I’ve just come from a ministers’ get-together where we all shared some of our favorite holiday stories with each other. It inspired me to share with you all a story I wrote for Christmas Eve, three years ago, inspired by Anatole France’s story “Our Lady’s Juggler” and Tomie dePaola’s “The Clown of God.” Happy holidays to all!

Many blessings,

Rev. Laura

***

Once upon a time, many a long year ago,
there lived a poor juggler named Urvakhsha,
which means “Joyful” in the language of the land where he lived,
the land of Persia, which now we call Iran.

This Urvakhsha was a wonderful juggler.
Every day he would go to the market
and perform for the crowds.
He juggled lovely brass balls that shone in the sun.
He juggled knives that glinted their sharpness
as they flew through the air.
The children stared and stared,
their eyes wide with excitement.

But this was a very difficult way to make a living.
Often Urvakhsha ended the day with only a few coins,
barely enough to feed himself.
Now, one day, as the winter was coming on,
a cousin of Urvakhsha’s walked by.
“Urvakhsha, my dear boy,” he said, “Are you still out here?
Listen, if you want the chance to be warm and well-fed this winter,
come and work with me in the stables of the kings.
There’s plenty to do and we could always use an extra hand.”

Urvakhsha thought.
He looked down at his coat full of holes.
His pockets were empty.
His stomach growled.
He said to his cousin, “Yes, I will come with you.
I have often wondered about the great palace of the kings”
(for ordinary people were not allowed to enter within its walls),
“though I will miss all my friends here in the market.”
And he went with his cousin,
carrying with him only the clothes on his back
and the bag that held his juggling balls and knives.

When they arrived at the palace,
the two cousins found the stables in an uproar.
A groom called out to them, “Hurry up and get back to work!
The kings have seen the star,
the great star they are pledged to follow.
We leave tonight!”

And so it was that Urvakhsha set out on the great journey of his life,
in the train of the three great kings
who followed a star across the desert.

For many days they traveled.
Many servants accompanied the kings,
and Urvakhsha was the lowest of the low.
Urvakhsha was kept very busy,
tending to the horses and camels of the caravan.
The stable-master was not unkind,
but Urvakhsha had much to learn in his new role.
Every day he reproached himself for being slower than the others,
and for being a little afraid, still, of the great beasts he cared for,
who were so much larger than himself,
and very proud, being in the service of the kings.

Now, the servants of the kings had their own campfires.
But sometimes, at night,
Urvakhsha crept close to the great fire
that burned outside the tent of the kings.
He watched the three kings sitting in talk with one another.
How beautiful they were,
with their robes of gold and rings of ruby, emerald,
precious stones of every kind.
But it was more than their dress—
the way they carried themselves was magnificent,
such poise and dignity and power—yes, these were kings indeed.

And their words!
Urvakhsha listened to them converse in low voices
about the stars and their movements and the secrets they contained.
They spoke of government and art and philosophy,
poetry, science, and prophecy.
Urvakhsha felt new worlds opening up before him as he listened.
He said to himself,
“I never knew there was such knowledge in the world.
I never knew people could think on such things
and speak of them together.”
He told himself, “I must be very stupid.
There is so much I do not know.”
And he hung his head for shame.
How quickly we seize on the learning of others, or their wealth,
and call it proof of our own failures!

For many days and many nights
the kings and their servants traveled through the desert.
And all that time the star burned bright above them.
At last, late one night, the caravan arrived in a little town.
The kings looked at the star, now burning more brightly than ever.
They looked at each other and read on one another’s faces
the same excitement that burned in their own hearts.
“We have arrived,” they proclaimed.

Now, there was only one inn in this little town,
and to this inn the three kings and all their train went
to seek lodging while they prepared to search for the child
throughout the town,
that child whose birth was witnessed by the star,
the child who would be king over all kings.

When they reached the inn,
Urvakhsha went to ready the stables for the kings’ horses.
Not for him was the inside of a respectable inn.
His place was in the stables, seeing to the animals,
and sleeping with them, too.
It had been a long journey; the night was growing cold,
and Urvakhsha looked forward to sleeping within the stable walls
instead of outside, as he had done for many days now.
When he got there, his heart sank, for the stable was very small,
and there were already people within—
a young girl, and a young man with her,
and the young girl held in her arms a tiny baby
crying and wailing as if he would never stop.

