracle.

4. HE CAN COMMUNICATE: Congenital CMV is the leading cause of non-hereditary deafness in children. Over 65% of kids with the disease develop hearing loss. Terry is deaf. Some of the only vibrations Terry can respond to are below those tested on standard audiogram charts, beyond the pain threshold and at a level that would cause deafness in a hearing person. Terry also has autism which greatly impacts his ability to use language.

Today Terry has a sign language vocabulary of about 500 words and also uses a pictorial communication system to communicate with family, friends and staff.

5. HE CAN BREATHE FREELY: CMV can invade the lungs and cause a fatal pneumonia in both infants with the congenital disease and in adults who are immune compromised. Terry was in respiratory distress when he was born. He was diagnosed with a floppiness and collapse of the main airway and many other problems including asthma. Sinusitis, bronchitis, pneumonia -Terry averaged 13 respiratory infections per year.

Today the frequency and severity of Terry’s respiratory infections and asthma attacks have greatly decreased and he is usually full of energy. He was just seven years old the first time he climbed Mt. Wachusett with this church.

6. HE CAN WALK: That may seem obvious, but then again, breathing, seeing and eating probably did too. 25-39% of children born with CMV disease have abnormal motor function. Terry’s central nervous system was not spared. His tone was so abnormal that the hospital called in an occupational therapist the day he was born. When he was just two months old specialists wrote that he most likely had a mixed, quadriplegic form of cerebral palsy. At age three and a half he could not walk, could not sit without supporting himself, and tired of holding his head up.

Today Terry continues to receive occupational and physical therapy several times a week, but he can walk, swing, dance and climb. He is a miracle.

7. HE CAN THINK: Congenital CMV is the most common infectious cause of mental retardation and a leading cause overall. Terry had an abnormally small head circumference and seizures. Just before turning eight he tested at the 16-18 month old level and was diagnosed as severely mentally retarded.
Today Terry’s head size is normal, he hasn’t had a seizure in over ten years, and his cognitive skills test in the six year old range. He can read several words, write his name, count, match and sort items. His sense of direction and memory for routes far surpasses mine, and he likes to take apart and rebuild mechanical devices.

8. HE CAN WORK: For several years Terry required total care for dressing feeding and toileting. He was difficult to reach, withdrawing from the world to self-stim, rock, spin, and laugh to himself.

Today Terry loves work tasks. At school he has had mail delivery, stocking and recycling jobs, as well as assisting with shopping, simple cooking and laundry chores. He has been working in the school greenhouse potting plants and making horticulture crafts, works in the seat weaving shop and restocks the snack wall and soda machine in the school snack shop. He has become very competitive with his classmates, is proud of his accomplishments, loves to receive praise, and can’t wait to spend the money he earns.

9. HE IS STRONG: Terry has a genetic immune deficiency disease called hypogammaglobulinemia (an abnormally low concentration of the major component (85%) of all serum antibodies, leaving him susceptible to recurrent infections, scarring of the lungs, a painful form of arthritis, digestive problems and production of autoantibodies that attack his own tissues and blood cells. This condition is life threatening to people who are otherwise “normal,” it is bad news when a child with multiple disabilities has it. He used to miss more than 80 days of school a year due to illness.

Today Terry takes antibiotics every day, as he has for the past seven years. Since starting treatment, the changes in his health, stamina, physical growth and learning have been remarkable. He is stronger than he has ever been. He is a miracle.

10. HE HAS FRIENDS: For a long time Terry was more interested in wheels, shoes and door hinges than he was in any human being. Terry has autism with sensory motor integration disorder, obsessive/compulsive behavior and an attention deficit disorder.

Today Terry can still get distracted by wheels and shoes, but he has very genuine attachments to his friends. Whether it is sledding with Nathan, cooking with John, working with Ben, eating lunch with Joel, going to the YMCA with Katie or sleeping over at Sara’s house, Terry is involved. He asks for his friends when they are sick, and states that he wants to see them during school vacations. One of his very best friends is James – Terry has become an attentive and doting big brother!

SERMON: CONTAGIOUS LIVING

I want to begin by telling you my qualifications for being here today: I sent Jeffery Merritt a card. In other words, I am not qualified. This just proves the old saying that “no good deed goes unpunished.” That’s right. After today the Merritt household will wonder why they don’t receive any more personal mail.

As much as I like to brag about my kids, I’m thinking that sermons should pertain to every day life, and most of you probably don’t live with someone whose physical brain has been ravaged by a virus. However, we all know and live with the metaphorical viruses that ravage our brains. I’m talking about the viruses that infect us with feelings of worthlessness, shame, anger, fear and despair. Learning how CMV was passed to Terry and how it affected him, has helped me to learn how we pass emotional viruses onto each other and how they affect us. Here is my second top ten list:

1. ONLY DON’T KNOW: This is actually a Buddhist saying. I’m not going to ask a show of hands on how many of you have cytomegalovirus. I’ll tell you. 50% of us in the U.S. have it by the time we are 30, 90% of us have it by the time we die. So, if you don’t have it the people sitting on either side of you do. In talking about Terry, I risk him being discriminated against – so let me tell you upfront, you can’t get CMV from him. You get the virus from someone who has a new infection – and most people with one have no symptoms at all (although 10% have flu or cold like symptoms). You can’t tell by looking at someone. Avoiding children with multiple handicaps will not protect you.

This holds true for emotional viruses as well. You can’t avoid getting hurt by avoiding people with green skin. Yet our brains are wired to protect us. If we touch fire, we learn very quickly that we shouldn’t stick our hands into glowing red and yellow. Our brains want to use the same system to protect us from emotional hurt. I think this is where some prejudices originate. You can’t tell by looks.

2. YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONES YOU LOVE: There are three times in life when a person is most likely to get a CMV infection. The first is as an infant or toddler from other drooling infants and toddlers. The second is as a teenager from that new special other you are kissing. The third time is when you are the parent of an infant or toddler. The population at greatest risk for having a child with congenital CMV is mothers of children below the age of 3. Junior comes home from daycare, where other toddlers are wearing diapers, mouthing toys, drooling, and sneezing. Mom, who wouldn’t wipe the nose, change the diaper, clean the drool, kiss away the tears, or finish the food of a strangers child, will do all those things for her own child. Or, if she’s pregnant and being hyper careful, maybe her partner is doing all those things.- and then her partner gets the virus, kisses mom and she gets it and mom passes it to her unborn baby. Did you notice, it all comes from friends or family?

Emotional viruses work the same way. I can be nice to most people most of the time. I can have endless patience for other people’s children, but the people closest to me get to see me when I’m being mean and impatient. The most hurtful things I’ve ever said, the ones I’ve regretted the most, I’ve said to my husband. Now if a mere acquaintance says something hurtful to you, it’s easy to shrug it off. That person doesn’t know you! However, if the person you love most, the one you’ve trusted with your most personal feelings says something hurtful, it cuts you to the bone. The people we love most can hurt us the most. Therefore to protect ourselves from future pain we should all avoid letting anyone get close to us…NO! Don’t do that.

3. MOST VULNERABLE =MOST HURT: I told you that the vast majority of people don’t have any symptoms from their CMV infection. However, in people who are immune compromised, such as those who are undergoing cancer treatments, have had organ transplants or are HIV positive, CMV can quickly lead to blindness, liver failure or a fatal pneumonia. CMV is an opportunistic virus. In a developing fetus, all the major systems can be damaged.

Likewise, emotional viruses are most damaging to the most vulnerable. Yet, it is this group that is most often the recipient of such viruses. The nerdly kid. The geeky guy. The over-weight housewife. The forgetful senior citizen. Emotional viruses are opportunistic. And here is the rub, while most of us would not blame someone for a physical ill, we do blame people for their emotional ills. “Get over it.” “She’s overly emotional, anyway!” “He needs to grow a thicker skin.” When we cause emotional hurts, sometimes instead of being sympathetic, we get defensive. We don’t always know who is most vulnerable. One out of every 100 babies born in the US has a CMV infection, but 90% of them will have no symptoms at birth and 75% never develop any symptoms. Yet 10% of those newborns will have severe, life threatening disease. Why are some more vulnerable and some unaffected? We don’t know.

4. DON’T JUDGE: According to the March of Dimes, congenital CMV leads to 8,000 permanent disabilities in the US every year. (By the way, that’s 2,000 more than Down syndrome). Epidemiologists know this from studies that test every baby born in select hospitals across the U.S. However, normally, newborns are not routinely tested for CMV, and unless the test is done within the first three weeks of life, a positive result is meaningless because the child could have been exposed after birth. The vast majority of congenital CMV cases are never diagnosed. Every year thousands of parents have children who have deafness, blindness, cerebral palsy, cognitive impairment, and/or epilepsy, and never know that CMV was the cause. Often the disabilities are blamed on something that was also caused by the CMV, such as the premature birth. As an adoptive mom, it’s hard for me to understand, but I can tell you that mothers of children with disabilities blame themselves. The guilt is huge. Sadly, often, their spouses, family and friends will also think, “She must have done something wrong during that pregnancy.”

Obsessive/compulsive disorder used to be considered a result of “maladaptive coping of past conflicts, abuse and anxiety” requiring long-term psychotherapy. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder used to be attributed to “bad parenting,” “willful defiance,” and “moral defectiveness.” (These definitions are all out of old textbooks, by the way). Autism for many years was thought to be caused by “maternal ambivalence” towards the child. We now know that these each have a biological basis. Why do I mention these conditions today? Because congenital CMV is associated with all three conditions, and my son has been diagnosed with all three. Thirty years ago, you would all have KNOWN that I was a terrible mother. The textbooks said so.

Being judged, especially misjudged, hurts. I always like to think I know stuff and I’m forever realizing that I don’t have a clue. I’m not going to tell you, “Don’t judge,” because, to be honest, I find myself judging people and their behaviors regularly. But we should all TRY not to judge others.

5. HURT GROWS AND SPREADS: Someone sneezes and a tiny particle is passed to another person, where it multiplies, spreads to the bloodstream, passes through the placenta and grows in a fetus, potentially damaging every developing part: liver, lungs, heart, GI tract, eyes, ears, brain… Not just the brain as the thinking organ, but everything it controls – muscles, breathing, sleep cycle, temperature regulation, puberty. Congenital CMV can cause tooth enamel defects, orthopedic problems and hernias. All this from one tiny little microbe.

Emotional viruses are the same – one small insult can ripple and magnify and spread. This is especially true with gossip. Once something leaves your mouth, whether in a germ filled sneeze or hurt filled words, you can’t take it back or control where it goes.

