First Unitarian Congregational Society Brooklyn » Sermons http://www.fuub.org/home Words from a liberal religion in Brooklyn, NY Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:58:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Simply Peace http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/05/08/simply-peace/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/05/08/simply-peace/#comments Sun, 08 May 2011 18:29:20 +0000 Jude Geiger http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1309 Peace Mosaic Reflection
What a week we’ve had. It was late on Sunday when my boyfriend, Brian, looked over from reading the e-news to say, “They killed Bin Ladin.” He was relieved, a long time NYC resident, Brian had been living here when the Trade Center came down. The non-profit he works for was in midtown at the time, and has since moved down to Wall Street. My first reaction was different. Ten years ago I watched the smoke from twelve miles away, and waited for some friends to come home from work. It put in motion my studying for the GRE’s, and the career change from Information Technology to Community Development and ultimately the ministry. On Sunday night though, I didn’t have an emotional response; I didn’t find a sense of closure – that door that was opened on 9/11 didn’t feel like it shut closed and I found myself still staring at that open door.
I was quiet, a little stunned, and left wondering what the news, the politicians, and the entertainment media would do now. I was left wondering what changed; what’s next; and most of all – why wasn’t I feeling anything. What does justice mean? What does peace at the end of a rifle mean? Look at how much we can accomplish and how little we can stop. It wasn’t till the next morning that I realized, “Oh my, I have to talk about this at a family friendly service about Mothers’ Day and Peace this Sunday.”
It’s an impossible topic; yet one that needs to be addressed since this saga in our nation’s (and planet’s) history continues to define and determine our policies, our priorities, and the generations being raised in its wake. And I rather not leave it to our entertainment media to teach it to our children. We can shy away from it, but the truth is – all of us – adults, teens, and children – see this constantly on TV, in print, and certainly on the internet. And right now, when I look at these sources of information, I largely hear a message that tells me that violence is the only answer to violence; that war is eternal; and that we can never be safe so stay on guard. I personally don’t agree with those three views. I pray to hear more people speak up to help break this cycle of war and violence who don’t sound to my ear as fringe themselves, or evangelical in their militant pacifism, or who don’t negate the genuine feelings of those that support the course our country is currently taking. But I don’t personally hear that yet.
I would love to say to all of us that there is a clear and easy answer to how we should feel in the wake of the news of the death of the world’s most wanted terrorist. But the truth is, that like it was for Brian and I, we’re all going to respond differently. And that’s ok. Some of us will find solace; and some of us will feel numb; and some of us will feel like we’ve only made things worse.; and some of us were born after 9/11 so we don’t fully understand everything that’s going on and will just feel confused; and some of us who were born after 9/11 never got to know a certain family member and from that loss don’t understand why anyone would feel conflicted at all. I believe all of these responses are valid and correct in their own ways. ‘Violence begets violence’ remains true… and… someone who has caused so much suffering in the world must be stopped. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama’s response to this, Everyone deserves our compassion and forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean we need to forget. Sometimes actions must be taken.
If I can take anything of value out of this latest chapter in this tragic story I would say that we can learn to accept each others’ different emotional, intellectual and spiritual responses – our hearts, heads and soul. I would say that we give each other room to honor our pain, or our relief, or our fear, or our satisfaction. That we hold each other in care; that we hold off from the judgmental cries we might see on Facebook status updates; that we talk about what this means with our families and friends. That we refrain from the easier next step of intellectually critiquing US Foreign Policy, and remain in the more difficult place of emotionally wrestling with what this means for our hopes of building a more vibrant and connected world community. I think most of us know how much easier it is to critique or judge a thing – and how much harder it is to make anew or build something from the fallout. The world needs a lot more of the rebuilding than the breaking down right now. Where do we choose to focus?
With this page turning, can we be inspired to change how we interact with the people sitting next to us in the pews this morning? Can we start with that? I swear, it is so easy to get lost in the rush of responsibilities, and homework, and deadlines, and budgets and annual meetings. It is so easy to forget that everything we need to build community – to craft peace – is right before us and we can’t see it for the details. I know I’m guilty of that daily, and I regret that I am not alone in that mistake.
As you can tell from the differences in the order of service this morning, or from the fact that I’m giving my sermon in a couple of parts, we’re moving the liturgy around in the hopes of helping to work through these feelings a little more. In a little while – during our time of prayer, meditation and reflection – we’re going to ask all of us to do a little bit of building up of our own. We’re crafting in service today a larger peace sign. It’ll be a mosaic made of small felt squares in colors the range of the rainbow. You may not know that our side aisle chapels each are dedicated to different purposes. The one on this side is dedicated to all the world religions. During our candle lighting later, we’ll use this chapel for its usual purpose. Our other chapel is dedicated to peace. It is there that we’ll gather after the prayer to choose our own piece of felt to add to our peace mosaic. In a little while I’ll explain the logistics of how we’ll all do this together, but for now I’d like you to reflect on two questions. With reverence, I ask you to consider what part of the picture can you add in your own life? What color do your efforts look like?
The Logistical Bits
As we prepare to silently reflect and light candles in our chapel of world faiths, I invite those who would like to, to come forward as well and place a mosaic onto our peace sign. By doing so, you are not making a statement of support or critique of any policy, or procedure, or worldly decision, or critiquing our soldiers who are risking their lives for ours. Rather, you are agreeing to help build a little more peace in the corner of the world in which you live – at home, at the office, in this congregation – with family, with friends, with strangers. There’s no right color to choose, or right place to put it on the mosaic. As my local Park Slope arts and craft guru teaches me, we all have a natural instinct when it comes to colors. As a group we’ll naturally make it look great. We don’t have to overly think about it. We don’t have to form a committee to make it work. We don’t have to fret whether the next person will mess it up. It just takes our intention, our effort, and allowing ourselves to listen to our own heart – and it will all come out just fine. I invite now folks who feel so moved to come forward and light a candle in our one chapel and then head over to our other to place a mosaic. Some of you may choose to do the same thing in the reverse order. That’ll work out just fine as well. After several minutes, Bill Peek will lead our choir and the seated in singing the next hymn that’s printed in the order of service. Some of us will still be lighting candles or placing tiles. The words should be easy enough to join in singing whether or not you still have a hymnal in your hands. I welcome you now forward.
Homily
Our songs this morning – particularly our anthem and offertory – have this sense of time passing. That’s the phrase Bill Peek used, and I know he’s right on the mark. Some things may feel like forever, but they’re gone in a blink or look different on second glance. And yet, springtime returns every year at just about the same time. I asked Bill (our music director) if he thought the John Lennon song, Beautiful Boy could work today. I know it’s written from a dad to his son, and we’re celebrating Mothers’ Day; but I realize that we celebrate Mothers’ Day every year, and we don’t celebrate Fathers’ Day as such, it falling on our Juneteenth celebration. So for those dads out there, I hope this song gives you a little more space this year in the celebration.
The song has a particular meaning for me on this day though. “Out on the ocean sailing away, I can hardly wait, to see you come of age, but I guess we’ll both, just have to be patient, yes it’s a long way to go, but in the meantime, before you cross the street, take my hand, life is just what happens to you, while you’re busy making other plans.” Life is just what happens to you while you’re busy making others plans. That line of the song might be my motto this year. Thinking I was sailing away to a warm blue ocean on the other side of this continent, only to realize that my family situation, and my mother’s health, meant it was best if I stayed close rather than 3000 miles away. So many have asked this of me individually, so I’ll say to all of you now, my mom’s not in critical condition. She’s just learning to live into her next stage of life as she struggles with walking and other problems tied to mobility and heart health. And I guess my dad and I are trying to learn alongside her just as well. Knowing how private my mom is, it feels very weird even talking about this, but I know how much more strange it would be for our community if I were to remain entirely silent.
We grow up as kids waiting for the day to get out of the house and be on our own – to be adults. If we’re lucky, our parents are still around and we still want them in our lives. Then twenty or so years go by and all of a sudden you’re wondering whether being a bit closer isn’t the right way to go. We have an image of our moms as the one asking us to take their hand as we cross the street. As we get older though, there comes a time when we have to be grown up enough to ask the same thing of our parents. Maybe we should learn to take and ask for each other’s hands all along the way, and then maybe it won’t feel so weird should we let twenty years go by.
If you’re 15 right now and trying to imagine yourself holding your mom’s hand while you cross the street – seeing how strange it might feel, and knowing how other folks might look at you doing so being nearly an adult — try to fast forward a couple of decades and consider what it might feel like then. The awkwardness, I feel, are mirror images to one another; but just as many of us can recall our feelings and family frustrations from our teen years, I’m sure our teens can also get a glimpse of what the future might be through the images of our multigenerational community all around us. We can learn to take what moments we can as they arrive; ever trying to remember the mothers in our lives who have reminded us to “have no fear, (and that) the monsters are gone.” For those who have their mothers with them, strongly in their lives, we celebrate with you. For those who wish they had the chance to say one more thing to their mom, or their son or their daughter – we love you – and we’re just a hand’s length away when you need.
It’s in this spirit that our words from the Call to Worship this morning by the Unitarian Julia Ward Howe were crafted. It’s from the deep connection between child and mother, which the original Mothers’ Day Proclamation of peace was made in 1870. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.” Howe helps us to see the big problem of war, through the baby steps of starting at home. It reminds me of the contemporary slogan, “Think Globally, Act Locally.” To find a world at peace, we must act in our families, in our friendships and all through our community. I have no idea how to solve all the violence and war in the world. When I try to think of how to work through all the conflicts of all the people in the world, I simply have no clue. No clue. But I can try to speak more compassionately with those around me. I can seek to apply the words of Dr. Hicks that are printed at the top of our order of service this morning. ‎”Ask questions from the standpoint of curiosity, rather than arguing or debating another’s point of view.” For all of us who have ever asked the big questions like “Why is the sky blue?” – it’s with that spirit that Dr. Hicks words live in us. If you’ve ever had an argument with someone else, and you found yourself using the time where your opponent is speaking to formulate your response – not actually listening to them with more than one ear – Dr. Hicks is speaking to you. If we can’t find a way to listen with curiosity in our daily lives, we won’t craft world peace. We have to do it over the TV dinner if we ever hope to do it in the oil fields. World peace may be more complicated than that, but its first steps are that simple. Happy Mothers’ Day to all. May Julia Ward Howe’s dream come true in our lifetime.

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/05/08/simply-peace/feed/ 1 This Side of Paradise http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/27/this-side-of-paradise/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/27/this-side-of-paradise/#comments Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:29:47 +0000 Jude Geiger http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1260 There once was a farm in a valley that was practically perfect in every way, except that it had no rooster to crow at the crack of dawn, and so everyone was always late getting out of bed.”(1) If only all our problems seemed so simple! But I imagine it didn’t seem like such a small deal to the folks on the farm. From missing newspapers to late milked cows, to plain cranky attitudes, life in this otherwise perfect valley was marred by its one lack, a missing rooster.
What’s our missing farmyard animal? What’s the one thing in your life, that if only it were present, would make everything seem to work out all right? Go with the first thing that comes to you, it’ll do. Or if you’re like me on a bad day, start making lists. What does it give you that you don’t already have? How would it make things turn out just fine? What need does it fill?
I love stories like this. They really can draw out the essence of our daily challenges and struggles and they use humor to do so. It’s probably true that each one of us in this room could think of something pretty quickly that would help them to feel more whole, or more at ease, or at least full of gratitude. Getting into that college program; securing that job; hearing better news about the medical results. Those are some really serious concerns. If you’re like me, I imagine in the everyday you can catch yourself putting the same value on smaller events though. Catching that traffic light before it goes from yellow to red; or missing those closing doors on the subway, or waiting for that email or that text message to arrive; or the anticipation you feel waiting for the next episode of Glee…
What’s happening in between? That moment between otherwise being happy about how things are and the next where we convince ourselves that things will only be good, or OK, if the thing we’re waiting for actually happens. Let’s start with the little things first. Try to remember what it feels like in your body when I mention these. That traffic light. Getting caught behind a slow moving pedestrian on a narrower block in Manhattan. The iconic subway rider that won’t move out of the way of the closing doors. I’m going to hazard a guess that at least one of these can drive you absolutely nuts.