They smiled ruefully at Urvakhsha,
as if to apologize for the little baby’s cries.
And when Urvakhsha’s eyes met theirs, he smiled too,
and his heart leapt up for the first time in many days.
He might not know anything about philosophy and poetry,
he might not be very good with horses and camels,
but he knew how to make a baby laugh.
He reached inside his bag and pulled out the pretty brass balls
and began to juggle.

And, oh, what a sight it was!
When the baby saw the shining balls flying through the air,
his tears dissolved instantly into smiles and happy laughter.
Urvakhsha juggled and juggled—
now he grabbed his knives and flashed them into the air,
one-two-three, lightning fast.
The baby laughed and laughed,
Urvakhsha juggled and juggled,
no thought for anything but the flashing knives,
happy as he had not been for many days,
until finally, one-two-three,
he caught the knives and took a breathless bow.

Urvakhsha was never more astonished in all his life
when thunderous applause burst out all around him.
He whirled around to see the three kings
with all their entourage,
packed into the tiny courtyard,
craning their necks and clapping
for the juggler who had made the baby laugh with such joy.

The kings came forward
with their rare and precious gifts for the baby
as the star shone bright and brilliant overhead.
As they knelt before the little child, they said,
“Please accept these trifles as a token of our faith.”
And, turning to smile upon Urvakhsha, they added,
“The most precious gift of all
has already been given this night.”
Thus did Urvakhsha learn on a long-ago night
that no more and no less is asked of us
than to share our own best gifts with this world.

Amen and merry Christmas!

I’m a bit behindhand posting this sermon from last weekend…but I suppose that’s OK. Grateful for the retreat with colleagues that occupied my mind and heart most of the week. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Grateful Life, Joyful Life

I want to tell you a true story.
Picture an elderly lady, aged 91 and a half.
She’s got fantastic silver-white hair
and an expression that says,
“Don’t mess with me, babe, I’ve seen it all.”
This is Selma Baraz, a self-identified Jewish mother.
She is not shy about telling you
that Jewish mothers are born to complain!
“Actually,” she’ll tell you, “it’s called kvetching.”
All day, every day.
She’s spent her whole life reveling in how awful it all is.
“Either it’s too sunny, or it’s too dull out.
It’s raining, or we don’t have enough rain.”[1]
There is always something to complain about.
That’s Selma.
Now enter a skinny middle-aged guy with a big bushy mustache,
thick glasses, and a grin that won’t quit.
This is her son, James Baraz.
James grew up Jewish, obviously, but now he’s a Buddhist.
A Buddhist teacher, in fact, and kind of a famous one.
Now, complaining is not a real big part of the Buddhist tradition
in case you’re wondering.
The Buddhists I know are into cultivating acceptance of what is.
And that kind of gets in the way of complaining.
Anyway, James is a real sweetie,
and he and his mom love each other a whole lot.
But when James came to spend a week visiting his mom,
something had to give.
The constant complaining was just too much for him.
He told his mom about all the research that showed
people who don’t complain very much, grateful people,
are happier, healthier, all that good stuff.
Selma, his mom, was intrigued.
But after 91 years of complaining, how do you stop?
Good question.
So James came up with a little game.
Every time he heard his mom complain,
he would say to her, “And…?”
That was her cue to say, “And I’m really very blessed.”
I’m really very blessed.

Well, I am, for sure.
I’m so grateful I got the chance to study with James Baraz myself.
In 2008, I signed myself up for an online class James taught
called “Awakening Joy.”
For almost a year, my virtual classmates and I
committed to trying out spiritual practices
designed to help us feel happier and more joyful.
I’ll tell you, the thing that really transformed my life that year
was gratitude.
Just a few simple gratitude practices
made such a difference in how I felt about life.
Here’s one:
I took the course with my sister,
and she and I traded what we called “gratitude emails” once a day.
Just short little notes saying one thing we were grateful for that day.
Most days it was actually hard to stop at just one.
It was such a wonderful feeling
to take a pause and feel grateful.

In fact, let’s try it right now.
Take a deep breath, in and out.
Now close your eyes, if you want,
and think of one thing you are grateful for today.
Small or large, it doesn’t matter.
Think of one thing.
And now say, “Thank you!”
You can say it out loud—“Thank you!”
Now notice how you feel.
For me, it opens up my heart,
I relax, I smile.
Even on the worst of days, it helps me
“incline my heart toward joy,” to use a phrase from our class.
Gratitude inclines the heart toward joy.