6. TREAT OR REAP: There is no cure for congenital CMV, but the sooner it’s identified, the sooner it can be treated, and the sooner you treat, the less damage it causes.
As an example, CMV is a leading cause of deafness. 65% of those born with the disease develop hearing loss, and once the loss starts it almost always progresses to the severe to profound level in the affected ear or ears. The majority of these kids are born hearing and pass the newborn hearing screen. However, by the second birthday, deafness has often set in. Because most cases of congenital CMV go undiagnosed, the hearing loss is unexpected and often not discovered until the child enters school. Now consider that the success of every intervention –hearing aides, sign language, speech therapy, cochlear implants, etc. - depends greatly on how early it can begin – when the developing language center of the brain is most accessible. Today there is an antiviral treatment that has been shown to stop or significantly lessen hearing loss in newborns with the disease. (It can also stop or reverse the major CMV killers too –liver failure, gastritis, anemia and pneumonia). But there is no opportunity to give it if the virus isn’t diagnosed.

Not surprisingly, the sooner emotional viruses are recognized and treated, the less the damage. I think a lot of law suits could be avoided if people learned to listen and say “I’m sorry.” Too often we let anger, guilt and fear get in the way, or we hope problems will just go away if we don’t say anything – much like parents of a disabled child first hope, “He’ll grow out of it.” Situations that could have been addressed. resolved and forgotten, linger and fester and mushroom until the losses are severe and irreversible.

7. POP GOES THE WEASLE: CMV stays in your body for life, but after the initial infection the immune system keeps it in check. This is why, without treatment it can be life-threatening to those who are immune compromised. In times of stress the virus can reactivate. This is what happened to Terry’s birth mother. She was ill from the drug use, a Hepatitis B infection and probable HIV infection, had a severe CMV reactivation and passed the virus onto Terry. I have to tell you that kids born with CMV disease are not the hardiest bunch. Just when we think things are going smoothly we get a shock. Four years ago at age 13, Ronda was a lot like Terry, until the day she walked into a wall and it was discovered that the virus had reactivated in her eyes leaving her totally blind. Last year the virus reactivated in Ronda’s brain and she died at age 16. Sam is 11 and still with us, but two years ago the virus reactivated in his heart and lungs. This past winter he coded four times.

I want to read you the words of a parent written nine years after his premature daughter lived for 20 minutes and then died:
…the tragedy with Elise. It changed my life forever. I haven’t been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate towards God and unimaginable emptiness it seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn’t here to share it with us and I go right back to anger.

The family, friends and neighbors of this parent didn’t recognize his grief. They saw him as a steady worker, church goer, and devoted husband and father, yet this man shot ten girls in an Amish school house. We’ve all heard about the person who goes on a rampage in a post office, restaurant or school, but hidden anguish surfaces all the time on a much smaller scale in everyday life. I’m someone who hates confrontations, so I tend to swallow grief and praise myself for “not making issues out of ant hills” – except the ants are still there and to my embarrassment, I find that I tend to dredge them all up when I hit my breaking point.

8. KNOWLEDGE = POWER: Prior to today, how many of you can remember ever hearing about CMV? Well, in September of 2005 the Worcester Telegram and Gazette carried an article about an Italian study of congenital CMV. They offered hyperimmune globulin to pregnant women who tested positive for having a new CMV infection. In the study the drug cut the rate of mother-to-child transmission of CMV to just 3 %. In contrast, 50 % of the infected mothers who opted not to receive the treatment passed on the CMV to their unborn. The treatment is considered very safe and no adverse effects have been noted. Prevention of potentially severe birth defects.- this was great news! Guess how many American women have benefited from this treatment in the past 1½ years? I’ll give you a clue. 40,000 babies are born CMV positive in the U.S. every year. The answer? I don’t know of a single case (although I do know of a few U.S. women who received this treatment after ultrasounds and blood tests already showed fetal damage due to CMV).

Why is this? In Italy, where the study was done, all pregnant women are routinely tested for the virus several times during each pregnancy. The Italian public is aware of the risks of congenital CMV. In the U.S. women are not routinely tested and most U.S. women have never heard of this virus. Most CMV infected babies are born to women who carefully followed their doctors’ advice. They got regular pre-natal care, took their vitamins with folic acid, quit smoking, avoided alcohol and over the counter medications, they didn’t handle raw meat or change the cat litter box, they left the house when the nursery was being painted and even stopped dying their hair. But, no one ever told them about precautions to avoid CMV, and now no one is telling women about a simple blood test and possible preventative treatment.

Knowledge gives us power to make changes. This is very true with preventing the spread of emotional viruses as well. I probably shouldn’t mention how ignorant I am…but I am, and I used to be much more clueless. When I was in college I picked up phrases like, “There goes the paddy wagon,” “Don’t be an Indian giver,” and “I think I’ve been gypped.” These phrases invaded my brain and I started spreading them around, completely ignorant of what ethnic slurs they were, until someone who really cared for me (my husband) pointed them out. Most of us don’t try to hurt others. Just like the parents in my CMV support group, we try to go out of our way to protect others from harm, but we have to be educated. We need to seek knowledge and to be open to change.

9. THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE: Specialists were not very hopeful when Terry was born, and they weren’t very hopeful 3 ½ years later when he came to live with us, and yet, as I shared with you, he far surpassed expectations. He is a miracle.

There are probably people in each of your lives that you just don’t expect much of. Now I’m not saying to surround yourself with people who make you miserable, but keep yourself open to the thought that people can change. Don’t avoid joining a committee you are interested in because you don’t think you can work with a particular member. Don’t assume someone can’t do something, just because they never have. People will surprise you. I’m very surprised to be here today. Barbara took a chance asking me to give a sermon. I’m a private person, and a fearful public speaker. This just goes to show that as bad as my “preaching” skills are, I’m even worse at saying “no.”

10. GOOD IS CONTAGIOUS: It’s hard not to smile when you see someone smiling, and it’s hard not to feel better when you are smiling. Scientific studies are now actually proving this. We can spread good viruses. I mentioned earlier that Terry has a condition called hypogammaglobulinemia. (That’s one word, 21 letters long, by the way). One of the treatments for that condition is a four hour monthly IV of gammaglobulin. This blood product is taken from the blood of 10,000 donors. You need that many to ensure that the recipient receives antibodies to all the bugs currently circulating. That to me is an amazing thing – so many people giving something which is then pooled together to support one individual. And, because gammaglobulin only lives for 20 to 30 days, the treatment needs to be repeated every 3 to 4 weeks.

When our younger son James had congestive heart failure and was awaiting his second open-heart surgery, people of this congregation pooled together to support us. There were days in which we felt that we were capsizing, when your actions buoyed us. And before your treatment could wear off, we would get another infusion, another call, card, visit or hot meal. Those repeated treatments sustained us until we landed back on dry ground. Thank you.

May you go out and spread the viruses of love, hope and joy. Be as contagious as possible and infect as many people as you can.

MUSIC LYRICS

How Could Anyone by Libby Roderick

How could anyone ever tell you
you were any thing less than beautiful?
How could any one ever tell you,
you were less than whole?
How could anyone fail to notice
that your loving is a miracle?
How deeply you’re connected to my soul.

Don't Laugh At Me
by Seskin and Shamblin

I'm a little boy with glasses
The one they call the geek
A little girl who never smiles
'Cause I've got braces on my teeth
And I know how it feels
To cry myself to sleep

I'm that kid on every playground
Who's always chosen last
A single teenage mother
Tryin' to overcome my past
You don't have to be my friend
But is it too much to ask

Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me

I'm the beggar on the corner
You've passed me on the street
And I wouldn't be out here beggin'
If I had enough to eat
And don't think I don't notice
That our eyes never meet

I was born a little different
I do my dreaming from this chair
I pretend it doesn’t hurt me
When people point and stare
There’s a simple way to show me
Just how much you care.

Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me

I'm fat, I'm thin, I'm short, I'm tall
I'm deaf, I'm blind, hey, aren't we all

Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me

"Gratitude" Sermon by Rev. Barbara Merritt Mar 18, 2007

2007-04-24T16:39:00.000-04:00

“No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.”
-Elie Wiesel

First Reading: - from Psalm 139

O LORD, you have searched me, and known me.
You know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar.
My travels and my rest you mark; with all my ways you are familiar.
Even before a word is on my tongue, Lord, you know it all.
Behind and before you encircle me and rest your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is beyond me, far too lofty for me to reach.
Where can I hide from your spirit? From your presence, where can I flee?
If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in hell, you are there too.
If I fly with the wings of dawn and alight beyond the sea,
Even there your hand will guide me, your right hand hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely darkness shall hide me, and night shall be my light" --
Darkness is not dark for you, and night shines as the day.Darkness and light are but one.

Second Reading: — “Be Cool to the Pizza Dude” by Sarah Adams

If I have one operating philosophy about life it is this: ''Be cool to the pizza delivery dude; it's good luck.'' Four principles guide the pizza dude philosophy.

Principle 1: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness. I let him cut me off in traffic, let him safely hit the exit ramp from the left lane, let him forget to use his blinker without extending any of my digits out the window or towards my horn because there should be one moment in my harried life when a car may encroach or cut off or pass and I let it go. Sometimes when I have become so certain of my ownership of my lane, daring anyone to challenge me, the pizza dude speeds by me in his rusted Chevette. His pizza light atop his car glowing like a beacon reminds me to check myself as I flow through the world. After all, the dude is delivering pizza to young and old, families and singletons, gays and straights, blacks, whites and browns, rich and poor, vegetarians and meat lovers alike. As he journeys, I give safe passage, practice restraint, show courtesy, and contain my anger.

Principle 2: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in empathy. Let's face it: We've all taken jobs just to have a job because some money is better than none. I've held an assortment of these jobs and was grateful for the paycheck that meant I didn't have to share my Cheerios with my cats. In the big pizza wheel of life, sometimes you're the hot bubbly cheese and sometimes you're the burnt crust. It's good to remember the fickle spinning of that wheel.

Principle 3: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in honor and it reminds me to honor honest work. Let me tell you something about these dudes: They never took over a company and, as CEO, artificially inflated the value of the stock and cashed out their own shares, bringing the company to the brink of bankruptcy, resulting in 20,000 people losing their jobs while the CEO builds a home the size of a luxury hotel. Rather, the dudes sleep the sleep of the just.

Principle 4: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in equality. My measurement as a human being, my worth, is the pride I take in performing my job -- any job -- and the respect with which I treat others. I am the equal of the world not because of the car I drive, the size of the TV I own, the weight I can bench press, or the calculus equations I can solve. I am the equal to all I meet because of the kindness in my heart. And it all starts here -- with the pizza delivery dude.

Tip him well, friends and brethren, for that which you bestow freely and willingly will bring you all the happy luck that a grateful universe knows how to return.

Sermon: “Gratitude”

In India recently someone asked my spiritual teacher a question, “What is the worst karma a person can undergo here on earth? What is the greatest difficulty? The harshest circumstances?”

What an interesting question! How would you answer it? A few responses that came to my mind include financial poverty, to be born in a war-torn country, mental illness, debilitating physical illness, domestic abuse (my Lord, the list seems endless.)