What are we letting go of when we let this occur? We might have someone in our lives we love; we may have home and health; we may be enjoying a warm beautiful day on this side of paradise; but the traffic light, or slow moving pedestrian, can take it all away in the blink of an eye. We may be thinking about picking up our kids from their RE class, or prepping for the next congregational committee meeting, or just steeling ourselves for the rush of coffee hour instead of fully resting into this hour of reflection, refreshment and community connection. It’s so easy to fall into this habit. We’ve all been there, and we’ll likely all experience this sense of “momentary want” again – probably even today. The little things are just as easy to laugh at ourselves about – as they are to forget not to cling to them again and again. They’re not big, and yet they can all snatch from us the awareness of the awe in the living world around us.
…And the bigger things are much less easy to sweep away. Concerns for one’s home, or job, or prospects or health aren’t frivolous or insignificant. The death of a loved one, or feelings of concern for our friends who are grieving, are major turning points in our lives. For good or for ill, their effects will travel with us – possibly – for the rest of our lives. And yet, the simple truth is that the awe and wonder of this living, breathing world continues unabated in every moment. What happens to us, doesn’t change this truth; even if the awe and wonder becomes hard to see for a time… even if we can’t feel it for a while. A connection to our source, this life, remains. And yet those times of forgetfulness – those times of feeling disconnected from our source, will come. It’s the reality of a world full of promise and pain.
Our Universalist predecessors believed in universal salvation. They believed that when we died, all souls would be saved to heaven in glory. The reasoning went such that an all-loving, all-powerful God could not condemn anyone to eternal pain or misery. Personally, I’ve come to feel that salvation is accessible in our current lives, for all people, while we’re still living and breathing. I’ve come to see salvation not tied to death, or notions of original sin, but a salvation tied to life. A salvation responding to the hells of our daily making; a salvation responding to the hells of our communal making. It starts with being able to connect and reconnect with this awe-inspiring living breathing world. It’s a salvation that’s grounded in healthy community; a salvation that responds to our religious humanist forebears who found in religious community a saving grace from the false idolatry of the individual ego. It’s a salvation that liberates us from our ties to the mythic worlds of “what if,” the traps of “if only” and the fears of “no, not that.” It’s not a false sentimentality. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not a brazen disregard for the horrors, and pains and tragedies of our world. It’s a salvation that reminds us of the honest connections we are ever blessed with. It’s the kind that puts into context all the complexity and nuance of our often frenetic yet ever poignant world.
Our reading this morning by Pema Chodron offers a Buddhist take on this contemporary Universalist message. “Moving away from our experience, moving away from the present moment with all our habits and strategies, always adds up to restlessness, dissatisfaction, unhappiness. The comfort that we associate with concretizing and making things solid is so transitory, so short lived.” (2) Alright, let’s take a little mini-poll here. By a show of hands, who here has ever wanted anything? Ok, keep your hands up if that thing you wanted you got. Ok, now here’s the tricky part. Please keep your hand up if after getting that thing you wanted, you at some point stopped wanting or enjoying it. And finally – keep your hand up if that thing you wanted that you got, you came to wish you never got it? Alright, I thought that was a pretty common occurrence. I’m glad it’s not just me… phew!
That, my friends, is what concretizing can lead to. We sort of chase our own tails for dreaming. Call the grass on the other side always greener, or just admit that sometimes we don’t really know what we want. The draw to make things appear more solid in our lives is very alluring, but it’s ultimately a fruitless desire. I don’t mean to suggest we ought to give up on development, or goals, or hopes; but rather I hope to inspire us to offer a more realistic appreciation for the moment we dwell in. Our world is more full of joy if in our daily strivings we remain rooted, as best we can, in a thorough appreciation for what is before us. It’s from this place of fullness that we realize salvation. And it’s available to us in every moment; including this one.
There’s another message that comes out of the words for all ages we heard this morning about our practically perfect farm. Did you notice how the rooster went to every animal in the farm before even trying to figure out how to crow on his own? It made more sense to him that the pig, or cat, or sheep, or duck might know better how to make a rooster crow than he himself did. The part about that story that I love even more, is that the pig, cat, sheep and duck also thought that they knew how to make that noise better than the rooster. If they knew so well, I wonder why they didn’t take on the role of morning wake-up call till then; and yet they remained certain they could. How often do we take on one of those roles in our lives? When are we the know-it-all expert? …When are we the rooster that’s given up all our power?
I’m sure there’s a few sermons in the question of being a know-it-all, but I’ll save that for another day. The second question though, really fits our worship this morning. I’ve reflected a bit about how we give away our connectedness with the moment, with our connectedness to this side of paradise, by ever wishing for the next great thing. How do we do that when we give up our own answers? How do we disconnect ourselves when we solely rely on others to save us from our unknowing, or our quandaries, or our sense of loss? In religious community, I applaud the rooster’s desire to learn from his peers and elders. I applaud his willingness to engage with his neighbor. But I’m concerned that it never occurred to him to even try to rely on his personal experience. Our UU sources talk about this. One of our sources is our own human experience, and our story’s hero takes a while to get back to the beginning.
What’s going on there? I’m going to guess that we’re all a little guilty of this in our lives. Think about a time when you’ve had a big decision to make and the first thing you do is call every close friend and ask them to tell you what you’d do. A certain amount of that is good for the process of reflection. But so often we go to the absurd extreme with it. We give up our connectedness with the moment in our repetitive mental musings – with the proverbial spinning of our wheels while going no where. Maybe we need the advice, but maybe we already know our answer. Maybe we already know how to speak our voice and do what needs to be done if only we were to try. A friend of mine says that, “We can’t rely on others to show us the beauty of a moment. Another person can’t give us the eyes to see that; we’re born with them and we have to learn to use them.”(3)
In the Christian tradition, there’s a verse attributed to Reinhold Niebhur, that goes, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” This great prayer of discernment sums up the quandaries associated with fearing what will come and fearing who we are right now. If we can figure out how to live out the words from the Serenity Prayer, as it’s commonly called, we come closer to an appreciation for the moment. We come closer to loving this amazing world as best we can just as it is. It holds an honest balance between loving ourselves (and the world) as we are, and loving the world and ourselves as we might be — without making ourselves or the world out to be wrong in the meantime. It calls us to give ourselves a chance, without struggling against the impossible; while lifting up a sense of ownership with our feelings and experiences.
In all of this, if we were to name it for what it is, we might say that there’s a hole in our hearts for what we sense to be missing in our lives. In some traditions, we’d call it a “God-shaped hole.” In others, we’d call it “living in a state of suffering.” In psychological terms we might label it “insecurity” or “co-dependence” depending on its manifestations and triggers. I believe each one of these has their merits. As a minister though, and not a psychologist (except for maybe in the pop sense of the word) I’ll stick with the first two names. “Living in a state of suffering” and “A God-shaped hole in our heart.”
Our reading this morning by Pema Chodron clearly is in the school of thought that engages our sense of suffering. It’s a philosophy that calls for deepening our sense of comfort with the groundlessness of life – that ‘not knowing what will be;’ that ‘acceptance of the present moment.’ “This moving away from comfort and security (she writes,) this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky – that’s called liberation.” (4) I used the Universalist language of salvation before to reflect on this same sort of thing. As our religious tradition transforms, changes and grows we’re going to learn and develop more and more ways to express the complexity of life and matters of spirit in our own religious language. But I believe the core truths, the essential questions and challenges remain the same for us – we’re just learning better ways to translate them for our own hearts, minds and ears.
The “God-shaped hole” language may really work for you. Or maybe it’s a kind of language that’s really hard for you to relate to. As Unitarian Universalists, I’ll challenge us to be the best translators we can be. And I’ve given us a few ways to translate today. For the theists among us, when we give up our sense of faith in our own capacity; when we give up our sense of appreciation for Creation as it is; when we disconnect ourselves from a real communion with this side of paradise; we realize a God-shaped hole in our lives. We confuse ourselves into thinking that we’re alone; or empty; or unloved. We confuse ourselves into thinking we’re powerless; or incapable; or that the world is devoid of meaning.
None of these things are true. We are not alone. We are loved. Life is full of promise. Our potential and capacity for love and for life is an amazing gift – an amazing blessing that we only need to open ourselves up-to to know its full wonder. As Zora Neale Hurston audaciously proclaims, “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” That’s the core message in living into this side of paradise, regardless of our personal theologies, or beliefs. Loving the moment, loving the world in all its nuance and beauty, loving ourselves and the beloved communities we build together, loving this life through all its uncertainty, is the process of crawling out of our places of pain and fear and hiding. Friends, this world is too full to forever find answers outside ourselves, and it is too full to forever think we hold all the answers for our neighbors. This living, breathing world is too full to hide from it, each other, and ourselves.
1- “A Lamp in Every Corner” by Janee K. Groshmeyer p. 88
2- “Comfortable with Uncertainty,” by Pema Chodron, p.43. 2003 Boston and London.
3- Brian Brewer
4- “Comfortable with Uncertainty,” by Pema Chodron, p.44. 2003 Boston and London.

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/27/this-side-of-paradise/feed/ 0 Pride and Prejudice in the Multi-Ethnic Society http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/13/pride-and-prejudice-in-the-multi-ethnic-society/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/13/pride-and-prejudice-in-the-multi-ethnic-society/#comments Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:59:46 +0000 Rev. Patrick ONeill http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1257 I was born 64 years ago today – just yesterday, really. I was born only about seven or eight miles from here – or about six stops away on the A Train, as New Yorkers like to measure distance, on the West Side of Manhattan. Legends and stories about my birth quickly spread, as you might imagine. My mother used to say that I was an Irish Catholic baby delivered in a Lutheran Hospital by a Jewish obstetrician. “I should have guessed then that you’d grow up to be a Unitarian minister,” my father would later say.
I was born the seventh and last child of an Irish immigrant household consisting of my parents, Bill and Betty O’Neill, both of whom immigrated to America in the 1920’s; my paternal Grandmother, Katie O’Neill; and my siblings, John, Harry, Mary, Margaret, Catherine, Nora, and myself.
One story has it that my mother and my grandmother had a rather vehement argument on the day I was born about what I should be named. They were told to expect my arrival on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, which pretty much pre-determined what a boy named O’Neill would be named. But then they were told to expect me closer to March 7th, which I’m sure you all know, on the Catholic liturgical calendar is the feastday of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian. When I arrived in between on the 13th, my mother thought I should therefore be named Patrick Thomas. But my Grandmother, however, warned that this would be a terrible burden for an immigrant boy born in America. “Call him Thomas Patrick,” my Granny argued. “The name O’Neill will be hard enough for him to overcome; don’t make it harder for him by calling him Paddy.” She said this to my mother in Gaelic. My mother answered her (in English) “If the name is good enough for the patron saint of all Ireland, it’s good enough for my boy.”
And that is how I came to be Patrick Thomas Aquinas O’Neill, and not Tip O’Neill like that fellow up in Boston.
Lest you begin to think that my Grandmother was not proud of her Irish heritage, let me assure you she was, immensely so. But like millions of immigrants to this country before her and after her, my grandmother’s vision and dream for her family is that they would become thoroughly “Americanized” as quickly as possible; this, in order to make possible their fullest participation in what used to be understood as “the American Dream.”
For my parents and my grandmother this pursuit of the American Dream was their singular vision from the day they sailed past the Statue of Liberty into New York harbor. America was the dream for them, the land of opportunity where their children and grandchildren would have no limits to where their own talents and education and ambitions might call them. It sounds corny to us today from our comfortable privileged cynical place in an America where such notions seem a hundred years out of date – if you are lucky enough yourself to be of a generation and an economic class that has never known deprivation or class discrimination or racial oppression or social exclusion. If your own family is now far enough removed from the immigrant experience that you can barely relate to what poor working-class people have been willing to endure and sacrifice in order to provide their children and their grandchildren with a better life – if your own experience has never included the first-hand encounter with hatred and bigotry because of the mere color of your skin or the faintest accent of your family’s native language or the religious background of your family’s heritage – if you really cannot imagine the insult to one’s soul that comes with ethnic slurs or stereotyping of any kind – then my sermon today may hold very little for you.