And that’s why I’m telling you today:
when we practice gratitude,
we discover a grateful life is a joyful life, a happy life!

Now, let me check something out with you.
I’ve thought for a long time now
that Unitarian Universalists tend to be a little suspicious of happiness.
We’re not always sure happiness is an appropriate response
to the world we live in.
We see all the problems of our world—
violence, poverty, injustice, environmental degradation,
and we say to ourselves,
anyone who claims to be happy in this world
has got to be a little superficial
or a little clueless, or both!
We say, those happy people must not realize what we’re up against
in the struggle to save the world.

There’s some truth here.
We are facing a lot of problems in this world.
Suffering is a reality for everyone.
But it is not the only reality.

This class I took on awakening joy was rooted in Buddhist teachings.
Remember Buddhism starts with suffering.
The Buddha tells us: life is inherently unsatisfying.
The Sanskrit word he used is dukkha, d-u-k-k-h-a transliterated.
It means stress, uncertainty, discontent, suffering.
The Buddha said, life is dukkha.
Being a human being means being discontented,
not every moment but a lot of the time.
Being human means feeling stress.
It means suffering,
wishing things were otherwise than how they are.
Buddhism starts here. It says, this is how it feels to be human.

But it doesn’t end there.
Buddhism says, we don’t have to be this way.
We don’t have to be stressed out all the time.
We don’t have to be discontented.
We don’t have to let suffering dominate our life.
Because what we are meant to be is joy.
Pure joy.
The goal of human life is joy.
The goal of the religious life is joy.
Now, Buddhist teachers tell us we get there
through discipline, through study and committed practice.
It doesn’t just happen—at least for most of us!
It takes commitment.
But the goal is freedom and joy.
Even the Dalai Lama says so: the goal of life is to be happy!
It’s not wrong or foolish to be happy—
it’s the most sublime state there is.
Joy is not a vaguely disreputable byproduct of the religious life—
it’s the whole point!

And gratitude is one of the fundamental practices that lead to joy.
Obviously it’s not the only one, but it’s pretty powerful.
We all know this.
When we feel grateful,
we are touching joy.
One Tibetan Buddhist teacher says,
gratitude opens our heart “like a satellite dish.”
We open up to send our thanks out to the world,
and in that state of openness
we’re able to notice all the blessings that surround us, always.[2]

I often think of a movie I saw years ago called American Beauty.
Maybe some of you remember it.
One of the characters is a filmmaker.
He’s kind of a messed-up kid,
but he has the most amazing eye.
In one scene you see the film he’s made.
The camera does a closeup on a plastic grocery bag
outside against a brick wall.
You think it’s just a piece of trash, right?
The wind catches it, it flies up;
like a dancer it floats down, it whirls around,
drifting and spinning.
And the filmmaker says, this is the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
And on the one hand, it is so sad,
because in our normal vision it’s just trash.
You think, this poor messed-up kid.

But here’s the thing:
if you let go of all our normal categories of judgment,
it is beautiful.
It’s incredible, the way that “piece of trash” catches the wind
and moves and sways.
It is beautiful.

Albert Einstein said once, at least we’re told it was him
and I like to hope it was,
“There are two ways to live your life:
one is as though nothing is a miracle,
the other is as though everything is a miracle.”[3]
When we decide to practice gratitude,
this is how it is.
This is how everything is.
We strengthen our mind and our senses
to experience a blessing in everything that is.
Remember Mary Katherine talked last week
about the “Gratitude Game”?
This is where you let your eyes fall on anything in the room,
anything at all,
and whatever it is,
right then you have to think of a reason to be grateful for that thing.
Like, right now, I see the sliding walls back there,
and I’m grateful for all of you who built that space
so we could be together here as a community.

You can make it harder, too.
I’m thinking of the most disgusting thing I’ve seen recently—
in one of our moving boxes I found a dead cockroach.
Yuck. I was not grateful for that.
But I want to be doing this gratitude practice with integrity.
Cockroaches are tough for me. I am not a bug person.
So I Googled “What role do cockroaches play in the ecosystem?”
and realized, oh, yeah, they help with plant decomposition,
they provide food for other creatures,
they’re part of the interdependent web of life too.
So, reluctantly, squeamishly (don’t make me touch one!),
I am practicing gratitude for cockroaches today.
I figure, if I can get that one going,
the rest ought to be easy!
Thich Nhat Hanh is the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher
connected with the Mindfulness Practice Center right here.
He tells us, don’t forget to be grateful for what isn’t wrong.
You might say, Last week I had a toothache,
but today I don’t—how wonderful!
I can relate to that one. I’m just getting over a cold,
and I am so grateful to be able to breathe through my nose again.
Of course I’ll forget after a while.
We take so much for granted.
This is why it is so wonderful to practice gratitude:
it helps us remember how lucky we are,
how richly we are blessed in every moment.
 