I was astonished by my teachers reply. He answered (and I paraphrase), “The worst karma is to be ungrateful. If you suffer from ingratitude then it won’t matter what blessings and goodness are in your life, you won’t be capable of receiving it. In contrast, if you are grateful then even in the most challenging of circumstances, you will be able to recognize the many gifts that you are receiving.”
When I heard this last Sunday, I immediately recognized the truth in his observation, but it was not altogether good news to me. For you see, many of us (if not most human beings) suffer from this particular variety of bad karma. Rather than possessing a grateful heart that is able to focus on all the advantages we have enjoyed, all the good company that we have been given, all the many blessings that God offers us on a daily basis, we (or should I say I) occasionally, in fact frequently, get lost and quite forgetful.

I focus on what isn’t on the banquet table. Looking over a lifetime, there are some of us who think we have an inalienable right to criticize, to complain, to accuse and to feel victimized.

It’s not that good fortune and great friends and tremendous blessings don’t find their way to our door. They do! But the relationship we usually take to such things is to take them for granted. Good health, a warm house, nice clothes, nutritious food, meaningful work, volunteer opportunities, beautiful music from the choir and an occasional nourishing novel or TV show or film; these become white noise – mere background – “givens” . . . but not necessarily noticed, appreciated, or fully acknowledged. We scream at their absence, but hardly ever notice their presence. And if someone says we ought to be grateful for what is good in our lives, we might become annoyed, resentful or impatient.

I was genuinely shocked when I went to my “Big Book of Quotes” looking for some wise words to put in the newsletter about “gratitude.” Under that heading more than 2/3 of the quotes were negative about the virtue of gratitude. The writers and poets and philosophers described gratitude as a form of servile humiliation, as an expression of indebtedness and disempowerment. The master of the house demanded it from the servants and such obligation was always an admission of defeat! Just for example, the Bengali poet Tagore wrote, “Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of victims.” The French philosopher Diderot dismissed it this way, “Gratitude is a burden, meant to be shaken off.”

Even an article in the recent UU World – while it claimed that gratitude was the pre-eminent Unitarian Universalist virtue, I was disturbed by what I perceived as a subtext (which may or may not have been present, or intended.) What I heard was a scolding tone. Our dependency was an inconvenient truth rather than a liberating relationship. Independence, freedom and autonomous individual integrity were described as posing “grave dangers.” Rather as if autonomy and self-reliance were simply self-indulgent fantasies that good Unitarian Universalists would have to sacrifice in order to dutifully acknowledge the many ways we need one another.

It’s possible that the reason I didn’t love the article on behalf of gratitude in the UU World is that no one can argue you into becoming grateful. The journey to gratitude is not about making lists or comparing how much you have compared to others, or forcing you to acknowledge how dependant you are on the co-operation of a lively universe.

How we arrive at gratitude is something of a mystery and I suspect that there are many roads (and detours.) How you get to gratitude might take you on quite different paths than the one your neighbor travels. I believe that some models of gratitude are dead ends, especially those based on the calculation method. In this mindset, your assumption is that at the auspicious moment gratitude will descend on you like fairy dust. People who enjoy the privilege of being grateful are those who 1) win the lottery; 2) receive the Noble Prize or a McArthur Grant or an Olympic Gold Medal; 3) billionaires; 4) people whose loved ones never die or suffer from ill health; and 5) those whose cars, appliances, computers, and hearts do not break. In such idealized fantasies, those lucky enough to be grateful are rare indeed.

A few weeks ago a member of this congregation, George Lane taught me a joke that he heard from Garrison Keeler. My poor husband has had to hear me tell it about 73 times. I thought I’d get over with this morning and tell you all at once. It concerns a grandmother who was walking with her 5-year-old grandson on the beach, when suddenly a rogue wave comes up and grabs that child and carries him out to sea. She looks up to the sky, holds her fist and says, “God, this is unacceptable, unbearable. You cannot take an innocent child.” And just as those words come out of her mouth, another rogue wave comes and deposits the child smiling back at her feet. She picks up the child in her arms, looks up to the sky and says, “This child had a hat!”

A variant on the calculation model, which is much more effective (but not without problems), is to put life on a balance. Acknowledging that life is a combination of good and evil, blessings and curses, advantages and disadvantages, peaceful moments and times of great agitation and anxiety. You ride the waves. And when you go into a tough time of hardship and deprivation, you simply have to wait it out. Happiness is an achievement of timing. The Broadway music lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein wrote with great eloquence as to why he defines himself as a happy man. Listen to what he has to say on the subject of enjoying this world.

“I am a man who believes he is happy. Why do I believe I am happy?

Death has deprived me of many whom I loved. Dismal failure has followed many of my most earnest efforts. People have disappointed me. I have disappointed them. I have disappointed myself.

Further than this, I am aware that I live under a cloud of international hysteria. The cloud could burst, and a rain of atom bombs could destroy millions of lives, including my own. From all this evidence, could I not build up a strong case to prove why I am not happy at all? I could, but it would be a false picture, as false as if I were to describe a tree only as it looks in winter. I would be leaving out a list of people I love, who have not died. I would be leaving out an acknowledgment of the many successes that have sprouted among my many failures. I would be leaving out the blessing of good health, the joy of walking in the sunshine. I would be leaving out my faith that the goodness in humanity will triumph eventually over the evil that causes war. The conflict of good and bad merges in thick entanglement. You cannot isolate virtue and beauty and success and laughter and keep them from all contact with wickedness and ugliness and failure and weeping.

I don’t believe anyone can enjoy living in this world unless he can accept its imperfection. He must know and admit that he is imperfect, that all other mortals are imperfect, and go on in his own imperfect way, making his mistakes and riding out the rough and bewildering, exciting and beautiful storm of life until the day he dies.”

Mr. Hammerstein presents a persuasive and compelling argument that the only place gratitude can exist (in this world) is in the midst of a complicated imperfection. I believe he is right about that.

Where I can’t so easily follow is keep to my balance and stay grateful when the ride gets especially rough. Some things go wrong and are never right again. Tragedies can break your heart for a whole lifetime. Some sorrows are inconsolable. Some failures and defects are permanent. While I can celebrate Oscar Hammerstein’s image of “riding out a rough and bewildering and exciting and beautiful storm of life,” this will not comfort a mother who has just lost a child, or the family who has just seen the father of their small children get killed in Iraq.

The road to having a grateful heart has to travel a more difficult terrain. And it was eloquently expressed by Elie Weisel. A survivor the holocaust of 8 million Jews, he wrote: “gratitude emerges from the kingdom of night.” Gratitude is not, in this model, the result of good fortune, happiness or great success. Instead gratitude is a response to life itself. It emerges precisely at the moment when we do settle at the farthest limits of the sea – in places and circumstances where we believe that we are unreachable, unsaveable and irredeemable. No one ever put it more clearly. “Thou are acquainted with all my ways . . . Where can I flee from your presence? If I make my bed in hell, thou art there . . . even the night shall provide light. The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee.”

The psalmist is making a rather bold statement. Grace can find you anywhere and everywhere. Even with your best and most determined efforts, you cannot exile yourself from the range and reach of love. The power of goodness is so enormous that eventually you will be pulled in.

This is the heart of Jesus’ story of the prodigal son. Not only is our poverty and our bad habits and our unconsciousness about the giver of our wealth and talent and strength not a barrier to God’s love, amazingly it is the way that human beings travel. We stumble, we fall, we get up over and over again our whole lives long. And there will come that moment when we see that love does not hold that against us. After all our adventures we will be welcomed, embraced and given a really big party.

It is out of that breathtaking vision that I suggest you establish your ever-so-cool relationship with the pizza delivery dude.

Sarah Adams, in wonderfully concrete terms, speaks of the practice of forgiveness and humility, not as something to contemplate in church. Instead, they are to be brought into play when a car cuts you off in traffic, exits from the wrong lane and doesn’t use his blinker. Each of us is given opportunities (probably more often than we’d like) to “give safe passage, practice restraint, show courtesy and contain our anger.”

We are here on earth, at least partially, to practice empathy, to honor honest work and to ceaselessly embody that central Universalist principle – the dignity and worth of all human beings. This practice of radical equality is measured by “the respect with which you treat others, and by the kindness in your heart.” And then comes the leap. When you become the giver of kindness, you are more likely to become aware of the kindness flowing towards you.

Gratitude is not about the things you do (or do not) receive. It is about a relationship. Some of us call the source of all life (and goodness and love) by the name of God. Some of us call the sense of all life a mysterious reality that cannot be named. But there ought not to be disagreement about our response to our current imperfect circumstances. We can pray to be given a grateful heart. Grateful for the gift of life. Grateful for the opportunities of this day to come closer to what is real and sustaining. Grateful that no matter how far we wander, or how many times we stumble, grace will find us and we will be blessed.

"Called Beyond Ourselves" Sermon by Tom Schade

2007-03-27T15:48:00.000-04:00

Called Beyond Ourselves
Sermon Tom Schade
February 4, 2007

For forty days and forty nights, the Israelites and the Philistines had squared off in the hills overlooking that valley. Everyday, Goliath had come down from the Philistine side and stood in the valley and shouted his challenge to the army that Saul had gathered. “Choose one fighter to come down and fight me, for the whole thing.” And everyday, Saul’s army quaked in fear, and no one went forward to fight Goliath.

This standoff had become a way of life. The fear that they felt had become a habit. I am sure that by the 10th day, no one thought about it anymore. “Oh, there is Goliath shouting again. No one would be so foolish as to go out there and fight this guy nine feet tall, covered with armor. You would have to be crazy to do that, because Goliath would kill you.” And given those odds, and those stakes – if we send someone out there and he loses, then we all become slaves to the Philistines, wouldn’t it make more sense to not risk the battle.”

Goliath was not going to be going away anytime soon.

Time slowed down and eventually stopped, and Saul’s armies had been stuck like a fly in amber. Fear and paralysis had become a way of life.

Goliath was a powerful man. He was nine feet tall, the story tells us, and covered in bronze armor and carried a huge and heavy spear and sword. He had also made the Israelites play his game. Instead of army against army, he wanted it to be one on one, where he had all the advantages.

And in so doing, Goliath had already won. He brought Saul’s army to a standstill. The Philistines must have been laughing up in those hills, saying to themselves. “Look, we have their whole army pinned down, and we have to do is send the big guy out every morning to yell at them.”

We all know this story of David and Goliath. It is one of the first stories that we learn from the Bible. It is an exciting story, and it is a story that appeals to young people, especially, I think, to young boys, who face Goliaths every day. It is interesting that it is not a particularly religious story. God does not smite Goliath with a lightening bolt – there are no miracles or supernatural interventions in the story. Goliath is beaten by a shepherd boy with a sling and a smooth stone. Yes, David gives all the credit to God, much as a grammy winning singer thanks God before getting around to thanking her musicians, producers, agents, lawyers and her parents.

But the story is not about the actions of God, anymore than it is a story about the advantages of slingshots over spears in combat.

It is a story about bravery.

David is a shepherd boy sent by his father to bring some bread and some cream cheeses to his brothers in the army. You might say he was the kid who delivers the bagels.