But if you feel as I do, that our great national experiment called America may currently be in need of some reclamation of what I was taught were the basic values that made this nation exceptional in its vision and extraordinary in its potential, if you feel uncomfortable, as I am uncomfortable watching the entire religion of Islam now come under Peter King’s Congressional inquiry for the actions of an extremist few – if you are made uncomfortable, as I am uncomfortable with the passage of state laws like Arizona’s where any person who even looks to be Hispanic can be stopped by police and required to produce proof of citizenship – if that feels just a bit more like Apartheid South Africa than like the United States of America to you – then maybe you can understand why I feel compelled to speak to this today.
You see, this is my St. Patrick’s Day sermon today. I write this sermon today for my grandmother, Katie O’Neill of County West Meath, Ireland, who spent more than a few years teaching me about pride and prejudice in a multi-ethnic society and how to distinguish between them. She showed us by personal example how to carry oneself with dignity and pride, and she taught us by personal example to respect the pride of others. But looking back now I appreciate most of all my grandmother’s profound understanding of the fine balances required for a multi-ethnic society to succeed. She understood, it seems to me, in a way that we don’t hear being voiced by enough of our leaders today – by enough of our Congressmen and Senators, by enough of our Governors or by our Supreme Court – my grandmother understood, she got it, that the whole sacred experiment of a multi-ethnic nation can’t work unless it is grounded in that most demanding and difficult of human virtues, namely, Tolerance.
I remember when I was still a pre-schooler walking with my Granny down Amsterdam Avenue to the market, and Granny would play a game with me, to see how many different languages we could hear along those few blocks. “That’s Spanish, Patrick. That’s Yiddish. There’s German. And that’s Italian there. Isn’t New York great, boyo…” She herself spoke with a brogue you could cut with a knife, but the truth is I could never hear my grandmother’s accent. And I could never hear my parents’ accents either. When I was in first grade I got into a schoolyard scuffle one day and came home with a bloody nose. ‘What happened,?” my Granny asked. “That boy said you talked funny, Granny,” I explained. She laughed and said, “Darlin Boy, but I do talk funny!”
Do you know that according to the 2010 Census there are now altogether more than 300 languages spoken in the United States. 300! Do you know that the New York City school system offers classroom instruction in 115 different languages today? One-third of all the children in urban schools across America today speak a language other than English at home. The state of Massachusetts offers drivers license tests in 24 languages. In California voting ballots are offered in six different languages. We are one nation in law and in definition, but we have always spoken in many different tongues. It is only one way in which we are a diverse society.
The term ethnic is derived from the Greek word ethnos, normally translated as “nation”. The term refers currently to people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture.
An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture often including a shared religion and an ideology that stresses common ancestry and connected with a specific geographical area, with common traditions, including food preferences.
We ought to be clear that “Ethnicity” and “Race” are completely different categories altogether. It is primarily because of our country’s sad history of importing and later having to painfully excise the practice of African slavery that the artificial category of “race” ever became a hallmark of American self-understanding. Nor is the term “ethnic” exactly synonymous with “nationality.” Nation states in many parts of the world are lines drawn on a map for purely political purposes, often throwing in together ethnic groups that have never traditionally gotten along as neighbors, let alone as countrymen. Witness the terrible “ethnic cleansing” warfare in modern Serbia and Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia. Witness the ethnic warfare between Sunni and Shiite tribes in the Middle East, or the Hutu and Tutsi tribal warfare in Rwanda. Not to mention the most horrifying ethnic holocaust of all in Third Reich Germany, when millions of people were slaughtered simply because of their Jewish heritage.
Near the end of her life in 1977, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked in an interview, “If we human beings are truly social animals, why do we seem to have such a difficult time getting along with one another in this world? Why so many wars, why so much hostility and aggression and intolerance among people?”
Mead’s answer was very enlightening. “99% of the time humans have lived on the planet,” she said, “we’ve lived in groups of 12 to 36 people. That is to say, we’ve lived in small groups of people probably related to us; people who looked just like us, thought like us, ate and behaved like us, worshipped like us. We simply never needed to learn how to tolerate anyone who was different from us. But in the last 300 years, the population of the world rocketed from 500 million to 4 billion. We simply haven’t had enough time,” said Margaret Mead, “to learn how to get along in such a crowd of strangers.”
Since Mead gave that interview in 1977, by the way, the world population has grown by roughly another 2 billion or so. There are about 6-to-7 billion people on earth in 2011. The world is not getting any roomier, and we do not seem as a species to be growing any more adept at getting along with each other. According to World Almanac, at any given moment, there are some 72 different armed conflicts, civil wars, and/or international aggressions going on between major groups of people somewhere in the world.
In our own country today we are engaged in an endless cultural conversation about the challenges and problems we face in learning to adapt to a “Multicultural” and “Multi-ethnic” society. “Diversity” is a watchword now in virtually every aspect of American life. New realities are upon us, and learning to get along with groups of people who are quite different from ourselves is no longer optional. Shifting population within our country, as well as the international linkage of economic destinies, world trade, and an Internet globe where information is massively and instantaneously accessible – all these factors are at work making this world in our lifetime a place of startling interaction and breathtaking possibility.
The problem is we no longer have the luxury of time – in the evolutionary sense that an anthropologist like Margaret Mead referred to – to perfect the behavioral virtues required for graceful coexistence in such a brave new world.
In evolutionary terms, we are still challenged to act kindly and trustingly toward anyone beyond our own family campfire. And here we are suddenly at a point in history when our sheer numbers on the earth and our accelerated technology now throw whole cultures up against each other for better or worse. And the irony – and the tragedy – is that these social animals called humans are still learning how to get along with each other, how to tolerate each other’s mere presence in the world.
I realize that my Irish American family had many advantages compared to many other ethnic groups in America. Having Patrick for a first name was never really a disadvantage, as my grandmother worried it might be. We got Americanized right enough, my family at least. Accept for their having brogues, my family at least understood English as their primary language. My grandmother stopped using Gaelic in America and did not teach it to her grandchildren. And as fair-skinned Caucasians, we at least did not suffer the indignities of racial discrimination. As Catholics we fitted in with mainstream Christian culture in America. And as members of one of the largest ethnic immigrant groups in America we soon enough had sufficient numbers in the general population to control political power in major American cities and eventually see an Irish American elected president.
Oh, I will admit there have been times when I’ve not been proud to be Irish. When I was younger I was embarrassed by the stereotypes of the Irish as drunkards, for example. I was ashamed of the terrorist bombings carried out by the IRA in the name of British political oppression. I was embarrassed by the hatred in the faces of South Boston Irish during the school integration busing crisis in the 1960’s. I was embarrassed by Mayor Daley’s public disrespect of Martin Luther King in Chicago. I was ashamed of the history of the Irish riots in New York City lynching blacks in the 1860’s. But there was much more that I was proud of about being Irish and proud of Irish contributions to American society and to the world. And most immediately, I’m proud of the family I come from. I come from a loving home, great parents, a wonderful grandmother, the best brothers and sisters. Whatever I know about faith and hope and charity and tolerance, I learned first from them.
The American Dream did come true for more and more Irish, as the sons and daughters of laborers and longshoremen like my dad became college educated and entered into the middle-class as teachers, lawyers, social workers, nurses and artists. Other groups in America have had a much harder route to endure, with more violent oppression and bigotry continually poured down upon them. Racism is still the most corrosive social cancer of all, the one America has never and may never successfully eradicate.
Here is the point I am conscious of on my 64th birthday as another St. Patrick’s Day parade is about to form up on Fifth Avenue. Being an American is the most privileged position anyone in the world can occupy in this time of history, and I’m grateful that my parents made sure their children had this privilege. I’ll honor them this week by being proud of my ethnic heritage and proud of my name. But I’ll honor them most directly by always trying to promote the kind of tolerance that they themselves dreamed for their children when they came here ninety years ago. May you be proud of your heritage as well.
Happy St Paddy’s day to you!

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/13/pride-and-prejudice-in-the-multi-ethnic-society/feed/ 0 Faith Lives in Honest Doubt http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/06/faith-lives-in-honest-doubt/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/06/faith-lives-in-honest-doubt/#comments Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:38:49 +0000 First U Bklyn http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1253 A Sermon Offered at the First Unitarian Society of Brooklyn
March 6, 2011
The Rev. Judy Welles©
I’m one of those dinosaurs who grew up before there was much to watch on television, so my brothers and I used to play games a lot — “Sardines” or “Capture the Flag” on summer nights with the other neighborhood kids, board games and card games when we were staying indoors. A favorite card game of mine was “I Doubt It,” because it was the only game I knew of where everyone was encouraged to cheat and tell lies. Cheating was one of the acceptable ways to win the game. And doubting what someone else said, catching them in the act of cheating, was the other way you could win the game.
This is the first experience I can remember where it was not only acceptable to cheat, but expected and encouraged as good policy to assert my doubts. However, as I look back on my Unitarian childhood from the perspective of deeper understanding, I see that doubt actually played a significant role in my religious education as a child.
My religious background was one which made generous allowances for doubt as a legitimate approach to understanding and belief. In my church life, I was exposed to a model of thinking which kept cynicism in check while encouraging the kind of critical thinking — an unwillingness to suspend disbelief — that might bring me to an acceptable expression of my faith. I’ve always been extremely grateful for my upbringing in the Unitarian church which gave me permission to doubt while acknowledging my rightful place as a doubter in religious community.
The encouragement of doubt is still a valid and valued element of the religious education experience we offer to our children. In fact, this is a significant part of the ongoing disagreement between the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Boy Scouts of America. Part of the Boy Scout oath asks the Scout to swear to do his duty to God and his country; another part states that “a Scout is reverent toward God.” Both of these phrases imply a belief in God, which you really can’t automatically assume about a UU boy (or many other boys that age either). One of the reasons that we haven’t been able to come to a meeting of the minds with the Boy Scouts, whose top leadership is heavily dominated by Mormons and Christian fundamentalists, is our insistence that our youth can doubt the existence of God and still be good UU kids with strong ethics and a valid spiritual understanding of their relationship to the world and whatever lies beyond it. It’s a fundamental part of our religion and our religious teachings to allow plenty of space for wondering, questioning, and doubt — and at no time in life is this more important than in adolescence.
Of course, the encouragement of doubt is not limited to our kids. It’s probably why many of you are here as well. In the congregation I serve back in Pennsylvania, my husband and I often hear that people left the churches of their childhood because, as kids, they asked too many questions which either went unanswered, were answered unsatisfactorily, or they were told in no uncertain terms that such questions were not permissible.
Others tell us about more recent experiences as adults in church, where they realized that asking questions or challenging the teachings simply wasn’t acceptable. The choices they were given in these churches were to keep their doubts to themselves or to leave. Fortunately they found the Unitarian Universalists and learned that there is a church which encourages you to cherish your doubts, to ask the hard questions and keep on asking them, and to refine and change the questions as your faith develops or changes.
Because this is the heart of the matter: doubt and faith go hand in hand. They live in the same apartment building. Their mothers are cousins. Or, in the words of Paul Tillich, “doubt is always present as an element in the structure of faith.”
So let’s go back to the Tillich essay and unpack it a bit, to try to get at what this twentieth century theologian had to say about the matter of faith and doubt. You may recall his claim at the beginning that faith is the state of ultimate concern. It is not a statement of factual belief, but rather a state of being in which one acknowledges what is of ultimate concern to oneself. This could be faith in God, or in the nation, or faith in any number of intangible but powerful entities. Whatever it is, faith promises total fulfillment and demands total surrender.
He says that an act of faith is an act of a finite being — that is, a human being whose lifespan is finite, who knows that he or she will die — who is grasped by and turned to the infinite. So it’s a matter of a relationship, the relationship between the person and what that person experiences as the ultimate. “The infinite passion,” he writes, “is the passion for the infinite.” The human heart seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest. In the infinite it sees its own fulfillment.
Yet because the experience of faith is received by a finite being — a person with all his or her human limitations — there will always be an element of uncertainty in faith. That’s because there is this imbalance between the finite and the infinite: the finite person is grasped by the infinite, and the infinite works beyond the limitations of the finite, so the outcome can never be known by the finite person. That’s where the uncertainty comes from, that inability to know for absolutely sure what the outcome will be. So we have uncertainty even in the midst of our faith. Being aware of the uncertainty, we are also aware that there is risk involved, and we face that uncertainty, that risk, with courage. In this case, courage means affirming oneself in spite of all that we know about our own finitude, our own limitations.