***
 
But what about when it just doesn’t feel that way?
What about those times we all go through
when there just doesn’t seem to be anything but pain
and suffering
and grief?
The other day I was talking with one of our covenant groups.
The people in the group were sharing some very profound stories
about how you can find blessings in difficult times.
In that moment I remembered a story I want to share with you all.
This too is a true story,
from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.
One day an elderly man came to see Dr. Frankl.
He had lost his wife two years ago,
and he was just drowning in grief and depression.
He didn’t know how to get better.
Dr. Frankl said to him, “Tell me, what would have happened
if your wife had survived you?”
“Oh,” the man said, “It would have been terrible for her.
She would have suffered so much.”
Dr. Frankl said, “Perhaps you have been allowed
to spare her this suffering,
though at the cost of your own grief.”
Very quietly the man stood up and shook Dr. Frankl’s hand
and left without another word.[4]
I come back to this story again and again.
No one could tell this grieving man
how to find a blessing in his sorrow.
No one could help him find gratitude.
Dr. Frankl could only hold up a possible mirror,
another way of seeing, gently, gently.
But that mirror, that invitation to see how his own suffering
had allowed his wife to suffer less,
was a doorway to peace—even, in time, a thanksgiving.
 
Now, please note that this man had come to Dr. Frankl for help.
Christine Robinson reminds us in the reading we heard earlier:
most of the time it doesn’t help to tell other people
why they should be grateful.
This is so important.
Especially when other people are suffering,
we have no right to do this kind of meaning-making
for anyone but ourselves.
Think about how awful it feels to be told,
“It’s meant to be”
or “It’s for the best”
when your heart is breaking.
It feels insulting, hurtful, outrageous—
and—this is the paradox, isn’t it?—
we have to find a way to practice gratitude for our own lives—
for all that is our life, as our beloved hymn puts it.
No one should force this on us.
But our happiness depends on it!

Remember Selma Baraz, the 91-and-a-half-year-old lady
who had been complaining and kvetching all her life?
She and her son, James Baraz,
started playing that little game
where, whenever she started to complain,
he would say, “And…”
And she’d have to reply, “And I’m really very blessed.”
Well, guess what? She loved it.
After just a week, she felt so much happier.
She’s kept up that simple practice ever since:
I’m really very blessed.”
And even though she jokes about
“My son, who ruined my life!”
she will now tell you, for the first time in her entire life,
she is truly a happy person.

I want to close with a poem she wrote
about what this practice has meant to her:

Ninety is just fine with me, I no longer rant and rave
About where the world is heading and my exclusive job to save
I wallow in contentment and know that I am blessed
Awakening to the joy of living at its best
I’m happier than I’ve ever been and truly mean each word
The thoughts that caused the worries now all seem so absurd
Though my eyesight has been dimmed I see clearer than before
The glass is not half empty it’s overflowing to be sure.[5]

Dear friends, may this be so, for us and for all the world.
Amen and blessed be.

–Rev. Laura

Forgiving Ourselves and Each Other

What does it take to forgive
when something unspeakably bad has happened?
What does it take to forgive?

I want to tell you a story about forgiveness in South Africa.
It begins in 1989.
Four black anti-apartheid activists had been killed.
A group of three black policemen were threatening to expose
some of their white colleagues for being involved in the murders.
Their boss, who was white, went to a man
named Eugene De Kock, a white South African
who led a secret government-authorized hit squad.
His specialty was assassinating people with bombs.[1]
In South Africa people called him “Prime Evil.”
The boss of these three black policemen went to De Kock
and asked him to shut them up.
De Kock planted a remote-control car bomb in a squad car
and got the black policemen sent off on a phony mission.
The bomb exploded right on schedule.
It killed the three policemen
and a friend who had been in the car with them.[2]

Eight years later, at least on the surface,
South Africa had changed dramatically.
Nelson Mandela was president.
Apartheid was over.
But it would have been so easy
for the country to collapse into violence and civil war.
People were full of fear.
In that climate,
the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu convened
the body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The TRC had a simple and profound goal:
to give all South Africans, both victims and perpetrators,
a chance to tell the truth about what had happened
during the long years of apartheid.