And he comes into this army that is frozen in fear, that for forty days and nights has been taunted by this nine foot freak, an army that has been slinking around talking about how good it would be for somebody, somewhere, somehow to take on Goliath. For forty days and forty nights, which is Bible talk, for a long long time.

So David says he will do it; even though it seems crazy.

Yes, he was skilled with the slingshot, and yes, he had some experience with lions and bears in his shepherding work, but mostly, he was not afraid. He was an outsider, he brought fresh eyes into the situation, and he was not trapped in the collective fear and community paralysis that had made Goliath so overwhelmingly powerful in the eyes of the Israelites.
You can see the power of the group-think that had gripped the Israelites when Saul tries to put armor on David and give him a sword. They only could think of one way to fight Goliath, and that way was guaranteed to result in defeat, which is where the paralysis came in.

Anyway, you know the rest of the story.

It would be great if all we ever faced now were nine-foot guys with big spears. Such a man might have a great career playing basketball, but he would not bring us all to paralyzed fear.

But Goliath is still out there for us.

I see Goliath out there right now in every social problem that seems too complex, with too many interconnections to ever be solved. Issues like homelessness. It’s a housing question, and a jobs problem, and a health issue, complicated by the syndromes of drug and alcohol abuse, which are frequently attempts to self-medicate the pain caused by mental and emotional disorders. And even if you were to be able to figure out the best way to attack all these inter-related problems, who has the money to do that, except the government, and how are going to raise the taxes to get the money when everybody is suspicious of homeless people, and angry at them, and afraid of that a run of bad luck could put them in the same place.

It’s Goliath, and it is fearsome, and it is becoming a way of life for us to live with persistent chronic homelessness.

It is becoming a way of life for us to live with widespread homelessness, just like it is a way of life for us to live with a health care system that costs too much and covers too few. But it is so complicated to fix a little bit at a time, but if you try to fix it as a whole system, everybody will think about the Clintons in 1993, and look what happened there. So let Goliath shout everyday.

The President comes out every couple of days and says to the Congress, “the only way you can stop my plans for Iraq is to cut off the money, and you don’t have the nerve to do it. So get used to it. You are too afraid to stop me.”

There are Goliaths in your own home and family – issues and estrangements that are so old and so complicated that they have become a way of life. There are Goliaths in your own mind: thoughts and memories where you don’t go, things that you know about yourself that you will avoid, just like you drive around certain “bad” neighborhoods, without even thinking about it.

We like to think that we are stuck where we are, in our lives, in our careers, in our personal lives, in our civic lives, because we are lazy, or self-centered, or self-satisfied. And surely do we love our comforts. We like to beat ourselves up. We would rather think that we are lazy and morally deficient than to admit that we are afraid. On the other side of our comfort zones, we know that there is a Goliath standing there, and we are afraid.

I am convinced that the reason why most white people prefer the company of other white people, and are uncomfortable in the presence of larger numbers of people of color is not that we/they don’t like people who are different. They are afraid, afraid of saying the wrong thing, even when they are trying to be nice, and looking as foolish as Joe Biden. We/They are afraid of being criticized. We/They are afraid of being a witness to someone’s anger.

There are transgender people in the world; this is just a fact. There are men who feel that they are really women and women who want to be men, and people who fall into neither gender category and wish to be accepted for who they are right as they are. For most of us, our gender is the most solid thing of our identity; we cannot imagine ourselves as anything other than what we are. For some people, this is not true. So, the world is more complicated than we thought it was.

But the presence of transgender people makes a lot of people nervous. And why? What I have found is this. When you get right down to it, it is because folks are afraid that they might say the wrong thing. Should I say “she” or “he” when I am talking about that person? That’s the Goliath who is out there, and you know it’s better to stay up in the hills and keep a low profile.

We have Goliaths right here in our church life, places and situations where we are paralyzed by our fears. We can’t do that, we won’t have the money. We can’t do that, nobody will accept that kind of change. I have had people tell me that they don’t like to approach strangers at coffee hour and greet them as newcomers. Once they did that, and the person had been a member here for 20 years. Ooops. It was embarrassing.

If you ever find yourself in that situation, I recommend saying, “well, I am so pleased to meet you then, I’m a much newer member.”

And if you are not sure whether to call a person who looks like a man wearing a dress “she” or “he”, it’s ok to ask. Everybody is kind of new at this.

We are being called beyond ourselves. David saw beyond himself, saw himself as more than he was thought of. Everyone else saw a shepherd, and maybe David in himself a future King, but mostly David saw a big guy who was defying the army of the Lord, and he saw himself as dealing with the situation.

Goliath is standing down in the valley and challenging us. We wouldn’t have wanted that situation, but there he is, and a result we have only two choices. We can deal with Goliath in some ways, or we can stay up in the hills, frozen by our fear, and waiting for somebody else to show up.

Goliath is calling us into a new moment in history. The situation in the world is very grave – we are in the midst of what will be clearly seen as a constitutional crisis someday – The President and the Congress and the Public are on very different pages regarding the War in Iraq, and there are many American and Iraqi lives all ready lost and still at stake. Some see clear and unmistakable evidence that our government is moving toward a military engagement with Iran, and that indeed, such a decision may not even be under our control.

Crucial decisions are being made, and yet, the spectacle of everyday life continues unabated, the Superbowl, American Idol, You’re the One that I Want, the adventures of Brangelina and Tomkat, terrorist threats morphing into advertising for late night cartoons. George Orwell’s comment that “to see what is in front of your nose is a constant struggle” never seemed more true.

The youth of this church are calling us beyond ourselves, setting as a goal going to New Orleans to help that stricken city rebuild. I do not think that this church has ever undertaken such a large scale act of service before. Goliath freezes us by taunting us by saying we do not have the money to do this. If this congregation doesn’t, then who on God’s green earth does?

We are called to move beyond our fears, beyond the despair into which we have turned our fears, and into the hope that we harbor. We are called to be David.

Adrienne Rich:

What would it mean to life in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?

What would it mean to belong to a church to which people brought their fears and despair, and laid them on the altar, and left carrying their hopes and commitments like flags waving?

Adrienne’s next line: You, yourself must change it.

What would it feel like to know your country was changing?

You, yourself must change it.

Though your life felt arduous, new and unmapped, and strange, what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair?

A smooth stone from the bed of the stream, a sling, a shepherd, a giant falls face first into the dust. You yourself must change it. What would it mean to answer the call to be more than you have ever been, to be braver than you have ever been, to turn your despair into hope.

"Lonely, No More" by Rev. Barbara Merritt January 7, 2007

2007-03-07T15:58:00.000-05:00

First Reading: - John 5: 2-9

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Second Reading: — from “Moral Proverbs” by Antonio Machado (Robert Bly, translator)

To talk with someone,ask a question first,then—listen.
Look for your other halfwho walks always next to youand tends to be what your aren’t.
In my solitudeI have seen things very clearlythat were not true.
What a the poet is searching foris not the fundamental Ibut the deep you.
Pay attention now:a heart that’s all by itselfis not a heart.
When I am alonehow close my friends are;when I am with themhow distant they are!
I love Jesus, who said to us:Heaven and earth will pass away.When heaven and earth have passed awaymy word will remain.What was your word, Jesus?Love? Affection? Forgiveness?All your words wereone word: Wakeup.

Sermon: “Lonely, No More”

I have never understood Florida. I mean I have never grasped the appeal of a place where for five months out of the year you are faced with oppressive heat and humidity, mosquitoes, fire ants, and what I have always called cockroaches, but which Floridians have renamed “palmetto bugs.” A rose by any other name…it’s still a cockroach to me.

But my recent five-day trip to Florida for a family reunion has revised my opinion of the region, and for the first time, I believe I know why some people retire there. At least why they go to Longboat Key, a small island in the gulf, close to Sarasota and Tampa. The Key is exceedingly narrow—a five minute walk from the bay to the gulf. And on the particular street where we were staying, every house had its backyard bordered by a canal. A vast series of canals had been dug between each residential street so that every house was “on the water.”We stayed at the home of my sister- law’s parents. They had inherited a small bungalow from a grandmother. Because the location was so beautiful, most of the modest houses on the street have been torn down and replaced with large and impressive mission-style homes. Believing this was the right investment, they demolished the bungalow and rebuilt “in the Florida fashion,” fully intending to sell it and go back to their large home in Marin County, California. Instead, after living there for a few months, they decided to sell their family home in California and become permanent residents in Florida. Why? Because they loved the community.

And community is exactly what you get on Rountree Drive. In the five days I was there I met 10 of their neighbors (and most of the residents were away for the holidays.) Everyone on that road takes walks and chats along the way. As I sat out on the back balcony/deck to read a book for one hour at least five boats went by in the canal and warmly waved to me. And while most of the houses are enormous, the lots themselves are tiny (no more than a driveway space between them.) Plus the close canal allowed me to eavesdrop on all the conversations of those who live on the other side of the water (and to watch them play with their dogs and pick oranges from their tree.) It is much more difficult to feel isolated and alone in that neighborhood, than it is where there are large lawns and busy traffic and hectic schedules keep people apart, separated and completely independent from their neighbors.

There is no question that some neighborhoods are more likely to engage you in human contact than others. But I doubt there is any place on this earth where loneliness has been banished.
This condition of feeling separate, alone and not in right relationship with one another (or with God) is part of what it means to be a human being. And yes, I know there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. But what I am talking about is not about counting how many people you are with at any given moment. It is about a fundamental estrangement that is universally recognized by almost all cultures, religions and times.

Kathleen Norris wrote about a different neighborhood, the great desolate plains of the American West, where neighbors live miles and miles apart. She writes about her native North Dakota: “Some have come to love living under our winds and storms, some have come to prefer the treelessness and isolation, becoming monks of the land, knowing that its loneliness is an honest reflection of the essential human loneliness. This willingly embraced desert fosters realism, not despair.”

Most of us live somewhere in between isolation and a neighborhood that functions as an extended family. But all of us should know what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote, “Hell is the place where nothing connects.” Loneliness can be such a hellish experience—where suddenly, and sometimes for no apparent reason, you feel that your friends and family have disappeared, and you are a stranger in a strange land. Albert Schweitzer, a man who dedicated his life to being connected to his fellow human beings, said that sometimes it feels like “you could die from loneliness.”

Enter the quick fix. “Lonesome No More” was the way the author Kurt Vonegut put it in one of his book titles. It turns out he genuinely believed that churches and congregations were places for people who simply couldn’t handle the essential loneliness of the human condition. (As if being a part of a religious community could make that aspect of human existence disappear! Not so I’ve noticed…) Lord knows, we strive to be a place of connections to one another and to God, but hopefully we also are quite truthful about loneliness. Although if you look through our gray hymnal for hymns about loneliness you’ll discover, with very few exceptions, that we’re all about community, all the time…together completely, one voice, one song, one family joining, loving, forward through the ages in one mighty living whole… That’s what we’re willing to sing about.