The aspect of faith which allows us to accept uncertainty is courage. So we must embrace our doubts, explore them with honesty and integrity and a dash of courage. One of our responsibilities to one another in religious community is encouragement — which, of course, literally means giving courage to one another. Affirming one another in our individual searches is stated expressly as one of the underlying principles of Unitarian Universalism: acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.
When you have faith in something, you put the whole meaning of your life into it, you base all your actions on it. This is what Tillich means by ultimate concern. When you have faith, you have posited the meaning of your life in that faith. If you are wrong then the very meaning of your life is threatened. But you cannot be sure your faith stance is the true meaning of your life. You doubt it. Your faith can overcome that doubt, you continue to vest your faith, but doubt always remains.
As an example, I may believe that God exists. But if I haven’t vested my faith in God, it really doesn’t matter whether or not God exists. Without vesting my faith, it would be like believing that this pulpit exists, and then someone waking me up from a dream and seeing that the pulpit is not in front of me, even though I had believed it was when I was dreaming. No big deal; it really doesn’t matter. I wake up from the dream and life goes on. Belief in God can be like this. But if faith in God were my ultimate concern, if I based my life and all my actions on faith in God — and then I found out it was all a fraud, the meaning of my very life would be threatened.
There is nothing that can be done about this existential doubt. Everything we have invested our lives in, everything we put value in, everything we think worthwhile could be a huge hoax. And yet people do manage to have faith, to have ultimate concerns, to vest their lives with meaning despite their doubts. People of faith understand that anything solid casts a shadow. They always have. So let’s turn to one source of stories about people’s religious experiences to see how this theory can be applied to real life, or at least to people who might have lived and had something like this happen to them.
One of these stories is from the Biblical Gospel of Mark.[1] It tells of a desperate father who brings his epileptic son to Jesus to be cured. The father pleads with Jesus, “If you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus says to him, “If you are able! All things can be done for the one who believes.” And immediately the father of the child cries out “I believe; help my unbelief!”
This is a classic statement of faith as Tillich has described it. The father does believe; he is a faith-filled follower of Jesus who believes his teachings, believes in the God that Jesus describes, and believes that Jesus can cast out the evil spirit from his son. “I believe!” he cries out immediately, when told that it is his own faith that will cure his son. But wait… what if his belief isn’t strong enough? What if he doesn’t believe quite enough, what if those nagging existential doubts that he constantly lives with are right? “Help my unbelief!” he pleads with Jesus. “Let my faith be stronger than my doubt. Give me courage.” Surely we all can identify with this desperate father who wants to believe, and who does believe, but who struggles with doubt in the face of such suffering by his son. Who wouldn’t doubt, seeing someone he loved so terribly afflicted? It’s such a human story.
Another story that fits here is the story of Thomas — Doubting Thomas — that is told in the Gospel of John.[2] Thomas was one of the twelve disciples, but in John’s version of the story Thomas was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to them in a locked room on the evening of the day that Mary Magdalene found the stone rolled away from the tomb. The disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” However, he didn’t disappear, he didn’t sink into cynicism or despair. He remained faithful to his quest for knowledge and understanding, and he returned the following week to the same house where the disciples met again. This time Jesus appeared and stood among them, and said to Thomas “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas did so, crying out “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Thomas is certainly not indifferent when it comes to religious questions. He is one of the inner circle, the Twelve, the small group of Jews who have followed Jesus and listened to him and tried to live the life he showed them. Thomas took all of this very seriously. He has dedicated his life to a worthwhile cause; he is trying to walk the talk. He has given his heart to something, he has found that ultimate concern that has gripped him and changed his life. How could he not be devastated when the one whom he followed and gave his heart to was brutally murdered by the Romans? It’s no wonder he didn’t show up right away that evening when the other disciples met to grieve together.
Why tell the story this way? Why on a Sunday? Why a week later? Why in the community of believers? Because this story was written 70 to 90 years after the events took place, and Thomas’s experience mirrors that of the early Christians for whom the story was written. They were the people who met each week, who wanted to experience the fact of the resurrection in their lives, but knew that they had only each other to go on because they hadn’t seen the events for themselves. Those are the ones, after all, who the author was addressing when he put the words into Jesus’ mouth “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Doubting Thomas might be the patron saint for Unitarian Universalists if we had such a thing, and this is why: He was not satisfied with other people’s accounts. He wanted to know by experience. He wanted his religion to be his own. He wanted to touch the truth for himself, and until then, maybe even in spite of himself, he said he would not believe. In this way Thomas approached religion critically. He was not simply an unbeliever who turned away from possibility; he was a searcher who valued his doubts until his own experience overcame them. He remained in religious community, he came to worship and brought his doubts with him and allowed the community to encourage him until he found something that he truly could believe for himself.
Now doubt can be a problem both for liberals and for fundamentalists, but for different reasons. There are many aspects to fundamentalism which help to describe it and to describe how fundamentalists think. One of these is that fundamentalists tend to be absolutists; they adhere strictly to a dualistic world view which divides the world clearly and cleanly into Good versus Evil, God’s world versus Satan’s, and so forth. In the world of the fundamentalists, there is no room for doubt, because doubt lingers somewhere in between the polarities, nagging and questioning. (One Christian source I read referred to doubt as “the ants in the pants of faith.”) The fundamentalists don’t want to acknowledge the possibility that what they have given their lives to might be a huge hoax. If you see the world as a polarity of right and wrong, with nothing in between, then there is no place on a continuum for doubt.
Liberals, on the other hand, often find themselves embracing both ends of a paradox. One of the definitions of a liberal is that it’s someone who can hold two conflicting views at the same time. And liberals often find themselves reluctant to give over their lives to anything which will make such ultimate demands on them. We aren’t so uncomfortable with doubt — doubt is familiar territory for many of us — but faith? Have faith in something of ultimate concern? Allow myself to be grasped by something infinite, something on which I will base all of my actions, something in which I will vest the very meaning of my life? Allow myself to be changed? That’s really big.
And this is a place where I think sometimes that we are not served well by our liberalism, because it can make it too easy for us not to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into living a faithful, a faith-filled life. We say that each of us must work out for ourselves what our beliefs are, what our faith stance is. No one here is going to tell you what to believe; you have to come to that understanding for yourself, based on your life experience, your understanding of the way life works, your exemplars, your ethics, and your interpretation of the stories you hear about other people’s faith, like the ones I’ve just told you.
It’s a very appealing construct for people who value independence and critical thinking, but let’s face it — it’s also appealing to people who just might be a little theologically lazy. Because there isn’t any test, there’s no recitation of a creed or memorization of a catechism, there’s no higher authority than our own conscience to force us into coming up with a statement of faith. No one here is going to coerce anyone else to identify our ultimate concern or explain how it promises absolute fulfillment to us or determines the basis of our actions in the world.
But if it works — if people really do grapple with questions of faith like the father who despairs over his son’s illness, if they do keep coming back into the community of seekers until they can finally touch their faith with their own hands — then they will have something. Then they will have developed the courage and the wisdom to cope with whatever existential doubt accompanies their faith. Their faith will be strong despite their doubts. No, their faith will be strong because of their doubts.
This is the promise that we make here. We offer courage — encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. We give each other plenty of space in which to entertain our doubts, to let them camp out in our living room and ask their unrelenting questions. Remember, faith lives in this building, too. We won’t tell you what to put your faith in, but we hope that you will put it in something much bigger than your finite self. You don’t have to believe in God or in miraculous healing or the resurrection or Jesus; you don’t even have to believe in Paul Tillich! But please find something ultimate that will grasp you and change you, that offers you fulfillment if you will shape your life after it.
You can do this. I know you can. But…will you?
It’s up to you.

[1] Mark 9: 22-24
[2] John 20: 24-29

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/03/06/faith-lives-in-honest-doubt/feed/ 0 Not My Problem http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/20/not-my-problem/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/20/not-my-problem/#comments Sun, 20 Feb 2011 18:19:51 +0000 Jude Geiger http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1229 http://www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith/moraltales/session12/sessionplan/stories/123589.shtml

Who would have thought one little drop of honey could cause so much trouble! Our story’s Queen learned otherwise, right? She learned that sometimes leaving something unattended for long enough could create mischief, fighting and even fire! I can remember my mom yelling at me as a kid to clean up my bedroom, or pick up my toys from the living room floor, or to turn off the television when I was done. I think I now have a better idea of what my mom was worried might have happened – although the biggest risks were probably just broken legos and lost toys – either one though would certainly threaten a crying little Jude.
Cleaning up after ourselves, putting away our toys, doing the dishes now before the friendly neighborhood cockroaches and rats arrive to do our work for us are all good habits to have and the reasons are mostly clear. But what can this story mean when we’re not talking about honey, or food, or dishes, or legos? What can it mean when it’s referring to the everyday mistakes we make? The nasty emails we clicked the send button for; the failing school grade that we hide the report card for; the impatient remark we make to a fellow congregant – to a friend; or the promise we fail to uphold? Can these things spiral into something more with the proverbial cat and dog fighting amidst the baker and the butcher?
I’d guess that we can all imagine ways in which these things can easily get out of control if we let them sit there and work their mischief. Emails can cause hurt feelings that only grow when we confirm them by ignoring the hurt in our writing. The same can be said for bitter attitudes with folks around us in person. Hiding our school troubles only delays when the truth comes out, and in return we only cut ourselves off from the support of our family when we probably need it the most.
The answers are often simple even if they feel hard to do at the time. Face what we fear in the moment rather than letting it grow out of control. The more we avoid it, the more we fear it, the more troublesome or hurtful it can become. The more power we give it to define our lives.
What if the everyday negative things that happen are part of a bigger problem that goes beyond us? February is Black History month, and I’ve been wondering how an attitude of “not my problem” has contributed to so many of the difficult stories Black Americans have had to face. I wonder how our unwillingness to face our fears of the moment help to support discrimination, prejudice and injustice even though we might not agree with the attitudes that create unfairness between people with different ethnic backgrounds.
I put a call out on Facebook for stories our congregation might be willing to share. June Wohlhorn, one of our Kindergarten-First Grade teachers shared one such story from 25 years ago. She wrote to me,
“At one of the offices where I worked, I was friends with the bookkeeper who was a black woman. At lunch, we’d sometimes run across the street to the Korean deli to grab something to eat at our desks. After doing this a number of times, I noticed that although the man at the cash register would always put my change into my hand, he always put my friend’s money on the counter. I didn’t notice the first few times, but eventually I did and discussed it with her. She said it was one of the things that happens when you shop while black.
I suggested that we not go back even though it was the most convenient and cheapest place nearby. She didn’t want to give up the convenience and said it happened in lots of places and if she let it get her too crazy, life would be even harder than it was. I had known there was prejudice but had not really understood how even the smallest things like how you receive your change was a way of people keeping others ‘in their place’.”
Take a moment and imagine what it would feel like if folks went out of their way to avoid you in everyday interactions? How would it feel if people treated you differently than other people? Have you ever felt this way before? If you have paper and a crayon, you could draw out a time when this happened. Or you could draw a picture of how you think you’d feel. … Take your time, there’s no rush. But when you do that, I’d like you to draw another picture of how you could handle it differently – how would you make it better? This could be really important for you or someone you care about someday because things like this still happen even though they shouldn’t.
Our first principle, where we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, reminds us that treating people negatively because of who they are, or whom they love, is a moment where we fall short of who we could be. We’re not at our best when we diminish, when we put down or insult others. And our Unitarian Universalist faith asks more of us than that.
How easy would it have been just to ignore the little fact that the cashier gave change to some people in their hands, and to other people they put the money on the counter? Paying attention to how folks interact is a really important skill. Speaking up, or reaching out – depending on the situation – makes a huge difference too. Taking the time to talk about what happens matters too. It can show we care. It can show we know something’s not right. It’s the beginning of solidarity. These are all ways in which we can live out our first principle too. We often talk about how we affirm the worth and dignity of every person, but our principle also calls us to promote their (and our) worth and dignity. It’s important and great to recognize the value of the people around us; and it’s just as important to protect that sense of appreciation for the people around us. Our principles are not beliefs so much as action statements.