In this new environment,
Eugene De Kock stepped forward and announced:
he wanted to confess what he had done.
No one knows exactly why.
But eventually he testified at great length
about the many murders his death squad committed.
In his first appearance before the TRC,
he confessed he had led the plot that killed the black policemen.
And then he did something extraordinary.
This man known as “Prime Evil,”
this man who had ruthlessly assassinated so many people,
asked to apologize.
In front of the whole Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
he appealed to the widows of the three black policemen he had killed.
He asked them to meet with him
so that he could apologize to them personally.[3]

Can you imagine how you would feel in their shoes?
Could you have said yes to that meeting?

Friends, we’re talking about forgiveness today,
and we have to ask:
Can someone who has done such terrible things
really change, begin again, and repent sincerely?
And how could it be possible to forgive such things?
How could forgiveness be anything but a travesty
of the justice we crave?

We are wrestling with these questions today
along with our Jewish neighbors.
Next Saturday is Yom Kippur,
the holiest day on the Jewish calendar,
set apart for repentance and forgiveness.
Each year, in the days leading up to Yom Kippur,
Jewish people are called to search their hearts
and remember all the ways they’ve hurt others,
intentionally or not, over the past year.
The tradition says you need to reach out to the people you’ve hurt,
apologize sincerely,
and make things right if you can.

In that spirit, I want us to try to think and feel our way
into what needs to happen
so that repentance and forgiveness are real and healing.

Let me tell you a small story from my own experience.
When I was a little girl, nine years old or so,
I read C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books.
I loved them.
There’s a very important character called Aslan,
a lion, but more than a lion, tremendously powerful and good—
he’s the god of that land.
Nine-year-old me loved Aslan.
I wanted for him to be real,
I wanted it so badly,
and I wrote a little prayer to him in my diary
asking, “Dear Aslan, please be real!”

That was a secret.
I never meant anyone else to know.
My family wasn’t religious at all,
and I knew they wouldn’t understand.
So it was my secret.
But one day my sister came up to me and started teasing me,
“You believe in Aslan, you believe in Aslan!”
And I realized in an instant,
like a stab through the heart:
she had read my diary.
She’d found out the deepest secret of my spiritual life
and she was making fun of it.
Oh, I shrank.
It really hurt.
It was a long time before I dared to tell anyone
how I really felt about religion after that.

But that was a long time ago,
and I’ve long since forgiven my sister,
who I love very much and never stopped loving.
It seems to me today, two things helped me forgive her for hurting me.
One thing came from her: She apologized.
Not right away—it took a few years of growing up on both sides.
But eventually she apologized
for reading my diary and teasing me about it.
She told me she had felt terrible right after she did it,
but at eight years old, she couldn’t find the words to say so.
She never did it again,
and in fact I don’t think she’s ever violated my trust since then.
So there was a quality of repentance in her
that I know was genuine.

But I have to say, I don’t think I truly forgave her
until I was able to let go of my own shame.
I never told anyone about my prayer to Aslan
until a few years ago, when I started going to church
and becoming much more open about my religious life
in all sorts of ways.
It wasn’t until I had forgiven myself
for feeling ashamed,
just for believing and yearning for what I did at that time—
it wasn’t until then that I could truly forgive my sister
for exposing me before I was ready to be seen.
And that makes me realize
she was never really the one I had to forgive in the first place.
It was me.

Remember our reading from Psalm 32 today.
What leaps out at me in this text
is the relief in being honest about who you are
and what’s really happening.
The psalmist writes:

As long as I said nothing,
my limbs wasted away…
Then I acknowledged my sin to you”
[but you could just as easily say “I acknowledged it to myself”]
and you forgave the guilt of my sin…
you surround me with the joyous shouts of deliverance.

I don’t know about you, but this speaks to me.
When we try to keep quiet and hide ourselves,
when we try to put on a good face for the world
we have no strength.

But when we are honest about what is,
what we have done with our lives,
who we are,
it’s like an inner revolution.
We are strong and solid,
and things that used to hurt us
just don’t any more.