And it’s not that surprising that we’ve become “Johnny One Note.” The culture is reinforcing the view that “togetherness” will solve all our problems. Whenever I do pre-marital counseling I am always alerted when a new, young couple explains to me that once they are married they won’t ever experience loneliness again. I always reach for one of my favorite classic books about relationships entitled, “The Mirages of Marriage” by Lederer and Jackson, and read to them from chapter six, False Assumption No. 6: That Loneliness Will Be Cured By Marriage:Lonely people who marry each other to correct their situation usually discover that the most intense and excruciating loneliness is the loneliness that is shared with another.Loneliness cannot be cured by Marriage. Loneliness is better tolerated by those who live alone; they have no expectation, and thus no disappointments.

What will cure loneliness? If you watch the advertisements on television, you might conclude that using “Chinette” paper plates will cure loneliness (by bringing you together in constant family reunions, parties and celebrations.) Apparently certain cell phone plans promise you 24-hour contact with adoring friends. Certain Caribbean islands claim that if you vacation there you will be surrounded by friendly welcoming natives. There are commercials that can bring me to tears as one touching, rapturous reunion after another is made possible through the grace of using your credit card.

Advertisers and marketers aren’t stupid. They know how to get our attention. Even if we don’t mention it in polite conversation, or at cocktail parties or at professional meetings, they know about the human condition and they attempt to use our vulnerability to sell products.

Of course you can use an endless supply of Chinette dinner plates and still feel pretty lonely at a family reunion. The persistence of our feelings of estrangement and separation and disconnection are (to a greater or lesser extent) a part of human consciousness. They will not go away, no matter the particular housing arrangements, relationships or lifestyle. So where does this longing and loneliness find expression in modern culture?

There is one song that musicologists trace back to early American songs of the 1780’s. The origin is unknown, but it’s likely home was Appalachian. Nevertheless, the song has been claimed as an African American spiritual, a Southern hymn, and a blue-grass classic.

The lyrics are simple: “I am a poor wayfaring stranger. This world is rough and steep and oft-times a place of woe, but I have a real home just over the river Jordan, a place where there is no sickness or toil or danger, and it’s there, in that heaven of connection, that I will meet my father and my mother; I’m going home.”

You won’t find this song in our hymnbook, or in any other that I know of. (Although it was in hymnals in the South in 1870.) Where will you hear it now? In Country and Western music, in pop culture, on the radio—listen to just one verse of Emmy Lou Harris singing about the universal longing for a place of connections and boundless love.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
While traveling through this world of woe;
And there’s no sickness, toil nor danger
In that bright land to which I go.I’m going there to see my Father,
I’m going there no more to roam;
I’m only going over Jordan,
I’m only going over home.

“I’m going there to see my Father.” I have the faith that somehow, somewhere, I’ll be home, healed in a bright land where love will be waiting.

Jesus told this story, not as a promised land beyond time and space, not as delayed gratification in a heaven far away, but rather as an experience to be had in this life—right here, right now. If you read the parable about healing carefully, while other patients waiting by the pool of Bethesda are suffering from blindness, being lame and paralysis, the one nameless man is described as having been “ill” for 38 years. And why has he been waiting for 38 fruitless years when everyone else seems to be cured except for him? He describes his own illness: I have no one to help me. I have no one to put me into the pool when its curative powers are operating. I have no one…when I try to go forward under my own power I get pushed to the back of the line. Jesus doesn’t let him continue on alone. First, Jesus listens to him, and then he speaks to him saying, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

My translation and interpretation? This cure was all about connection and relationship. In that man’s engagement with the Rabbi Jesus, he found again his health and his power—his connection to the whole. And this was what enabled him to walk.

The poet, Antonio Machado echoes this truth with simple eloquence. Waking up means (among other things) that we ask a question, and then listen—that we are seeking, not so much what makes up our egos, our fundamentally unique “I’s”, rather we are longing to be in relationship with a deep and profound you…”a heart by itself, is not yet a heart.” This is not ultimately about whether we have a lot of people around us most of the time, or very few. It is about waking up. It is about becoming aware of real and sustaining relationships.

Even after waiting for 3, or 23, or 38, or 78 years trying to get to where you need to go under your own independent power, you can wake up to something greater than yourself.

Here is my fantasy…my imagination at work. “What if”…what if everyone of us right now was enveloped and surrounded by all the joy and love and goodness and connection that we’ve been longing for and seeking our entire lives! And yet we had carefully constructed (with invisible bricks) a solid fortress around us that didn’t allow us to experience any of this reality. What if we had (additionally) put a bunch of cotton in our ears so that we couldn’t hear the words and music of love being spoken? And then put blindfolds on our eyes so that we couldn’t see our companions and all those who wanted to help us and bless us? We would say very loudly, “I am all alone …and no matter what you say, it sounds like I’m alone, and it looks like I’m alone and I feel like I’m alone.” How sad would that be!

Religious communities, like this one and so many others, exist to wake us up…to gently remind us that what we seek is nearby—closer than our own breathing. And slowly hopefully, we are persuaded to listen to one another (to take the cotton out of our ears) to see one another (to remove the blindfolds) and to realize that we have a lot of company on this steep, rough road. And then patiently to attempt to deconstruct, brick by brick, our judgments that separate us, our beliefs that divide us, our fears that move us into isolation.
In church we practice not being alone, not feeling alone, not acting alone. So that whether we are in a noisy crowd or living like a monk in the desert:
We know that we are connected.
We know that God is near.
We know that love is stronger than death.
We know that all of our wanderings will take us in the direction of our true home. Home: a place where we will wake up to the love and mercy and joy that will make us whole and complete and at peace.

"Hard Jolts" Sermon By Rev. Tom Schade January 28, 2007

2007-01-31T18:25:00.000-05:00

Our resident historian, Al Southwick, sent me a news clipping recently about a meeting sponsored by our church in January 1910 – nearly 100 years ago. The Rev. Austin Garver was the minister of the church, and he had invited 3 other clergymen to come and discuss what they called “the New Theology” with a group of interested laypeople.
The headline read “Urges a New Theology, Doing way with Old Dogmas.” And the subheadline was “No Use for Hell, Virgin Birth, the Fall of Man or Resurrection in the Body.”
The writer of the article was quite impressed by how shocking the presentation of the new theology was:
“There were some hard jolts for those who adhere strongly to strict biblical ideas before the rapid and invading force of scientific religion.”
“Hard Jolts”
The article drove home a point that has been made to me more than once, and of which we all need to be reminded, especially on a day like today, which is our Annual Meeting Sunday.
This is an old church, gathered in 1785, approaching its 225th birthday in a few years. The basic design of the building was created in 1854, and it was a traditional style, even then. The room we sit in was designed then, and all around us are traditional architectural motifs It is easy to see all the signs of tradition here. And it is important that we respect the traditions of this church. But we should remember that those people, the ones whose names are listed in the Worcester Telegram as having come to hear 4 ministers preach on the New Theology, they did not come to First Unitarian because it was a traditional church. They came because they wanted to hear some “hard jolts” to the conventional wisdom of their day. They were the theological radicals of 1910, and the best way that we can honor their tradition is to keep this church a center for new thinking about religion, the spirit, and church and worship.
One of the ministers who spoke that night in 1910 told this story:
“A farmer and his wife went to the circus and visited the menagerie, seeing in speechless wonder the various animals, all so strange to them. After they gone about carefully, the came to the giraffe. There before the animal they stood, held in a spell of wonder, broken only when the farmer remarked: “It’s no use, Maria, they hain’t no such thing.”
The minister then drew this conclusion. “There are people today that do not see that which is constantly before them in immovable fact.”
In 1910, the facts of evolution, the facts of science, the learnings of historical research into the origins of the Bible and how it was written: these were all immovable facts that some people were, like that farmer, could not see, would not see, even though they were right before their eyes. There are still some people with that particular blindness around today.?
But my question this morning is this:
What are the immovable facts about the state of religion that are before our eyes today, that most people will not see, that we ourselves have trouble seeing,?.
I love that story that the minister told about a giraffe, because there is a second metaphorical meaning to the giraffe. Not only does its neck make it seem like an impossible animal, but that neck is good for sticking out, and it makes it possible for the giraffe to get up above the crowd and see a little further.
If I were to try to be a giraffe today, and stick my neck out, I would try to look ahead and say the following.