Some of us may be thinking that none of this is really new. That we all know that racism and prejudice and discrimination are bad. And yet it still continues, so I feel we need to regularly have a reminder. I’m not convinced that we always speak up, nor am I convinced that everyone in our religious and social circles are always enlightened on this matter. I get a glimpse of it from time to time because I frequently get confused with someone who is of a Jewish background. I’m actually of a mixed background, each grandparent coming from a different European country. I have a lot of immigrants in my family tree. I was raised Italian Catholic, and for those of you who also were, you know exactly what I mean when I say Italian Catholic. It’s a cultural identity that means a lot to me with all its humor and strength. And I’m not Jewish, but I’m told I look it.
I mentioned that I get a glimpse of discrimination from time to time. I can most easily tell when someone’s mistaking me for Jewish when the person becomes oddly mean, or dismissive, or patronizing (a big word for talking down to me.) Sometimes they’ll make an explicit reference to me being Jewish. I’ve honestly not experienced this at our congregation, but I have run into it at other UU congregations that have fewer Jewish congregants, and I do encounter it from time to time in stores in NYC. When other folks are present, no one ever says anything. No one ever speaks up. I try to focus more on changing their habits, or calling them out on it, than I try to change their assumption that I’m Jewish. It’s an opportunity not to avoid their discrimination, but rather to correct it.
One interesting thing I’ve come to learn about our first principle is that it doesn’t try to say we’re all the same; it reminds us that we all have value – that where we come from matters and is worthy. It is correct to say that we’re all human, but I think it’s a mistake to hide or cover up our differences. Just like I strongly value my Italian cultural household (yep, mom won out on that front), our First principle suggests we value the different backgrounds we all come from. We shouldn’t discriminate because of how someone looks, or where they come from, but we should learn from the identity and culture our neighbors grew out of. Ignoring the strengths that come from our differences is another way of the Queen ignoring the honey she dropped. Without stretching the metaphor too far, something is lost when we let that nourishment go to waste as well.
All these things that might seem to some people as small things (the change on the counter or the hand, the disparaging comment, ignoring who someone is,) can really add up to bigger problems. All these stories when looked at broadly paint a picture of a world where folks are treated unfairly based on characteristics we choose to dislike for no good reason. I believe that these drops of “messy honey” from the “unconcerned Queen” from our story, can add up to fighting and a burning kingdom. It’s up to each of us to clean it up in the moment; to not let a bad thing spread.

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/20/not-my-problem/feed/ 0 If You Meet the Buddha on the Road http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/13/if-you-meet-the-buddha-on-the-road/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/13/if-you-meet-the-buddha-on-the-road/#comments Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:07:27 +0000 Rev. Patrick ONeill http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1224 At the time of the account, 2,500 years ago, it was excitedly whispered from town to town across the Ganges Plain of India when the Buddha was coming. It was considered a marvel to see an Awakened One and hear his teachings.
“More marvelous,” writes one scholar (Jack Kornfield), “his ancient and wise understanding has lasted and is still with us. We now have the teachings of the Buddha translated into nearly every language, and in the past generation they have spread throughout the world. Today there are hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns, and hundreds of millions follow this path of awakening. The teachings of compassion and generosity, of quieting the mind and opening the heart are as relevant today as they were in the community around the Buddha…. They illuminate the universal questions of human suffering and find our own Buddha nature in response.” (Jack Kornfield in Before He Was the Buddha: The Life of Siddhartha, by Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Seastone Press, Berkeley, 1998.)
His story, such as we know it and such as scholars have pieced together from ancient writings and from the legend of the centuries, is that one night toward the end of the sixth century before the birth of Christ, a young man called Siddartha Gotama walked out of his comfortable home in the foothills of the Himalayas and took to the road. We are told he was twenty-nine years old, though we have absolutely no historical basis for any of the facts of his life. He lived and died a full century before any writing of his life was recorded. And as with the legend of so many other holy men and prophets in history, his life story is embedded with legend and tales of miraculous happenings meant to illustrate his unique standing as a human incarnation of divine enlightenment.
At the time of his birth, holy men and seers were said to recognize this baby as the “perfect one, the greatest human being ever born.” As a child growing up, his complexion was said to “shine as golden metal, his eyes a radiant blue, his intelligence and athletic ability causing him to stand out above all other children.” His mother died while Gotama was still an infant, and his father, shaken by the prophecies of the seers concerning his gifted son, protected the boy throughout his growing years, keeping him confined within the idyllic setting of his palace, where the child would never be touched by the harsh realities of the outer world. So long as he was innocent of knowing about the real world, Gotama was content to live the life his father had chosen for him. He married a princess who had been chosen for him, and they had a young son.
But eventually there came the day when, restless, the young prince ventured forth from the palace and saw four sights that forever changed his consciousness. He saw for the first time the realities of old age, sickness, death, and enlightenment – the first three being the universal and inescapable lot of all living creatures, and the fourth condition, enlightenment, being a vision of human possibility that was attainable by all those who were willing to pursue it through practice and discipline.
Gotama left his wife and a son only a few days old, and renouncing all his worldly goods and possessions, and donning the yellow robes of a monk, he took up the life of an itinerant ascetic. Dependent on the alms and charity of others, he would wander the countryside as a teacher and holy man. For the first six years of his wandering, Gotama engaged the rigorous practices of extreme fasting and meditation to a point where he nearly died. And finally came the day, when sitting under the Bodhi tree and facing the East, Gotama began the great seven-day trance from which he was said to emerge as a Fully Enlightened One, a Buddha. He was thirty-five years old when he attracted his first followers. His ministry as a teacher would last more than forty years.
Princeton scholar Karen Armstrong, who published a wonderful study of Buddha’s life (Buddha. Viking Penguin Books, New York 2001) explains how Buddhism emerged during an amazing historical era called the “Axial Age,” which extended from about 800 to 200 years before Christ. During this period of time, for whatever reasons, she writes, “an impressive array of prophetic and philosophical geniuses” addressed the human condition and offered unique insights that changed the course of history and have continued down to our time. “Gotama would become one of the most important and most typical of the luminaries of the Axial Age, alongside the great Hebrew prophets of the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries; Confucius and Lao Tzu, who reformed the religious traditions of China in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the sixth-century Iranian sage Zoroaster; and Socrates and Plato in the third century BC, who urged the Greeks to question even those truths that appeared to be self-evident.” (Armstrong, p.11)
“The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we know it,” says Karen Armstrong. “During this period,” she says, “men and women became conscious of their existence, their nature, and their limitations in an unprecedented way. Their experience of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest goals and an absolute reality in the depths of their being. The great sages of the time taught human beings how to cope with the misery of life, transcend their weakness and live in peace in the midst of this flawed world. The new religious systems that emerged during this period – Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in Iran and the Middle East, and Greek rationalism in Europe – all shared fundamental characteristics beneath their obvious differences.
Thus, during this one era spanning only a few centuries, the Chinese, Iranians, Indians, Jews, and Greeks all experienced new religious horizons and embarked on a quest for enlightenment and salvation. It was a general movement forward from the ancient age of magical religion to an age of ethical religion. “In the Axial countries,” Karen Armstrong says, “a few great teachers sensed fresh possibilities and broke away from the old traditions. They sought change in the deepest reaches of their beings, looked for greater inwardness in their spiritual lives, and tried to become one with a reality that transcended normal mundane conditions and categories.” (Armstrong, p.12)
The basis of the Buddha’s philosophy is the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth is that life is full of suffering because of illness, aging, discontent, and the awareness of death. Second, the cause of this suffering is desire, or attachment to the world in such a way as to become liable to suffering – i.e. desire for sensual pleasure, desire to go on living, etc. Buddha’s Third Noble Truth is that therefore, the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate desire. The Fourth Noble Truth reveals the way to achieve this removal of desire: Buddha called it the Middle Path.
The Middle Path, Buddha explained, is the avoidance of the two extremes of self-indulgence on the one hand, and self-mortification on the other. The Middle Path is an eight-fold path of Right Understanding – seeing life as it is, Right Thought – a pure mind, Right Speech – speaking in a truthful, kindly, tolerant manner; Right Action – charity and kindness in all things; Right Livelihood – earning your living in a way that does not conflict with the conduct of your life; Right Effort – fostering noble qualities of generosity, wisdom, and patience; Right Mindfulness – developing awareness of what is highest and most important; and Right Concentration – the practice of meditation that leads to a full understanding of the impermanence of things. This meditation requires discipline and training.
The Buddha taught very clearly that this eight-fold path, the great Middle Path, was available and attainable for all who would practice it. It is the practice, the journey itself and not the destination, that is the heart of his teaching. It is in the practice of the Middle Path that individuals attain the fullness of being, the state of Awakeness or “Buddhahood” that frees the human personality from being mired in suffering. The Buddha never professed belief in a great overarching Divinity and never preached the existence of the human soul. And therefore it is questionable whether Buddhism should properly be considered a religion in the formal sense at all. Nor is it strictly speaking an organized philosophy of life.
The Buddha abhorred such categories themselves as being diversions from the path to individual enlightenment. Nor did he ever claim for himself any status of divinity, just the opposite. He preached avoidance of any cult of personality, especially the kind of divinization that arose around such prophets as Jesus in Christianity. No authority, he taught, should be revered, however august. Buddhists must motivate themselves and rely on their own efforts, not on a charismatic leader. One ninth-century Zen Master went so far as to command his disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” to emphasize the importance of maintaining this independence from authority figures. Karen Armstrong says that “Gotama might not have approved of the violence of this statement, but throughout his life he fought against the cult of personality, and endlessly deflected the attention of his followers from himself. It was not his life and personality but his teaching that was important. He believed that he had woken up to a truth – a dharma – that was inscribed in the deepest structure of existence.
Buddhism, as one scholar puts it, is not for those who like to be told how to order their lives, who look constantly for guidance to an outside authority; whether in the form of priest, scripture, or ritual. Throughout the Buddha’s teaching, along with his insistence on balance and common sense, there is an implied obligation on each individual to think things for oneself, for each to make up his or her own mind and own moral decisions. We are each ultimately responsible for our own karma, our own salvation. I suppose this the reason Buddhist teachings have a fair amount of appeal to Unitarian Universalist sensibility. Many UU’s have found in Buddhist practice and meditation a method of access to the inner life that honors their individuality and encourages their search for inner peace and meaning. It is a rich pathway for the sincere searcher. A pathway worthy of your exploration.

An Introductory Bibliography on Buddhism and Buddhist Practice
By Patrick T. O’Neill

Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. Lipper/Viking/Penguin. New York. 2001. The definitive biographical treatment of Buddha by a Princeton scholar.
Batchelor, Stephen. Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. Riverhead Books, New York. 1997.
Epstein, Mark. Going On Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change. Broadway Books, New York. 2001. The interaction of Buddhism and psychotherapy.
Kornfield, Jack ed. Teachings of the Buddha. Barnes and Noble Books, New York. 1993. See other titles by Buddhist monk and teacher Jack Kornfield.
McCleod, Ken. Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. (A good introduction to Buddhist practice.)
Mizuno, Kogen. Basic Buddhist Concepts. Kosei Publishing paperback,
Tokyo, 1999
Pauling, Chris. Introducing Buddhism. Windhorse Publications paperback, Birmingham, England. 1999 edition.
The Pocket Buddha Reader edited by Anne Bancroft. Shambala Press, Boston, 2001. Contains texts from Pali Canon of Buddha’s writings.
Ruhala, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. Grove Press paperback, New York, 1974.
Saddhatissa, Hammalawa. Before He Was Buddha: The Life of Siddartha. Seastone Press paperback, Berkeley, CA. 2000.
Thich Nhat Hahn. Living Buddha, Living Christ. Riverhead Books paperback, New York1995. (See also many other titles by Thich Nhat Hahn on Buddhism.)
Willis, Jan. Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman’s Spiritual Journey. Riverhead Books, New York, 2001. (An African-American woman’s Tibetan Buddhist journey by a professor of religion at Wesleyan University. Interesting!)