So often people hurt us not because they really mean to,
or expect to—
people hurt us because we have tender spots that are easily hurt.
There are places in us that we feel ashamed of,
or embarrassed about.
And you know how when you get a really bad bruise,
it hurts if you push on it even just a little bit?
I think we have bruises on our souls like that,
all of us, in different places.
Sometimes it feels like we’re all going through life
bumping into each other, mostly by accident,
saying, “ow, ow, ow!” to each other.

I think of what Santideva says in the Buddhist text we heard.
He says, look,
whatever people do wrong,
they do it because everything in their life,
all their history,
their parents’ history, and their parents’,
and their society’s—
everything in their life has shaped them
so that it’s nearly impossible for them to do anything else.
So why be angry at people who do bad things?
They’re just living out the consequence
of all the history and emotional baggage they’ve inherited.
Why waste your time being angry at them?
Why not feel compassion for them and try to help them?
Santideva says, people are doing the best they can
with the circumstances they inherited.
Sometimes they do things that are very wrong and hurtful—
but they are doing the best they can.
So where is the need for forgiveness?
It’s almost beside the point—
how can you forgive someone for doing the best they can?

When we hurt each other,
we have to find ways of forgiving each other and moving on—
ways of beginning again in love.

Here I should say, as I’ve said before,
practicing compassion doesn’t mean letting people do
whatever they want.
Just because we have a compassionate understanding
of why someone is doing what they’re doing,
it doesn’t mean we have to let people walk all over us.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean endless permission-giving.
We have the right to set limits on people’s behavior.

But the real challenge is letting go of our own need to blame and judge.
The real challenge is letting go of finger-pointing
and saying “This person is bad,” or “That person is evil.”
The challenge is replacing those attitudes
with compassion for the other person,
filling ourselves with hope and desire
that the other person will find a better way for themselves.

It’s not always easy or simple.
What about Eugene De Kock,
otherwise known as “Prime Evil”?
He murdered a lot of people.
He meant to do it;
he knew what he was doing.
But years later something had changed within him.
He wanted to apologize for what he had done.
He wanted to confess and try to make things right,
even though of course some things can never be made right.

Elizabeth Faku had been married to one of the policemen
killed by De Kock.
She and another one of the widows agreed to meet with De Kock.
Afterwards, Mrs. Faku said,
“I was profoundly touched by him.”
She said he had acknowledged the pain he had caused her,
and she believed he was truly sorry.
She said, “I couldn’t control my tears.
I could hear him, but I was overwhelmed by emotion,
and I was just nodding,
as a way of saying, yes, I forgive you.
I hope that when he sees our tears,
he knows that they are not only tears for our husbands,
but tears for him as well….
I would like to hold him by the hand,
and show him that there is a future,
and that he can still change.”[4]

There is a future.
We can still change.

And so:
for each time that our fears have made us rigid and inaccessible,
for each time we have struck out in anger without just cause,
for each time that our greed has blinded us to the needs of others,
for the selfishness that set us apart and alone,
for falling short of the admonitions of the spirit,
for losing sight of our unity,
for those and for so many acts both evident and subtle
which have fueled the illusion of separateness,
we forgive ourselves and each other;
we begin again in love.[5]

May it be so.
Amen.

–Rev. Laura

***

Immortal Love: Why Universalism Still Matters

Our subject today is love.
Not just any kind of love—
the biggest kind of love there is:
infinite, immortal love—
the kind of love our religious ancestors felt and believed in,
powerful love,
an active love that loves every person and everything that is,
a love that will not settle for anything less
than peace in every heart
and justice in every land.

This is the kind of love that burst the bounds
of the religious world of our ancestors many years ago.
It still has the power to transform us and our world,
if we let it.

First, a bit of history,
and then we’ll flash forward to today.
About 400 years ago, you remember,
Puritans from England were coming over
to the northern colonies in North America.
These were people who took religion extremely seriously.
They founded congregations wherever they went,
and many of those congregations
later morphed into the first Unitarian congregations
in the United States.

In many ways those early Puritans are our spiritual ancestors.
But some of their beliefs
were very different from what we believe today.
For our purposes today, you need to know
they believed in predestination. That is,
they believed God had already decided from the beginning of time
what would happen to people when they died.
A few lucky people would be saved,
but the vast majority would be condemned to hell forever,
and there was nothing you could do to change your fate.
A few would get saved, but almost everyone was going to hell.
Talk about depressing!