One, Organized religion, as the Western world had known it for thousands of years, is dying a painful and convulsive death.
And Two, The religious impulse is being reborn, resurrected, in entirely new circumstances and arrangements.
Many people do not have the impression that organized Western religions are dying. We see, instead, the power of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam, and while fundamentalism Judaism seems remote to us, if we lived in Israel, it would not. In fact, the world today is being shaped by conflicts between fundamentalist religions. We have the sneaky feeling that, even at the highest levels of our government, in the Oval Office, itself, that people there see the conflict in the Middle East as a religious war, between Christians and Muslims, a conflict that as it gets worse only brings the day of Christ’s return closer. And on the other side, we are all being very persistently educated in the power of Islamic fundamentalism, as a religious point of view, and the political lessons Muslims draw from it.
But we must raise our sights a little higher and remember that all of these forms of fundamentalisms are, in fact, in reaction to, and in opposition to, a much broader movement toward secularism, modernity and what in 1910 was called the New Theology.
We are able to see that Christian fundamentalism is a defense against a modernizing and secularizing culture. And we see that a particular strain of Jewish fundamentalism has developed in Israel, long a secularized society. And while I have less knowledge about the world of Islam, I cannot help but think that the Western secularism seems so threatening to the Islamic fundamentalists because there are portions of their population which are attracted to it.
So, If we are to raise our vision a little higher, like the giraffe, stretching our neck to see a little further, we might want to say that the religious world is a conflict between secularism and religion, especially fundamentalist religions.
This is the conventional wisdom of the day. ,
I do not think that it is the whole story. I think that we are missing something right before our eyes. And so, I want to stick my neck way out now, like a giraffe, and say this: Secularism is not the enemy of Christianity; it is the natural outgrowth and fullest realization of Christianity. I agree with a few theologians and thinkers who are now saying that Western religion is evolving into secularism. Secular society is the culmination of some of the most crucial themes of the Western religions.
The western religions have been moving have a direction in their movement. It actually has many directions, because like everything in history, it goes this way and then that way and circles back on itself, but it does have direction.
But you can sum up the direction of western religion with these movements.
God goes from “out there”, to “in here”. Think about it – at the beginning of the story, God is out there, the creator of all the Earth, and then he comes down to Earth as Jesus, and he is killed and resurrected, and enters the body of believers as the Holy Spirit. From out there to in here.
God starts out talking to the patriarchs, and then to Kings, and then to disreputable prophets, and then comes as a carpenter, who is executed as a criminal and one of the last times people see the risen Jesus, they think him an ordinary man, a fellow traveler, walking with them to Emmaus.
Worship goes from rituals in the Temple, to worshipping in truth and spirit.
Our sacred duties go from sacrifices at the altar to ethical living and justice-making.
God’s favor goes from those He chooses, to all of humanity, especially those who are suffering.
I ask you to look again at the responsive reading we read this morning – from Isaiah. This passage is, time wise, from about the middle of the Old Testament, from the 6th or 7th century before the common era. The oldest parts of the Old Testament were written 4 or 5 centuries earlier, the newest parts were about the same time frame after it. And Isaiah is talking about how God does not interested in the sacrifices made at the Temple, but instead wants people to behave more ethically. What Isaiah reflects is a movement of religion, from outward ritual toward the inward, toward the personal and toward the ethical.
Look at the reading this morning from John 4. Jesus, speaking to a Samaritan woman, a people who worshipped the same God but differed from the ancient Jews about the role of the Temple and Jerusalem, takes it all the way. “The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. God is spirit and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.” One can read this passage as calling for the end of organized religion and the direct individual encounter with God, in spirit and in truth, inward, personal and ethical.
I believe that when this movement toward the personal, toward inward, toward religion as lived reality and not a belief structure, toward ordinary people and away from power is fulfilled, what emerges is a secular society. Western Religion, over the course of its history, places more and more emphasis on each individual holding the religious truth in their innermost hearts. And if the test of religion is whether a person sincerely holds those values in his or her heart, then does it not follow that each person must have the freedom of conscience. And does it not follow that the state first, and then the church must ask no more than voluntary compliance with religious rules? And does that not lead ultimately to a secular society? The whole thrust of Western religion, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, is that each of us must freely choose God, in our own hearts, and if we are to freely choose, then we must be free to choose, which must also mean that we must be free to not choose.
Christendom is replaced by a secular society. And Religion, organized religion that is powerful social institution, is replaced by personal spirituality. So everywhere you go, people say, “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.”
What do we mean by a secular society? I think that it more than a society which is legally secular – one that practices separation of church and state. There is an ideological component to secularism as well. The cultural hegemony of religion as a set of beliefs has been broken. People understand their lives according to their own standards and schemes; there is not an overarching religious understanding which defines normalcy and reality for everyone. The focus of people’s lives are in the here and now, the practical details of their own happiness and success – their ethical and moral standards are derived from their own reflection and common sense.
Where a person fits into the great cosmos, the multitude of other people, the planet and all our fellow travelers on it, how one relates to the possibilities of one’s own mistakes, errors and sins – in a secular society, these questions are inward questions, they are personal questions and they are ethical questions. These are understood by ordinary persons to be spiritual questions. The accumulated wisdom of the world’s religions are a resource for the exploration, but religion itself is not authoritative. The people do not recognize external authorities, because the final authority for each person’s spiritual quest is internal, inward, and personal.
I do believe that the great prophets and religious teachers of all the ages have wanted this for us, the ordinary people of the Earth. That our hearts be open to joy, to wonder, to gratitude. That we should be careful about how we live with other people, neither bringing them harm, nor turning away from their suffering. That we are free of all coercion in matters of the spirit, but take up our tasks with glad hands and a joyous heart. That we let the long conversation between loving the world and loving the Lord go on in our hearts.
These are the spiritual tasks of a free people in a secular society. Oh, the fundamentalists of all types are aghast and cannot imagine that men and women will have holy hearts unless they are pressured by conformity. They say that they are fighting for God, but they are actually fighting for power over people. They may drag the whole world down with them. Who knows?
But what we are about is summed up by Theodore Parker ““Be ours a religion which, like sunshine goes everywhere; its temple, all space; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living.”

Amen

"Who Answers Prayers" by Rev. Barbara Merritt

2006-12-12T21:30:00.000-05:00

When I think of mosques, I remember visiting the Blue Mosque in Istanbul; a magnificent architectural structure with exquisite ceramic tiles and vast interior space and light. I think of beautiful minarets and graceful domes and ornate Persian prayer rugs.

Thus, I did not recognize the photograph of the mosque in my son’s village in Africa. In Kanfarandé the mosque is little more than a medium size shed with a corrugated metal roof. Here a few dozen men gather to direct their prayers to Allah. It seems that for the last year they have been praying for my son; not for him to be a good physics teacher for their children, or that his Susu (the local language) might improve. Their prayers were that this young man from the West, who knew people with resources, might somehow raise the money to pay for a water pump that would bring clean water to their village, and keep their children from needlessly dying. Robert was the only person they knew who had any contact whatsoever with the international community. So as they said goodbye to him in June, several of the village elders told him of their prayers and sent him forth into the world to do his best.

When Robert injured his knee in September his return to his village was delayed by two months. I don’t know what kind of doubts the old men entertained when their Peace Corp volunteer did not return. (Though in this part of Africa, without phones or any form of high-speed communication, there is remarkable patience when it comes to schedules.)

I can only imagine what his return to the village was like last week (because he won’t be close to an email for awhile.) He did tell me that he won’t be doing what I, myself, would want to do. The grand announcement! The triumphant return! Robert explained to me that in village culture this would be neither appropriate, nor wise. Instead, he will quietly inform his two honorary grandfathers that the financial resources have been obtained. This weekend engineers will be visiting the village to locate the well and make the preliminary specifications and equipment assessments. Because these pumps can only be drilled at the end of the rainy season, the actual work may have to wait a few weeks.

Enough money was raised so that two neighboring villages (even poorer communities than Kanfarandé) will also be receiving wells. About half the money for this clean-water project came from members of our parish. Family and friends donated most of the rest. But the truly surprising gift came from a Catholic Parish, St. Mary’s in Southborough, MA. I have no idea of how they even heard of the Peace Corp Project, but they decided that their tithe from their Sunday offering should go to this work, and they sent us a check for $225.

Imagine, if you will, Roman Catholics donating money to help Unitarians in assisting Moslems in three small villages on the West African Coast. That’s about as close to the kingdom of God as I’ve seen in a long time. Ordinary people are answering the prayers of strangers.

We all know people who prefer miracles. They worship a God who is supposed to intervene in the course of the natural world, with fire and smoke and marvelous acts. God is expected to keep the people you love from dying. God is supposed to keep the innocent from suffering. And God’s promise is to bless you and yours with good health, wealth and serenity.

When God doesn’t perform according to the dictates of the mind, when God doesn’t answer these prayers, some people lose faith. But I can’t help but wonder whether such disillusionment is not so much with God as it is an argument with human existence. We live on a planet where everyone dies, where innocent suffering is a given, and where what we want does not necessarily happen. So our frustration and anger may not actually be directed at the divine. We might just be quarrelling with reality…ordinary reality.

Here is where religion becomes interesting. In the words of Thomas Merton, the idea of God walking the earth in flesh, of God being born at Christmas in the person of Jesus, is not really a miracle story. Merton writes, “God took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and He hid Himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place. And He refused at any time to Lord it over men, or to be a King, or to be a Leader, or to be a Reformer, or to be in any way Superior to His own creatures. He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counselor, and their servant, and their friend.”

And to his disciples Jesus taught that when we do the ordinary work of feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, and visiting the sick we are serving God. We have also been sent to earth to answer the prayers of those in need.

This is the season when, as Charles Dickens wrote, “Let us by one consent open our shut-up hearts, and think of people as if they were our fellow passengers. Let Christmas be once more a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. The common welfare is our business; charity, mercy, forbearance are all our business. Let us go forth while it is day and turn human misery into joy."

To that end (you are invited to bring to church):

1) Hats and mittens for the mitten tree (to be given to children at Elm Park School)

2) Long underwear (especially X-large sizes) and warm socks to be distributed to shelters.

3) Non -perishable groceries: there is currently a food shortage crisis in Worcester. On the morning of December 17th through the morning of Dec 24th we will be collecting canned goods, peanut butter, pasta, cereal, and other non-perishable items. We will sort them as one of the activities at the 10:30 a.m. Christmas Eve morning Service project.

4) A dish, or volunteer on the clean up crew. The Christmas dinner potluck, Monday, December 18th, is hosted by the Monday night at the Church "Christmas Spirituality" group and is for all ages. You can sign up on the bulletin board for specific food or tasks, but no reservations are required. Afterward there will be wonderful Christmas music, and a fire in the fireplace in the Bancroft Room. The festivities begin at 6:30 pm.

5) Your generous financial contribution at the 5:30 p.m. Candlelight Christmas Eve Service. Our collection this year will once again go to homeless children and their families in Worcester County, through the Interfaith Hospitality Network.

Any questions? Speak to either of your ministers, or to Ted Messier, Heather Souare, or Liz Gustavson.

Barbara

"Tis the Season" by Revs. Merritt and Schade

2006-12-05T16:38:00.000-05:00

“’Tis the Season”

“It’s that most wonderful time of the year,” goes the song. And it is not just the season of holiday cheer, family togetherness, sleigh bells and snowflakes on our nose and eyelashes, and chestnuts roasting on open fires, but also the season of our yearnings for peace, and goodwill for all, and Tiny Tim, shouting "Bless us All, Everyone" and best of all, figuring out what to do about the $20,000 church deficit.

Thud.

That's right. It is the end of the fiscal year at the First Unitarian Church and we have to confirm that which we suspected all year long; the church spent more than it took in this year.

The church leadership has been anticipating this deficit. Very early on, we realized that the church had budgeted too little money for the transition for the Interim Director of Religious Education, (an additional $6000 was spent.) We would have very little slack in the budget in the case of any other unanticipated expenses. Every year the budget is our best estimate...and we build in contingency funds. Nevertheless, we didn't anticipate 1) that we would completely catch up on three years of overdue audits this year, costing us an additional $10,000. 2) We had two angels who contributed money to cover a major boiler repair, and a restoration of an exterior retaining wall and banking that was dangerous. But a new regime of water treatment for the boiler is costing an additional $1600. 3) members promised to try to pay unpaid 2005 pledges, but we still came up $2500 short. We knew that we would be projecting a deficit at the beginning of December; the question was how much. The way to minimize it was to do everything as well as we could.

Throughout the year, expenses were watched carefully. Some areas of church life are returning funds that were budgeted but unused. The Music Department saved significant amounts of money this last year. And our goal was to do as well as we possibly could in everything else that we could do.

Auction co-chairs Madeline Silva and Mary McAllister led us to an excellent auction in the spring which was a big help. Our Steeple Lighting fundraiser program and the spring plant sale were other successes. The proceeds from the wonderful new choir Gospel CD, as well as continued sales of the original, have earned money for the church. The assessors were more diligent than ever before about asking new members to make pledges as soon as possible. They also made sure that new members had the information they needed to make an appropriate pledge.

Two things we did not do. One, we did not restrict the Church's generosity. We continued to raise money and conduct fundraisers for other worthy causes. We had special collections for the Sudanese Lost Boys, The Elm Park Community School Children's Fund, The Carty Cupboard, UNICEF, and The Peace Corps Water Pumps project. Everyone remembers the Fabulous Fifties Floor Show which raised money for Epilepsy Research. We still intend to dedicate the Christmas Eve offering to the Interfaith Hospitality Network, (the organization through which the church provides hospitality to homeless families and children for 2-3 weeks during the year. (This year our donation will be matched, and doubled!) It is an article of faith for us that the only way to invite generosity into your own life is to practice it.