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/13/if-you-meet-the-buddha-on-the-road/feed/ 0 In Between Memory and Hope http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/06/in-between-memory-and-hope/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/06/in-between-memory-and-hope/#comments Sun, 06 Feb 2011 18:10:11 +0000 Rev. Patrick ONeill http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1221 This morning, as we do every Sunday morning at the beginning of our worship service, we lit three candles. The Candle of Memory, the Candle of Hope, and the Candle of our Flaming Chalice. In our beloved community of faith that now extends back one hundred and seventy-nine years here in Brooklyn, we hold dear the heritage of the generations that precede us in these pews. And we take seriously the legacy of Free Faith that we in turn pass along to those who will come after us.
Somewhere here – in between Memory and Hope, you might say – you and I together represent the present reality of First Unitarian. By that I mean that whatever this congregation has been in years past, in generations past, whatever fine people have lived here before us, whatever good folks have occupied these pews and this pulpit in years gone by, we here today – you and I – are the only First Unitarian congregation that exists today. However wonderful the memories that live in this place and which comprise our legacy as a congregation, it is now completely in our hands- yours and mine – to have and to hold. We are Unitarian Universalism in Brooklyn, precious as it might be, fragile and imperfect as it might be as a faith and as a community, whatever we dream of this faith becoming for our children and for all those who will follow us here, we are the temporary keepers of this small albeit proud legacy. That’s what the Candle of Memory is lit to remind us every Sunday.
And the Candle of Hope is our symbol of the responsibility that the current members of this congregation feel towards all those who are only now or yet to find here a community where their personal faith can someday blossom. The Candle of Hope is to remind us every week that you and I are placeholders for some wonderful people that we have yet to meet, but who are all the future leaders and members who will inherit this church from us. Do you ever think of it that way? I do. I love the notion that right now there are a couple of young parents somewhere near here, with one or two pre-schoolers to raise, who are looking for just this kind of church for their family, and some Sunday soon they’re going walk in here on a Sunday morning not knowing what to expect, and they’re going to find here a church they love, that will become part of their family life for the next twenty years. I love that idea.
I love the notion that maybe next Sunday or the Sunday after, or maybe even today, someone is going to come to worship here who is a future President of the Board of this church. They don’t know it yet, but coming to worship here may turn out to be one of their most life-changing decisions they ever make. They may not even believe that a church like this exists anywhere – a church where their freedom to believe, and their freedom to think religiously for themselves, where their freedom to doubt and to question and to explore religious ideas for themselves is honored and encouraged; a church where their children will be taught tolerance and respect for other traditions; a church where individual difference is expected not merely tolerated; a church that holds we need not think alike to love alike. I love the notion that the newcomer you welcome to church this morning or next Sunday might walk in these doors feeling like an exile or a orphan from the tradition in which they were raised, and they just may be overwhelmed to discover that we’ve been keeping a space just for them, because so many of us here today know exactly how they feel because for so many of us here their story is our story too.
The young professionals who have just moved to New York and are trying to establish themselves in a city far from their family home and their friends, and who come to church of a Sunday morning looking for something like community, something like grounding, something to touch their spirit a little.
The Gay or Lesbian couple that has become wary of churches where they have felt isolated for so long, and who have heard somewhere from someone that the Unitarian Universalists really seem to mean it when they talk about “standing on the side of love,” for everyone, and they walk in our doors still a little skeptical because their church experience to date hasn’t exactly filled them with trust. I love the notion that First Unitarian has been getting ready for one hundred and seventy-eight years to welcome them into this room and into this fellowship of free faith.
I love that the congregation calls both these notions of the beloved Community of Memory and the Community of Hope to mind every Sunday in our worship. It means, of course, that we are mindful of the place where we reside in the history of the congregation. We live here, in between Memory and Hope. We live here, in the Present, you and I.
This is a wonderful place. But I would remind us that it isn’t so much what we find here on Sunday, as what we bring here every day of the week that makes this place special. Surely, I don’t need to tell you that First Unitarian will continue to be a vibrant community only as long as we here in the present are willing to contribute our gifts and resources to help it thrive.
This is the Sunday of the year – the one Sunday of the year, to be precise – when we ask each of you to consider making a financial commitment of support to the church for the coming year. It’s a fairly straightforward proposition we bring to you this morning, and one which we certainly want to present to you in a straightforward and no-nonsense kind of way. This church is completely self-sustaining, dependent entirely on the contributions of its members and friends for its existence and its programs. What this church is able to do and be in the coming year is largely shaped by, and limited only by, the funding and gifts we each contribute.
If First Unitarian is important to you or to your family, if you think Brooklyn is a better place to live for what this congregation means to the community and stands for in this community – if you think what this congregation offers to the education of its children is valuable – if you think what this church offers to senior citizens and elders in the way of community and education and caring in times of crisis –
if you feel that the quality of pastoral care provided in this church is worthwhile – if you are enriched and nourished and challenged by the weekly worship life of this church – if ever you have had your afflictions comforted here and your comforts afflicted here – if you appreciate the aesthetic beauty and quality of the music programs of this church – if you enjoy the social life of this circle of friends – then you have more than enough reason to support this church generously and gladly.
And if you feel, as I do, that there is so much more that we can do and create together in the coming years, then you understand why I do not hesitate to ask you to make every effort to increase your support over last year’s gift.
The energy level and the activity level in the church is high. Our average attendance is higher than it’s ever been. So the signs of life are good for our congregation. But it is also true that we’ve been hit hard by the economic setbacks of the past couple of years. Our endowment was severely impacted, and you know that we’ve had to pare our operating budget to the bone, and still we face another round of budget reduction and possible staff reductions yet again this year. And this is in spite of the fact that our level of annual pledges has gone up both years. But we are paying for endowment problems going back years. And so we must come back to you to help see us through a difficult year ahead.
I say to you in all sincerity, if your financial pledge to the church has been level for a couple of years now, and that is best you can do for your congregation, I thank you most sincerely. We have no church without you. But I tell you this in all honesty: to the extent that you can see your way to increasing your personal pledge this year, it would be a very effective and symbolic year for you to do so.
Here is what we know, this house of Memory and Hope is a gift from those common people who love it and who work for it and who support it as they are able. It is the love of its congregation that ultimately sanctifies any church or temple or meetinghouse and makes of it a sanctuary, a holy place, a place which transcends time.
First Unitarian, finally, is nothing more than its people and what we all of us bring to it: our faith, our vision, our collective hopes and dreams, our memories and our customs, our history, our prayers, our good works, and our values. And what community we are able to create here for ourselves is always pieced together with painstaking love and unending patience, each one of us adding our gifts to the whole.
Thank you for the gifts you continue to bring here!

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/02/06/in-between-memory-and-hope/feed/ 0 Emerson’s Refulgent Religion http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/30/emerson%e2%80%99s-refulgent-religion/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/30/emerson%e2%80%99s-refulgent-religion/#comments Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:29:37 +0000 Rev. Patrick ONeill http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1199 Occasionally, I like to highlight from the pulpit some of the great figures and leaders from Unitarian Universalist history who by their ministry or by their writing or by their individual examples and witness helped to shape our liberal faith and bring it where it is today. This morning I want to tell about one of the true giants of American Unitarian thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Bard of Concord.”
It would be difficult indeed to overstate the importance of Emerson’s place in the history of Unitarianism.
“In a religious association distinguished by so many prominent leaders, thinkers and reformers in American history, Emerson’s legacy to Unitarian Universalism is unparalleled. Even today, two hundred years after his birth, Emerson is the most widely recognized and revered figure in our movement and continues to attract many to our congregations.
Through his career as minister, lecturer, writer, reformer and public citizen, Emerson was instrumental in shaping both American culture and Unitarian Universalist theology.” (Emerson Bicentennial Committee, 2003)
One biographer, Frank Schulman, says of Emerson that
“He made everyone feel taller. A washer woman who always attended his lectures at Faneuil Hall was asked by a reporter if she understood Mr. Emerson’s elegant prose. ‘Not a word.’ She replied. ‘But I love to see him standing up there thinking everyone else is just as good as he is. He makes us feel at home with greatness, does Mr. Emerson.’”
Emerson’s moment as the dominant Unitarian thinker of his day arrived as he rose to deliver what came to be known as the Divinity School Address of 1838.
“In this refulgent summer,” it begins, “it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers.”
With these lovely words, flowing in the sometimes purple prose of nineteenth century New England, one of the undisputed masters of the language, Ralph Waldo Emerson, began one of the most important sermons in the history of American Unitarianism.
These words were delivered in the tiny chapel of Divinity Hall at Harvard College in Cambridge. The chapel seated scarcely more than three score of people, and on that particular day, Sunday afternoon, July 15th, 1838, the chapel was filled to overflowing. The occasion was the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, and besides the six graduating student ministers, there was present that day a virtual Who’s Who of American Unitarianism in New England.
The entire faculty of the Divinity School was there, of course: all of them Unitarians, the intellectual flower of American liberal Protestantism. Henry Ware, Jr. was there, who held the Chair in New Testament Studies. Andrews Norton was there, Dexter Professor Emeritus of Sacred Literature at Harvard, who had been a central character in the Unitarian revolution at the Divinity School in the 1820′s. The Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston was there, only two years out of Harvard himself, and not yet become the most famous Unitarian preacher in the country.
Elizabeth Peabody of Concord was there, too. She was one of the most prominent educators in New England, an early leader of the kindergarten movement in this country; she was also a writer and publisher of Dial magazine, the voice of the Transcendentalist Movement. She was a family friend of Emerson, and personal secretary for many years to William Ellery Channing, the Father of American Unitarianism. Edward Everett Hale and his sister Sarah of Worcester arrived late to the ceremony, and had to take chairs out in the hallway of the chapel. Mr. Hale would later write that he was appalled by what Emerson said that day.
As we sit here in a Unitarian Universalist church in Brooklyn one hundred and seventy-three years later, it may be a bit difficult for us to appreciate fully what that kind of occasion meant, in general, to the budding Unitarian movement of the day, and what this particular sermon would eventually signal and symbolize for the development of our liberal brand of religion. In fact, our Unitarian congregation here in Brooklyn was only five years established when Emerson gave the Divinity School Address, and this congregation and its minister at the time was much too conservative to have approved of Emerson’s words that day. Ours was still in practice one of the old-school Channing Christian Unitarian churches, and Emerson was in the beginning of his career as an evangelist of Transcendentalism, a school of religious thought that would eventually revolutionize the entire Unitarian denomination, including our congregation here. But in 1838, that was a revolution not yet arrived.
I smile to think that Plymouth Church just a few blocks away from here proudly displays a plaque commemorating the occasion when Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke from their pulpit. Ironically, our own pulpit would never invite Emerson to speak here, so radically was he regarded by Brooklyn Unitarians of his day.
Today, of course, there are over 1100 Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America with upwards of 200,000 members. There are more than 1200 ordained Unitarian Universalist ministers today, and some 500 ministry students in training this year.
But as that small group of people gathered in Divinity Hall at Harvard that summer day in 1838, the American Unitarian Association was only thirteen years old. There were at that time fewer than two hundred Unitarian ministers in the entire country, virtually all of them within a day’s horseride from Harvard Divinity School, which was then the only Unitarian seminary in America. So the occasion of six young men graduating and entering their ministerial careers was a vitally important event for which the elders and leaders of the movement turned out in force.
The graduating members of the Divinity Class of 1838 had asked the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord to deliver the Address to the Graduates. He was a natural choice, the kind of speaker that any graduating class loves to pick. Emerson was already widely known as a brilliant and mesmerizing orator, colorful in language, gifted in the use of imagery and metaphor.
But even more interesting to the graduating class, Mr. Emerson was known to be something of a theological radical, even by Unitarian standards. They expected that he would have something provocative and stirring to say to the assembled high company. Yet, few could have guessed that Emerson’s words that day would literally drive a wedge into the fledgling Unitarian movement and change unalterably the course of Unitarianism forever after.
Ralph Waldo Emerson himself had graduated from Harvard College in 1821 and from the Divinity School in 1826. He accepted a call to the pulpit of Second Church of Boston in 1829, where he served as pastor for a little over two years before he resigned. For the next six years, from 1832 to 1838, Emerson made his living as a supply preacher at various Unitarian churches around Massachusetts, and more and more turned his attention to the lecture platform and to the writing of essays which were widely published and praised.
And although his lecturing career was blossoming, the truth is Emerson was greatly torn over his decision to move away from his calling of ministry. His father, his grandfather, and his wife’s father were all ministers, and from the beginning Emerson seemed to have a love/hate affair with the profession. One of his friends remarked that Emerson loved the idea of ministry, while he hated having to practice it in real life.