Now, I don’t want you to think these folks were dumb;
I don’t want you to think they were horrible people;
they were people just like us
trying to figure out why the world is the way it is
and what it all means.
They came up with an explanation that made sense to them,
even though it’s hard for us to understand today.
They were struggling to understand why there is suffering,
and why it’s so hard for us to do what we know is right,
and why some people seem to have it easy
and others have it so very hard.

They looked at themselves and each other, and they said,
we are so far from perfect,
we screw up so much and so often,
there’s no way we deserve to go to Heaven.
They believed people in general
were bad and messed up and basically hopeless.
They believed they were bad.
They believed their God found them disgusting.
They believed they deserved to go to hell.

Think of how it would feel
to feel that way about yourself.
Imagine how it feels to judge yourself
with that kind of merciless scrutiny
So many people with so much pain.
So much sadness.

But then something began to shift.
Some of those people,
those ancestors of ours
who judged themselves and their neighbors so harshly—
some of them changed.
All of a sudden,
and now we’re in the middle of the 18^th century,
groups of people all up and down the northern coast
began to believe something new.
These were the people who came to call themselves Universalists.

Just like everyone else,
the Universalists knew people mess up and screw up, over and over.
They had no illusions that people were ever going to be perfect
on this earth.
But something shifted in their hearts.
They came to believe their God wasn’t an angry God.
They started to say,
we think God loves us so much, everyone is going to be saved,
no matter what—
every single person on this earth,
no matter what they believe or what they’ve done—
there is nothing we can do that can alienate us from the love of God,
nothing.
They said to the parents in their midst:
Parents, when you get mad at your children,
do you throw them in the fireplace?
Of course not!
Then how could the God who loves every person
condemn anyone to the flames of Hell?
It makes no sense.

They said, we just do not believe our God would do that.
Everyone is loved, so everyone is saved.
Salvation is universal—no one left out, no one forgotten,
every single person held and cherished
in the infinite love of the divine.
Universal salvation.
Infinite love.

In our Unitarian Universalist congregations today,
we tell this story again and again
because it’s part of our sacred story,
part of who we are as a people.
Today, we use different language,
but I think our core belief and the certainty we feel is just the same:
every person is precious.
Nobody is going to hell when they die.
We don’t know for sure what will happen when we die,
but we believe whatever it is,
it will happen to all of us, everyone,
and it is not going to be a bad thing.
And when we say “we” we mean everybody.
You remember the lesson from last week:
You are loved.
And so are they.
Everybody.

I think of Barbara Pescan’s poem
which we heard in our reading today:
She calls us to see ourselves and each other
through eyes of compassion,
to allow ourselves to believe we are worthy of love,
faults and screwups and all.
Remember she asks:

Can we
Know ourselves seen
And know each other this same way
Until our restless hearts
Learn to abide
In this knowing and this love?[1]

This is our Universalism for the 21^st century,
and our world needs it so much.
Our belief that every person is loved,
every person is precious—
that belief makes a huge difference in the way we treat other people,
or it should. I hope it does!
And I’m not just talking about personal relationships,
how we relate to people one-on-one,
though of course that is so important.
I’m also talking about the connections between our beliefs
and our social institutions.

So now I’m going to shift gears
and remind you of what you already know:
what we believe—our religious beliefs, our faith—
directly impacts the kind of society we live in.
Whatever a people believes,
those beliefs define and shape and even dictate
their social institutions:
their education systems, economic systems,
structures of marriage and family life—
and, not least, their systems of justice.

I think of the justice system we have in this country today.
As a nation, we are building more and more prisons.
We incarcerate vastly more people than any other democracy
on the face of the earth.
We have a relentless, voracious appetite for locking up people
and throwing away the key.
We want to punish, punish, punish.
We thirst for the blood of murderers to be spilled
because we think it will make things right.
And I ask you: where does this come from?
What kind of belief system allows us to believe
it is morally right to consign human beings to lifelong punishment
without the hope of redemption and restoration?

I suggest to you that our prison system
which condemns so many people
to lifelong imprisonment and even execution
would be impossible without the foundation of a religious belief
in a God who is angry,
a God who desires vengeance,
a God who is willing to condemn people to horrific punishment
for all eternity.
Because if God thinks this is how people should be treated,
who are we to question it?
If God is willing to condemn people to hell,
why shouldn’t we lock them up in a hell on earth
for the rest of their lives?