The other was that we chose not to push the panic button and talk often about the probably deficit for the year. Our plan was to take the year one step at a time; do each thing as well as possible (good Auction, good pledge drive, good fundraisers) and then see where we would be at the end of the year. Now we are at the end of the year, and the deficit is still here and still going to be a problem. We have elected to combine a final fundraiser with our end of the year appeal.

We are enclosing an envelope with this newsletter. We are asking you to make a generous contribution to close our deficit. If every member of the congregation contributed about 6% of their 2006 pledge amount, this deficit would disappear. If you are not a member, please consider making a contribution to this church this year, perhaps in appreciation of this weekly newsletter, or in gratitude for some beautiful music you heard here, or in memory of friend's funeral held in our sanctuary.

Please mail your envelope to the church office, or better yet, bring it with you when you attend services during the holiday season. Best of all, bring it to church this Sunday when Mantown, our irrepressible ad-hoc Men's Group is hosting a Black and White “Close-the- Deficit” Coffee Hour.

Whether you can give only $20...or $2,000, together we can balance this year's budget. Will you join us?

"The Taste of Christmas" by Rev. Tom Schade

2006-11-29T14:24:00.000-05:00

There is nothing sweeter, more heart - warming, more spiritually delicious than the traditions of my family and my tribe as we celebrate Christmas.

On the other hand, there is nothing gaudier, more tawdry and more soul-deadening than the ways that some other people celebrate the holidays.

The Christmas and Hanukkah seasons, having been now combined into one commercialized “Holiday” celebration of good-natured greed and gluttony, give us a chance to compare tastes on a level-playing field. And by tastes, I don’t mean comparing German Stollen vs Slovenian Potica vs those Swedish anise flavored cookies and all the other varieties of Christmas cookies. I mean tastes, like in good taste and bad taste, as in trees, lights, decorations and gift-giving styles.

Back in the early 60’s my mother caught sight of a neighbor’s Christmas Tree, and since then, I have known that Christmas is a test of one’s good taste. Our neighbor had put up an aluminum tree, with identical blue balls. And was lit by a color-wheel, so that the whole thing turned green, red and gold in ever-repeating order. I thought it kind of cool, in a space age, Jetsons sort of way, but my mother was appalled. It was the talk of the neighborhood, but what was said was not always kind. Around our dinner table, it was proclaimed to be the end of civilization as we know it, and a sign of the impending Apocalypse.

We were of another tribe, the ones that celebrated with fresh cut trees, decorated with the larger multi-colored bulbs and an eclectic collection of pricier ornaments, bought a few at a time each year.

It wasn’t until later that I learned that our Christmas tree décor is considered tacky by the tribe that favored smaller lights that were only white and themed ornaments.

Just so you know, as adults we favor the blinking small multi-colored lights with a collection of ornaments either made or chosen by the children when younger. Our ornament collection includes a lime-green knitted Christmas Octopus, whose exact role in the Nativity story is unclear.

There is the tribe that favors the single candle in each of the windows of the house, and the tribe that favors a Nativity scene in front yard, and the tribe that favors Santas climbing into the chimney. Tribes mix and combine; you can now buy statues of kneeling Santas to place by the manger in your front yard crèche. (Gosh, what’s next? Easter cards showing the Easter Bunny on the cross?) There is even the tribe that favors any sort of cartoon character as a yard decoration at Christmas. Why should Sylvester the Cat and Tweety be left out?

The Boston Globe has been publishing a hot and heavy debate about a family that has decorated their house with so many lights that their electric bill runs $1100 a month during the holidays. Naturally there are many letters to the editor suggesting better uses for that money. But there are also letters from people who are delighted by the display and one letter from a nurse who describes how she looks forward to seeing it on the way home after a long and difficult shift in the hospital.

Some people get up at 5 a.m. to hit the stores on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Others derive just as much pleasure being appalled at such behavior when reported on the evening news. “Would you ever?” They ask.

Even in our most joyous and happiest time of the year, we find ourselves comparing, judging, competing and playing games of moral one-upmanship. We like to leap from differences in taste to making conclusions about morals and values. I suggest that how we decorate our homes for Christmas is not a real measure of whether we have grasped the true meaning of the holiday.

I urge you to do the following this year: Make something beautiful for the holidays with your own hands. You probably already do, but even so, put an extra effort in this year. Be mindful of your effort, your creative process, and your satisfaction and pride at the results. Live for a moment in yourself as an artist, a holiday artist or a holiday crafter, and hold onto that feeling.

When you go out into the world, watch and observe. Everywhere you go, you will the see the results of so many other people’s moments of creativity. The holidays are a huge popular arts and crafts exhibit, the time of the year when more people turn away from their workaday world to create something lovely, witty, beautiful and charming. The more deeply that you can feel yourself as another holiday artisan, the more you could see the same being expressed by others. May you be filled with a spirit of compassion as a result.

"Too Much Religion?" by Rev. Tom Schade

2006-11-27T16:22:00.000-05:00

Sermon Delivered on November 26, 2006

First Reading: Isaiah 44:12-20
Second Reading: Excerpts from the Epilogue of "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris.

This morning I have departed from my usual practice around readings. I try not to read readings that are that long. And I generally avoid readings that I disagree with. I don’t like to read something so that I can argue with it during the sermon. Readings, in my mind, should be inspirational.

But I wanted to give you a taste of Sam Harris’ book: The End of Faith. Harris’s book is like one of those people who corner you at a party and proceed to yell at you about his or her greatest passion. There isn’t a lot of nuance in what they are saying And you agree whole heartedly about a third of the time, and are intrigued about a third of the time, but the final third seems a little crazy. Sam Harris pushes you, the reader, around.

Harris’ book is of this time, the first five or six years in the 21st century. According to him, the main danger in the world is Islamic fundamentalism. He is also opposed to Christian fundamentalism, details the crimes of the Medieval Catholic church in the Inquisition, and lays the blame for the Holocaust on religious doctrine. But the reader senses that it is Islamic fundamentalism that most haunts Harris now. That is what he spends the most time on and where he has the greatest passion.

And I share his general point: On the one side, Muslim fundamentalism and jihad.

On the other side, Christian fundamentalism.

Both imagine an apocalyptic ending of history in which God intervenes in history to allow the believers to triumph while the unbelievers suffer and die.

Both imagine that the world is moving toward a Clash of Civilizations or a Final Religious War.
Unstated in those scenarios, of course, is that the vast majority of the world’s people, the people like you and me, are to be collateral damage, not just metaphorically, but in actuality, as weapons of mass destruction are now accessible to many more countries and movements around the world.

I believe that this is an accurate description of the peril that the world faces.

And if we are to form ourselves as the C.D.S.L.F. – The Collateral Damage Survival and Liberation Front -- a world wide movement of those of us who do not want to die in somebody else’s Armageddon – we need to diagnose the root cause of this situation accurately and propose the right cure.

Sam Harris believes that the root of the problem lies in religious faith, by which he means belief in religious teachings that have no basis in scientific fact or reason and which are preserved in human culture in religious texts and traditions. Religious faith functions like a portal through which the tribal hatred and narrow views of centuries and millennia past are given entry into today’s world, where they are still unquestioned and unchallenged.

Harris makes no real distinction between “moderate” religious beliefs and “extreme” religious beliefs. Religious moderates still validate the same mental process – taking religious teachings on faith – as do extremists. Once you start quoting the Bible as normative, as being authoritative, even about something so benign as “loving your neighbor as yourself”, you have, in Harris’ opinion, also left the field open for the extremist who will take the harsh judgments of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to heart. Or who want to conduct war in the manner prescribed by Joshua.

The problem with moderates is that they are tolerant.

Harris:
“Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of Go, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world – to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish – is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness.”

For Harris, the only hope of human survival and flourishing is that humanity should give up religious faith of all types. Or as he says” An utter revolution in our thinking could be accomplished in a single generation: if parents and teachers would merely give honest answers to the questions of every child.”

And so, here at the first meeting of the Collateral Damage Survival and Liberation Front, we have a motion, a resolution, and a plan of action proposed by Mr. Sam Harris, on how to proceed, in order to avoid the world ending in a religious war between Christian and Muslim extremists.

Whereas, religious believers threaten to end the world in an orgy of religious violence and whereas, religious faith underpins the tendency toward self-destructive violence,
Be it therefore resolved, that humanity will give up religious faith immediately and be it further resolved, that this be accomplished by every parent and teacher telling the truth to their children in all cases.

Can I get a second?
Of course, I can.

My question is “while we are at it, can I get a pony too?”
My question is sarcastic and intended for a laugh, but if the situation is as serious as Harris argues that it is, and I do agree with him there, then his solution doesn’t make any sense. He argues that the greatest threat to humanity is that most people think badly about life, death and religion and that the solution is that we should change our minds.

Anyone whose plans for a better world involve a rapid advance in human consciousness, such as the people of the world giving up their religions, is not being very realistic.

In fact, what becomes clear through the rest of Harris’ book is he believes that war with Islam is necessary and has already begun. He is more than willing to fight the religious war that the Islamic fundamentalists have been trying to provoke us into, and in which our Christian fundamentalists are already enlisted.

Is there another way to approach the problem posed by the rush to Armageddon, toward the apocalyptic religious war envisioned by some?

Would a different diagnosis of the problem we face lead us in a better direction?

Let’s back up and talk about religions for a moment.

Religions are like cathedrals. Religions are ancient on-going collective works of multi-media art, always growing and always evolving. They are collections of music, and art, and literature, and words. The World’s Religions are humanity’s greatest cultural creations. They are giant imaginative understandings of who we human beings are, and what we are like, and what we do that is full of love and wonder. The World’s religions are imaginative understandings of how we fail, and how we recover from our failures, and how the universe is so constructed that we have a place in it.

Religions try to describe a mysterious source of moral authority that seems to order the Universe, even if imperfectly.

And however one describes that ultimate source of moral Authority, the religious imagination draws a picture, creates a model, of how that Authority makes its presence known in the world of men and women. How do we discern the voice of God among the clack and clatter of the world? Where do we find it?

I define the religious problem facing humanity differently than Sam Harris. He says that problem as religious faith in general. To me, the problem is not religious faith per se, but external sources of religious authority. External sources of religious authority are those which place the final arbiter of religious truth outside the individual – external to the person. The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic church, the Bible if understood as inerrant word of God, the Koran, which was dictated directly by God.

An internal source of religious authority, on the other hand, is within the person: it my determination of what is true and meaningful to me. It is my reading of texts, and my freedom to read them, or reject them, as I see fit. It is my use of reason, and my weighing of the evidence; it is my emotional response to the world around me; it is my own mystic experiences, or reflections. It is my willing submission to a tradition that I have decided is worthy of my life.
Whether one sees the source of religious authority as external, in scripture or hierarchy or tradition, or internal, in conscience, in personal reflection, in private study or meditation, this is not just a philosophical argument. At the heart of any system of religious authority, there are social relationships at stake, there is power. External Religious authority is enforced by people and confers power onto particular individuals and groups. The priest has power in the community.