It was the pastoral demands of ministry, and the expectations of endless parish calling typical of Emerson’s day that eventually drove him out of ministry. He had become restive and critical of his profession even before he resigned from Second Church. He felt inauthentic and hypocritical distributing communion in his church, knowing that its symbolism meant something much more to his people than he himself could believe. It was easier for his ego to blame the profession and the institutional church for shortcomings than it was for him to accept his own inability to be happy in the ministry.
In truth, what Emerson loved most about ministry was preaching, and he was an extremely harsh critic of colleagues who were not gifted in the pulpit. He wrote in his journal, “…the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts enduring it than at other times.” Returning from one particularly poor pulpit performance by the pastor at First Parish in Concord one Sunday, he wrote in his journal the now-famous line, “I like the silent church before the service begins more than I like any preaching.”
It is hardly surprising then that Emerson would have some strong things to say to the graduating ministers about the kind of preaching then prevalent in the Unitarian pulpits of New England. He told the graduates that day that “historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching, that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country, that it comes out of books and not out of the soul, that it aims at what is usual and not at what is necessary and eternal.” It was the doctrinal gauntlet that Emerson threw down in the next section of his Address that most disturbed them.
Up to this point in the development of American Unitarianism, the movement had been absolutely identified strictly within the confines of traditional Christianity. With the exception of the doctrine of the Trinity, which most New England Unitarians were only tangentially vague about (like most all other Christians, incidentally, who really don’t begin to understand this mysterious doctrine either) the Unitarians of the day were hardly very radical theologically. Jesus Christ was accepted in most Unitarian churches as the one true Son of God, the divinely appointed Savior of humankind. And while the Unitarians certainly valued reasoned approach to interpreting the Scriptures, the older generation of Unitarians did accept the miracle stories of the New Testament as a sign of Jesus’ divinity.
By 1838, however, a newer, well-educated, and more theologically adventuresome generation of Unitarians was ready to challenge the miracle stories of the New Testament as being unprovable and unnecessary interpretations of Jesus’ life. Furthermore, this new generation of Unitarians did not accept Jesus as necessarily divine, but rather as a prophet of the divine, a model of moral perfection – perhaps the greatest model of selfless love in history – but no more than a model. And moreover, they claimed that God’s revelation of moral principle to humanity did not end with the Bible. It continued in the life of every living creature, in the mind of every thinking person, in the sentiments and conscience of every living human soul.
If these do not sound to us to be very radical propositions (that Jesus is but one model of moral perfection, that revelation did not end with the Bible, and that the natural human conscience is capable of moral decision unaided by divine rule) be assured they were radical indeed in 1838. And every one of these points was in fact hammered home by Emerson in the Divinity School Address.
Most of the young divinity students who heard him that day were enthralled, and most of the faculty and parish ministers present correctly understood that Emerson was giving eloquent voice to a new and powerful doctrine that would take American Unitarianism beyond the boundaries of mere liberal Christianity.
Unitarianism, as Emerson enunciated it that day, called for a religious vision and a religious understanding that included more than just the Christian view. Among those present in that elite and sophisticated Cambridge audience that day were a number who would eventually lead the Transcendentalist Movement of the 1840′s, and that movement forever implanted a Trans-Christian, Universalist, non-creedal, free-thinking tenor to Unitarianism.
In the year following the Divinity School Address, a storm of controversy broke between the old-line Christian Unitarians of Channing’s generation and the New Age Unitarians who looked to Emerson and Parker as their poets and theological champions.
The Transcendentalist circle of Emerson, Parker, Fuller, et al. found truth and wisdom in other traditions besides Christianity, and claimed place for them in our Unitarian reverence. For the first time, our theology reached out to embrace the concept of religious truth found in many places, in many cultures, in many styles.
Unitarian theology began to expand from a strictly Christian base to a more eclectic and inclusive theology in the rich climate of scholarly Boston in the 1830’s, with the flowering of the new Biblical linguistic analysis of the day, and the opening up to Eastern mystical traditions and languages, the poetry of the Upanishads, the meditation disciplines of Hinduism, the publishing of Koranic and Tibetan sacred texts for the first time in America.
It shocked orthodoxy when Unitarians first did this. It still shocks some that we would look anywhere beyond the boundaries of Judeo-Christian tradition and Scripture for inspiration and truth. Historically, Unitarianism did not see itself as rejecting Christian tradition by honoring other theologies. It saw itself as a Trans-Christian tradition, including a reverence for our Christian roots and reaching beyond that to be nurtured and enlightened by the truths of other great faiths, as well.
Interestingly enough, the Divinity School Address marks the end of Emerson’s active personal involvement in the Unitarian movement itself, though his influence would be felt in Unitarian churches for decades.
But the Divinity School Address itself seemed to resolve something for Emerson, and his vocational crisis was finally decided. He gave up preaching formally, and he eventually even resigned his membership in the First Parish in Concord (probably because he just couldn’t stand the sermons anymore) although his wife and children remained faithful Unitarians for their lifetimes, and he continued to pay his church pledge even after he resigned. When he was in the very final years of his life, he did attend church again. He died in Concord in 1882.
Eventually, the Transcendentalist movement, with its mystic and intuitional elements, was itself later replaced in Unitarian outlook by the ascendance of a scientific and critical attitude. But by challenging the Christian orthodoxy of its day, the Transcendentalist movement and its great prime mover, Ralph Waldo Emerson, made this forever after the church of the open mind and the open heart.
When I was a divinity student in preaching class, a friend of mine memorized much of the Divinity School Address for recital in class. However, he misspoke Emerson’s opening sentence in this interesting Freudian way: he said, “In this refulgent religion, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” May ours be ever a religion that is indeed “refulgent”: the word means “blooming, open, full of life.” That is a prayer that Ralph Waldo Emerson would have prayed with gusto.
So be it.

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/30/emerson%e2%80%99s-refulgent-religion/feed/ 0 The Differences That Unite Us http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/23/the-differences-that-unite-us/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/23/the-differences-that-unite-us/#comments Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:10:52 +0000 Rev. Patrick ONeill http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1194 If you grew up in any kind of organized religious community – whether a church or synagogue, mosque or meetinghouse, makes no difference – sooner or later at some point along the way you probably heard your pastor or Sunday school teacher explain the etymology of the word “religion.”
As you may recall, it comes from the Latin word, “religio,” meaning a “tie” or a “binding.” The religious impulse, at its root, refers to a sense of our being bound together, connected, conjoined in a circle of community, a circle of mutual support and love.
It is a positive sense of feeling joined in community, In harsher times and places in history, say, in Colonial America for example, or on the frontier prairies where survival against climate and starvation was dependent on being part of a reliably bound community – to help bring in the harvest or protect against the extremes of nature, – that was a comforting notion. Thus in the words of the old hymns, “Blessed be the ties that bind…” and “Bringing in the Sheaves” – the wheat tied in bundles for harvest.
Unfortunately, all too often in history we have seen organized religion forget the full context of the word’s etymology. And hence, too many churches have forgotten the positive notion of religion as providing a sense of connectedness of the whole human family, and emphasize instead the more constrictive negative notion of “binding” their small circles of believers, – tying them off, literally, – against all non-believers and everyone else outside of their closed off circles.
And so, religion, which at its best ought to invite us to an inclusive and unifying celebration of human connectedness and commonality, too often becomes instead a divisive, exclusionary, and partial distortion of the sacred.
It’s easy to see how it happens. We human beings are quick to notice and articulate all the differences that distinguish “me” from “thee,” “us” from “them,” “our people here” from “those people over there,” “this tribe” from “that tribe,” “the saved from the unsaved.” It was precisely to make these distinctions and define who the “true Believers” are from the “non-Believers” that formal Creeds were invented.
And once that practice was established, once Christian churches, beginning at the Council of Nicaea in 325, decided that membership in the Christian faith could be determined by a willingness to conform oneself to the exact wording of doctrine, that was the moment when the Christian faith turned from appealing to the universal bonds of love to the narrower ties of exclusionary faith.
Paul wrote, “Faith, Hope, and Love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is Love.” The greatest of these is Love, not the specifics of faith, not doctrine, not the recitation of a fixed Creed. Paul had it right for once. He missed a lot, but this one he nailed, he got it.
But the Church beginning in the fourth century took a different path, a political path, an exclusionary path. Emphasizing Faith over Love. Choosing the parochial over the universal. Establishing Theology over practice, structure over community, obedience over freedom as the foundational values of the organized church.
What is too often overlooked in church history is the fact that the whole notion of the Christian Church changed profoundly and permanently with that historical moment when the fourth century church leaders froze church doctrine in the wording of the Creed. The enforcement of that rule of membership in the church made possible everything that followed.
It made the church a political institution, a hierarchical power institution, changed it from being a suffering church to being the persecuting theocracy of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, a trior of heretics, a militant church embattling the Crusades and later setting Catholic against Protestant, and Christian against any other religion, none more so than the very Judaism which Jesus himself practiced and from which the Scriptures sprang.
The legacy of that chosen pathway, the brainchild of St. Augustine in the fourth century, is that churches in the West forever after have been defined through the requirement of conformity of belief, not affinity of spirit and quality of loving practice. No one was ever burned at a stake for not having enough Love. But millions died down through history for refusing to accept proper doctrine, or for refusing the bow in obedience before ecclesiastical courts for articles of belief that defied rationality or which contradicted reason.
The old world is used to focusing on the negative spaces between people. New forms of religion, new frameworks are needed if religion is to be an agency of hope in this modern, more dangerously flammable world of ours today, if it is to be any kind of redeeming force, literally, then churches and synagogues, the mosques and meetinghouses all need to refocus their vision and get their eyes back on the prize.
Medieval religious structures of hierarchy will simply not serve in this age. Religion should be about preaching service, not separation. It should be about making peace between nations, and calling the nations and cultures to connection, not blessing wars or condoning policies that make war inevitable.
Let me tell you what I love most and value most about the Unitarian Universalist church more than anything else: it says something that I have never heard in any other church. It says that what you are and how you act and how you love other beings and treat the planet we share is more important than any common definitions of faith we might ever invent together.
It says how and what you love is more important than your belief in any definition of god or any savior in history. It says that this church is not threatened by your agnosticism or your questions of faith or your heretical tendencies to distrust organized religions. It says it is not threatened by your religious imagination.
Unitarian Universalism is not a collection of tenets or articles of belief that can be memorized and digested and produced on demand. And this is a serious frustration to many people who think that religion must be so defined. We say something different. And if perchance this Sunday happens to be your one and only visit ever to a UU church, I hope this is the one thing you come to understand about us.
We say that a church is a community wherein people are empowered to live and grow and develop as spiritual individuals. This kind of church can never be a passive activity; it is a participative process. In our tradition, one’s faith is not an inherited gift that can be handed down to anyone. One’s faith is the product of one’s own journey. It is fashioned out of the sum and substance of our living. One’s faith is a combination of all the values that we have learned in our lives, all that we have experienced; all that we have celebrated, suffered, enjoyed, or endured.
Our Unitarian Universalist church takes a different approach to religion, and indeed, to the whole theological enterprise. It is an approach that values connection over conformity; diversity over division; reasoned ethics over blind doctrine.
We simply do not ask those who would join our church “What do you believe?” We know there is a much more important question for us all to engage on our journey, the root question upon which any personal theology (or church community) must be based. We ask of those who would walk with us, “What do you love?”
You can spend as much time as you care to distinguishing the fine points of theological difference that divide Christian from Humanist, Unitarian Universalist from Catholic, from Episcopalian, from Methodist, from Jew, from Hindu, from Moslem. But as long as you focus on what divides those great traditions, you will miss what it is that makes them all – at their best – pathways of the sacred. Truthfully, this is a church that does not presume to define for the rest of humanity such sacred notions as God, divinity, faith, church, truth, love, goodness, ethics, mystery. It is a church where theist and non-theist sit side-by-side, because they know they do not need to agree on all these things, and they are comfortable in the knowledge that what unites people is not conformity of belief.
We echo John Murray’s Universalist truth from the 18th century when we say, “We need not think alike to love alike.” What unites people, according to this radical tradition, is an affinity of spirit, mutual respect, a deep love for truth as each life uncovers and discovers truth in each person’s journey.