If your community believes that kissing frogs is a necessary step to salvation, people who own swamps will become rich and powerful. Religious beliefs have political and social consequences. I believe that external systems of religious authority are idolatry, in that they try to capture and freeze God in a human creation, as sure as Isaiah described it. But what I want to stress is that religious idolatry is a social process, which leads to relationships of domination and subordination in the community.

Look at American Protestant fundamentalism. It argues that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, which trumps all other forms of knowledge. Who is empowered by such a claim? People who control the process by which the Bible is read and interpreted. There was a time in American history when the small town minister was the smartest and most educated man in the village. And what he knew was the Bible. Protestant fundamentalism is, in part, an effort to maintain the social power of the Protestant clergyman. He knows the most important form of knowledge that there is.

When you pose the fundamental philosophical conflict in the world today as between Religious Faith and Reason, as Sam Harris does, the future looks dark and grim, a world-wide war unfolding.

When you pose the fundamental religious conflict in the world today as between systems of external authority on the one hand, and systems of internal sources of authority on the other, the future is not so bleak.

On the one hand, there are all the oppressive systems that come from idolatry. But as powerful as those are, on the other is the most powerful force active in the world today, and that is… the accelerating desire of individuals to seek their own freedom, self-determination and happiness. The desire of people to be individuals, to claim their own authority over their own life.

We see it in the world wide growth of secularism and the world-wide shrinkage of the religious realm. People pursue their own happiness. We also see it the growth of what Harris dismisses as meaningless moderating forms of religion. We ourselves are evidence of that: Unitarianism and Universalism emerged out of Christianity, a religious culture that looked as closed and totalitarian as anything before or since. We grew to believe that God is present in this world in the thoughts, words and actions of the inspired individual; that God is not present in books, or the bread and wine, or in any sacred text, but as the Holy Spirit speaking directly to the solitary human soul. And from that insight, we developed the covenanted democratic religious community. And from that insight, we came to understand the need for tolerance and interfaith respect, and interfaith dialogue.

Where shall we place our hopes for our own future? In war and religious conflict, and Armageddon – and believe me, a war between the Secular Rational and Scientific West against Muslim fundamentalism is just as much an Armageddon as any proposed Rapture – or in the process of interfaith dialogue, tolerance, and personal liberation?

The latter is our only hope.

"Opening Spam" by Rev. Barbara Merritt

2006-11-27T15:37:00.000-05:00

No matter how many filters our church programmer / server employs, no matter how many filters I create on my own computer, no matter how carefully I screen my incoming e-mail messages, every day I find myself inadvertently opening some UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail.) Called by the acronym spam, the name actually refers to the Army issue luncheon meat. A sketch in the British comedy Monty Python series had all the patrons at a restaurant shouting for Spam . . . and thus evolved the idea of flooding the market with stuff you don’t want. A more popular understanding states that the letters of spam stand for Stupid, Pointless, Annoying, Messages. All I know is that every time I open one and find an unwanted solicitation, I hear a little voice saying “gotcha.”

It is a simple enough task to send such messages to the trash. But so much of it goes through the system, that lately I have started paying attention to what incoming messages are able to fool me, intrigue me and unfortunately, entrap me into wasting my time by opening them up.

In the Hindu tradition, sinfulness and error is placed in five categories: lust, anger, greed, attachment and ego. Much like Dante’s circles of hell, or Catholicism’s seven deadly sins, the purpose of any categorization of how we human beings get lost or distracted is to turn us in more productive directions. What I find fascinating is how easy it is to place almost all my Spam messages in the five Hindu classifications.

Lust? Welcome to the world of pharmaceuticals, and pornographic sites, and strangers who want you to visit their chat room. I become very annoyed with myself when a message asks, “Can you help me?” and then my mind is subjected to a brief, but still very sad and desperate pitch from someone in the commercial sex trade.

Anger? There are political tirades from both sides of the aisle. Both the right and the left are assuming that outrage and money are the best ways to change the political process.

Greed? From Nigeria and dozens of other countries, all are asking me as “a good Christian clergy person” to help them transfer millions of dollars.

Attachment? Attachment in Hinduism is defined as excessive selfishness and a desire to be in control and to possess. The spam that tells me that I have ordered something I didn’t order, or that my credit card account has been used for an unauthorized purchase play on my fear. The chain letters that are sent to me use a carrot as well as a stick. If I will only forward the message to ten friends I will be blessed, ealthy, have unlimited good luck and will be healed of all illness. If on the other hand I don’t forward the message, there will be hell to pay.

Ego? Here’s the one I fall for constantly. If the message says “Thank you,” I want to know who is grateful. If the message line says “Good Job,” I want to know who’s noticed. I have opened “in appreciation” and “eloquent words” and “question?” all with the expectation of a genuine communication. None of them were. This week, in my inbox, I succumbed to opening messages entitled “Dante”, “mistake. . .”, “Thanks for your support” , “Question” and “Being of Service.” Gotcha! They were all trying to get me to buy something I didn’t want. And the spammer’s knowledge of human frailty gets past all my filters. If you currently get e-mail, spam is pretty much a given.

As we approach the holiday season, there is another “given.” There is realnourishment. You can participate in life giving interactions. And there are endless opportunities for us to be generous with one another.

You’ll have to find a diet that works for you, but mine would include the following:
*Spiritual practice. Find the meditation, the prayer, the reflections, the disciplined exercises that allow you to listen, to pay attention and to be a part of something larger than you understand.

*Worship. Be in the communities that speak to your better nature, that return you to your focus, that remind you of what you know is true, but which you continually forget.

*Physical labor and exercise. Especially as winter approaches, your physical body needs work and attention and care. Do it!

*Family and friends. Find the people who make you laugh, who help you relax, who know your faults and love you anyway. Time spent in good company can restore your soul.

*Beauty in nature (even in November and December) and at the art museum and in music. (Sometimes the best moment in my week is when our choir sings an especially glorious anthem.) Appreciating what is harmonious makes it easier to get through all that is not.

We can wish for a spam-free holiday, but we won’t get it. This is a complicated creation of good and bad, real communication and calculated disinformation, sincerity and cynical manipulation. But in the midst of it all, may you hear the messages that love keeps sending. “You are a beloved child of God.”
Barbara

"To Be Counted" by Rev. Tom Schade

2006-11-27T15:26:00.000-05:00

The affirmation of my ministry at First Unitarian Church, as expressed in the resolution to “promote” me or to “designate” me as the eleventh minister of the Church is very gratifying. When I started on my path to Unitarian Universalist ministry in 1995, it felt like a risky adventure. To have the congregation I serve tell me that they have appreciated the work I have done feels good.

The act, “promoting me to be the 11th minister” is symbolic. It brings no change in responsibilities or rewards. It is not a new office in the church, and it makes no presumptions about the future. I did not think it to have by-law implications, but some wondered about that question.

What the action says to me is that I am now to be counted as among the ministers of this church, and not just listed among the numerous assistant ministers and associate ministers that have come and gone, usually quite quickly, over the 225 years of our history. I entered into the ministry with a long view; I wanted to do what I could to preserve and to advance the ways of the free church. To be counted as one of the line of ministers at one great church of that tradition tells me that I am reaching toward my life’s goals. Is it vain on my part to be concerned about where I will be listed in the as-yet-unwritten second volume of First Unitarian Church’s history? Probably. I am not immune to the sin of pride.

Not counting interims, and associates, and assistants, First Unitarian Church has had just ten ministers in its history. None were perfect.

#10. The Rev. Barbara Merritt, 1983-present. The first female minister of the church now presides over a period of great growth and orderly change. The church has become more theologically broad than ever, and she encourages a deep commitment to personal spiritual practices. Ms. Merritt has done what few UU ministers in this era have been able to do: to successfully maintain an intergenerational church as the baby-boomers come into its leadership.

#9. The Rev. Christopher Raible, 1976-1982. Ministering during a period of intense cultural, sexual and moral questioning, Mr. Raible was a civic activist. He divided the church. In the midst of personal crisis, he left after our shortest ministry.

#8. The Rev. Wallace Robbins, 1956-1976. Our minister during tumultuous 60’s and 70’s, Mr. Robbins was a traditionalist and a committed Christian. While Unitarianism and Universalism merged in 1961 and headed in an atheistic and humanist direction, Mr. Robbins resisted that trend. He preserved the theistic worship tradition of our church, including its seriousness, prayer and scripture. As our church is different than many other UU churches, much of the credit is due to Mr. Robbins.

#7. The Rev, Walter Kring, 1946-1955. This Presbyterian Army chaplain, turned Unitarian, ministered during the postwar years and into the 50’s. Walter was a theist. He helped found the Worcester Center for Crafts. The author of the first volume of our history, an accomplished potter, a Melville scholar; he left First Unitarian for All Souls, in New York City.

#6. The Rev. Maxwell Savage, 1919-1946. One of the most successful of the ministers, Mr. Savage led the First Unitarian through a period of great growth and vitality. During his ministry, First Unitarian merged with the Church of the Unity, built Unity Hall, and became the largest Unitarian church in the country. In 1938, the sanctuary portion of the church was destroyed in a Hurricane, and rebuilt.

#5. The Rev. Edwin Slocomb, 1912-1919. During his relatively short ministry, Mr. Slocomb led the church through a transition to the modern organization of the church, as a democratic voluntary association: with by-laws, an annual canvass, annual meetings of the congregation and formal membership. Mr.Slocomge was an agent of change.

#4. The Rev. Austin Garver, 1882-1910. Mr. Garver ministered during one of the Golden Ages of the Church. First Unitarian was large and composed of socially prominent persons at this time. Mr. Garver was instrumental in founding numerous Worcester institutions, including building the Art Museum.

#3. The Rev. Edward Hall, 1869-1882. Mr. Hall served in the post Civil War era. He was a popular preacher and quite active in national denominational affairs. He answered the call to the First Parish of Cambridge after 13 years here in Worcester.

#2. The Rev. Alonzo Hill, 1827-1869. Rev. Hall started as the assistant to Aaron Bancroft, our founding minister and served for 42 years. For twelve years, both he and Mr. Bancroft were active ministers. It was during Mr. Hill’s ministry that the present church building was built. Mr. Hill served for 25 years on the Worcester School Committee.

#1. The Rev. Aaron Bancroft, 1786-36. Mr. Bancroft was our founding minister. He was the first minister called to a church created for the specific purpose of hearing “liberal” (as opposed to Calvinist) preaching in the United States. The first President of the American Unitarian Association. Served for 50 years, although much of his duties in the latter years were carried by his colleague, Mr. Hill.

Of course, these ten ministers were called to serve one congregation, which is a continuous body, whose members live with and remember many ministers. There are members of our congregation who joined while Mr. Savage was minister. Congregations and ministers co-create each other, for both our shared accomplishments and shortcomings. To be counted as among these ministers is a great honor, and a great responsibility and a great calling. I pray to be worthy to be among that number, and to be a worthy steward of your trust.