Making plain the fragmentary music of our dance of connectedness, it seems to me, is exactly what we come to church hoping to discover– our connectedness to one another in this room, our connectedness to our wider community, and beyond that, our fundamental connectedness to the entire circle of life on this fragile and fractured planet, and our connectedness to the grand mystery that is ever our source and our sustenance.
I call all of us this morning to that foundational faith that makes everything else we attempt possible, and without which nothing we do has lasting meaning or meaningful promise. I call us to a faith in that holy connectedness that joins us one to another; that faith – to use Mark Belletini’s wonderful Universalist image – that sees written “in every leaf a Torah, in the eye of every Robin a gospel, on every blade of grass a new Sutra, under every stone a word calling us to a serious peace” and to our rightful place in the divine order of things.
Amen.

]]> http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/23/the-differences-that-unite-us/feed/ 0 The Slow Slide Back http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/16/the-slow-slide-back/ http://www.fuub.org/home/2011/01/16/the-slow-slide-back/#comments Sun, 16 Jan 2011 19:28:34 +0000 Jude Geiger http://www.fuub.org/home/?p=1184 Nationally, this weekend we pause to honor the life, the accomplishments and the heroism of Martin Luther King, Jr. We learn about the man, the mission, and the vision. We remember his quest for racial desegregation, his promotion of peace in general, and his widespread expansion of non-violent protesting as a mark of active citizenship in the United States. We encourage civic volunteering as a nation this weekend; we also tend to take a day off from work tomorrow; and our schools will be closed. It wasn’t till 2000 that the holiday was observed in all fifty states. Interestingly, “[the holiday] is combined with Civil Rights Day in Arizona and New Hampshire, while it is observed together with Human Rights Day in Idaho. (…) It is also a day that is combined with Robert E. Lee’s birthday in some states.”[1] (Apparently Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and Mississippi.) …
… We honor his legacy now in ways that we never could honor his life; for when he was still living, we in the States at least, our collective national consciousness – used different ways to single him out. We used dogs, and we used fire hoses (most of us will remember that classic photo, and some of us in this room were there); and finally and tragically a gun. We pick a day, as good as any other, to remind ourselves that we’re not always our best selves when it comes to integrity of character; to remind us of the importance of compassion for our neighbor; and maybe to dream once more that there might be another way. We take a weekend each year to mark the truth that something great happened on this soil; something that grew from centuries of pain and suffering; something that was most notably brought into pinpoint clarity by this man. Something great that was an appropriate, and fitting, and remarkable and yet simply necessary response to the torpor our collective consciousness otherwise lied in at the time.
On this weekend, we thank you Mr. King for your dream; for your vision; for your sacrifice – even as we mourn and regret that such a sacrifice was apparently needed or allowed to occur. And we try to shake ourselves once more to realize that each one of us are the people left to pick up that mantle once more and still. May our hearts come to know a way to celebrate that goes beyond the ready ease of just another day off that otherwise might pass us by unremarkably.
With the closeness in timing of this national holiday to the recent shooting tragedy in Tuscon, Arizona, I can’t help but wonder about the slow slide back from non-violent protests of the Martin Luther King, Jr legacy we celebrate. I can’t help myself but to imagine the lines of intersection and difference between the two – not in the rationale of madmen, but in the effect they have had on our collective consciousness. I won’t take the time now to analyze the clinical facts and details, beyond reflecting that I am grateful the assassination attempt of Reps Giffords, has so far failed, while mourning the death of six people ranging from age 79 to 30 to 9. The youngest of which, Christina-Taylor Green, would have been 10 years old this coming September 11th. She had appeared in the book Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 (page 41).
This last detail in itself is so heartbreaking. A child who symbolizes hope in the face of tragedy is now forever lost to us. It makes it easy to imagine why pundits, and politicos, and preachers might wax eloquent in every direction possible. Desperate to make sense of the senseless; craving a need to point fingers elsewhere. Seizing an opportunity that might allow us to push forward some bit of legislation or another. Frantically, loudly, trying to return our collective consciousness back to a point of stability we’re familiar with; where we’re comfortable again. These days that looks like a few people, or a pair, neatly and quickly laying out opposing views as if the world were so simple we could define everything as either “Purple” or “Not Purple”; most notably articulated by former president George W. Bush in an address to a joint session of Congress on Sept 20, 2001. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” …He may have framed the next decade for us with those words.
All the voices clamor for our attention! ‘Better gun control laws would have stopped this assassin from buying a gun.’ (Forgetting that he had no prior record or tipped any criminal notice, so how could we have flagged him?.) Or we get Rush Limbaugh’s split-personality finger pointing. On one hand saying, “What Mr. Loughner (referring to the alleged gunman) knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He’s sitting there in jail. He knows what’s going on, he knows that…the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he’s just a victim….”[2] While on the other hand we can see photos of advertisements for Mr. Limbaugh where he calls himself a “straight shooter” amid a visual background of bullet holes. The giant-sized billboard remained up in Tucson, Arizona – sight of the shooting – until 9:30am Monday morning following the shooting.[3] (Both of the links to these news stories are on my Facebook page, and will be posted with the sermon on Tuesday to our website should you wish to see the photos for yourself.)
All the voices clamor for our attention! ‘Sarah Palin should be accountable for drawing bull’s eye’s over congressional districts’ (Realizing that while her language choices are regretful, shameful and violent in nature, I’d ask ourselves to consider how often we use references to violence in our quest for social justice – for example. “Fight for the rights of …”, “Shoot down legislature…”, “Silence the opposition…”, “Community organizers who are hired guns.”
Let’s be real here, although she’s misguidedly taken it to the extreme, the fact is most of us have bought into that way of speaking. You can turn on the news and listen for 5 minutes to any politician on either side of the aisle, and you will hear at least one violent phrase just about every time. PTA’s will get far more “up in arms” about sex education in the schools than most members will ever get about violence on TV, cartoons and the movies. Our rating system for movies, and the access we grant children, skews more heavily against acts of sex and love than it does toward shooting. At its core, the blame for this atrocity begins and ends with the perpetrator of the violent act. If collectively, however, we want to investigate a different question – one that asks how our broader consciousness affects the life and world around us, and we only speak up to criticize others, we’re probably missing the point of such an exercise.
Our reading this morning by Pema Chodron is very spiritually instructive here. “When the flag goes up, we have an opportunity: we can stay with our painful emotion instead of spinning out. Staying is how we get the hang of gently catching ourselves when we’re about to let resentment harden into blame, righteousness, or alienation. It’s also how we keep from smoothing things over by talking ourselves into a sense of relief or inspiration. This is easier said than done. Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don’t interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge…. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment – over and over again.”[4]
What a challenging instruction! How are we staying with our collective emotional pain and how are we seeking to relieve ourselves with the tools of blame and righteousness? I imagine these questions themselves are almost the answer. The knee-jerk quest for the solutions to the act of terror that I’ve spoken at length about; that the barrage of pundits has enumerated this week; that the Facebook proliferation of petition’s that we’ve “liked” and done little more about; and the posters, screenshots, and ad campaigns grassroots groups have crafted all speak well to the latter half of the question. We adeptly implement tools that help us to manage the sense of loss of control; to alleviate the fear of a spiraling society where the extremes have greater access to voice than the broader middle; and we rebuild our way of thinking that bolsters our sense of rightness and “their” sense of wrongness.
I’m unclear if this strategy changes anything. It does maintain the stasis that existed prior to the mass shooting in Arizona. Prior to January 8th, we lived in a polarized society. After the shooting of January 8th, our society remains polarized, despite all the talking points. And none of those lives will be returned to us for all the talking points, all the gesticulating and all the righteousness in the world. The call for finding the middle ground isn’t really an answer either. The mythic middle ground is yet simply another belief, another viewpoint, another position. Sure we could add a third pundit in any piece of entertainment media we would like, but I fear it would simply be a vaguely more sophisticated way of confusing us into thinking we’re being more open-minded, more productive, more sane. No, we’d just be giving space for a third kind of sound byte. Chodren’s “habitual momentum” would remain in force.
As Unitarian Universalists, we hold in tension a theology that gives space for two pressures. On one side we value dialogue, conversation, and communication. Beliefs and viewpoints are expressions of personal human experience. It’s one of our valued religious sources. On the other hand, we lift up the reality that beliefs are ephemeral. As a creedless faith, beliefs are not at the core of our spirituality. How do we hold that in tension? The goal of conversation is where our 5th and 3rd principles unite; namely the communion of the democratic process with the call toward spiritual acceptance of one another. The goal of dialogue is consensus building, not winning over the other side. I hear a lot of debate these days; I see a fair bit of finger pointing; but I witness very little consensus building. In this regard, our practical challenge is to refocus our assumptions about success to how well we’re able to generate consensus rather than how well we can win a 51-49 vote or a 60-40 filibuster break. Consensus building is what we teach our youth here, and it’s what we hope for with our congregational leadership process annually.
The spiritual challenge Pema Chodron calls us to, is a different matter. To remind us of her last words of advice from the reading, “…with practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge…. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment – over and over again.”[5] You know, we could easily ignore these words. We could say that we need practical solutions. But practical solutions won’t bring back the victims of assassinations. We could say we need to prevent these things from ever occurring again. That would be an ideal outcome, but as a goal, I imagine it would look a lot like a police state to secure if we were to try to achieve it through policies, laws and procedures. If we attempt that ideal outcome, however, through spiritual self-discipline, I feel we’d be spinning a few less wheels while getting a lot further along the way.
What does staying with a broken heart look like though? I’m not sure I could describe it directly, just like I couldn’t readily define love. But I can say that we find out what it would mean when we stop resorting to our everyday mini-escapes. When we resort to blaming, chastising, or herding the friends for a great batch of righteous gossip, we know we’ve utilized another one of our tools to escape. When we only listen to Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow – whichever one fits our personal preferences – we might be using an avoidance strategy. When we stop turning from the reality, and seek to be present to it – in its fullness – with the intention of self-transformation, we’re probably not using an avoidance tool. When we seek to change ourselves, in all our everydayness, we’re on the right path. In the big picture, the rest (the policies, the laws) may need to happen as well, but starting with ourselves will probably get us there faster – or may be the only way ever to even arrive. Real solutions, real transformation, happens most essentially, when the reasons for the change have become part of our nature. Rules and reactions can take us only so far. Character is the more helpful path, and that path is a very everyday one. That’s the business of the religious community and how it hopes to shape public discourse. Or in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr; “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. ~MLK, Strength to Love, 1963.” Friends, we’re at our best when we model these changes in our lives, and seek not to get caught up in the fevered noise that districts us from what our heart knows is true and right; compassion, moderation in speech and well-reasoned conviction. We can’t fix the world by succumbing to the same strategies that help to break our communities.
Our anthem this morning gets at the core of this message. Thanks to our soloist, Cameron Mitchell Bell, I now know that the song from the musical entitled Floyd Collings[6] “comes at the very end of the show where the lead character is speaking to God asking him all the questions we hear in the song before he finally accepts his death.” Our Music Director, Bill Peek, really picked an amazingly fitting piece this week for the message of the sermon. It culminates with the words, “Only heaven knows how glory goes, what each of us was meant to be. In the starlight, that is what we are. I can see so far…” We’re hearing the character’s struggle between knowing all the answers to what will come when we finally die. At the resolution, there’s a comfort that comes to us in not knowing. Only heaven knows how glory goes, what each of us was meant to be…. All the thinking in the world, all the beliefs we can craft, will not change this essential unknowing. What will happen to us? What is next? The character learns to see further when he comes to accept the lack of certitude alongside an increased awareness of where he is in this moment. In the starlight, that is what we are.
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[1] http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/martin-luther-king-day
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/11/rush-limbaugh-jared-loughner-full-support-democrat_n_807543.html
[3] http://gawker.com/5732700/rush-limbaughs-tucson-billboard-is-just-perfect
[4] “Comfortable with Uncertainty,” by Pema Chodron; Shambala, Boston and London. p. 7-8. 2003.
[5] “Comfortable with Uncertainty,” by Pema Chodron; Shambala, Boston and London. p. 7-8. 2003.
[6] from a musical by Adam Guettel entitled Floyd Collins:

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