And that’s not even to raise the question of racism.
Because we know, too, that our justice system
is deeply, deeply biased against people of color.
We know the statistics.
We know we are living with a system
that claims to be just but in fact is deeply racist.
And I have to wonder,
could that system of racism have arisen
without the foundation of religious beliefs
that separate people into the saved and the damned,
beliefs which divide us
and invite us to get comfortable and cozy with our prejudices,
our beliefs that “those people over there”
are somehow less than fully human, unworthy of divine love?

But we know it doesn’t have to be that way.
Beliefs can change when our hearts are touched.
And when beliefs begin to change,
our society will surely begin to change as well.
It’s inevitable.
If you ever wonder whether our faith matters to the world today,
just ask yourself:
what would our society look like
if everyone truly believed
that every person is precious in the sight of the divine?

Beloved people, I am convinced that we have a mission
in this time and this place.
We are here to witness to our faith
that every person on this earth
possesses an inherent worth and dignity
which cannot be taken away
either by their own actions or the judgments of others.
Now, that faith does not mean
we let everyone do whatever they want.
Some people are a danger to others.
It is not wrong to find ways to protect ourselves
from those among us who can’t stop themselves from hurting others.
There have to be boundaries.
We need our communities to be safe.
But let those boundaries be kept
in a spirit of respect and compassion and hope.

***

Let me say a final word about why our faith matters.
Personally, I believe the Universalists were basically right
in what they believed.
Like them, I do believe whatever happens after we die,
it happens to all of us and it’s going to be OK.
I don’t have it in my heart to believe in hell
or any kind of eternal punishment for anyone.
I happen to believe those who do believe that are wrong.
But it’s really not about who’s right or wrong,
because nobody really knows what’s coming.
Maybe we’ll find out when we die, or not—we just don’t know.

It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong.
But, as Sophia Lyon Fahs reminds us, “It matters what we believe.”[2]
It matters in this world.
Because our most basic beliefs about the nature of the divine
do so much to shape the society we live in.
If we believe in a vengeful God of punishment,
you had better believe we are going to create a vengeful society
bent on punishment.
But if we live out of our faith in that love which
“has laid hold upon us, and will not let us go,”
if we live out of our faith that every person is held in that love,
what a world it would be.
Not perfect, mind you,
because we are never going to be perfect ourselves.
Not perfect. But I’d choose that world all the same.
I believe you would too.
And each one of us is called
to try to make that better world more real every day.

As we go forth, let us drink deep
from the love we seek to embody in this place,
this blessed and imperfect human community of faith.
There are times when we will make mistakes
and disappoint one another.
But let us never give up—
never stop trying to be a channel
for that immortal, infinite love
which is at the very heart of our faith
and has been from the very beginning.
This is how the world changes.
And here is where we begin, again and again and again.

So may it be.
Amen.

Soon I’ll be starting a new ministry as associate minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax in Oakton, Virginia, near Washington, DC. This is a very exciting change for me, though not without stress and to-do lists. I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a couple of weeks, as I deal with movers and trek across the country. See you on the other side! In the meantime, deepest thanks and blessings to all the wonderful folks in Stockton who have helped make these last five years such a rich part of my life. I will miss you.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Good Goodbyes

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
July 31, 2011

Saying goodbye. One of the hardest things in life.
Many of us never learn how to say goodbye very well.
It’s so much easier to deny,
to pretend it’s not really happening.
When we’re young, on graduation day,
we crack open each other’s brand-new yearbooks
and smell that new-book smell
and write notes saying, “See you soon!”
If we were honest, we might write something like this:
“I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.
I care about you. I wish you well.”

Or say it’s your last day on a job.
Maybe over coffee you say to your coworkers, “Let’s stay in touch,”
but even as the words pass your lips,
you hear how lukewarm they sound.
Maybe you know you don’t mean it,
and you wish you had said what you really meant.
It might be as simple as this:
“I’m glad we’ve gotten to know each other.
I wish you well.”

But instead, so often, we make those shallow promises
we know we’re not going to keep.
Because somehow we think there’s something wrong
with simply saying goodbye.
We think it would be mean or unfriendly or rude,
or even hurtful,
to say goodbye
and be honest that the relationship is ending.

Saying goodbye. It’s hard to do.
But that doesn’t change the truth
that sometimes relationships do end,
sometimes abruptly and painfully;
sometimes for very good reasons,
with no one to blame, no one at fault.
Relationships come to an end.
And in that moment of ending,
by saying goodbye well,
we honor what the relationship has been,
and we make room in ourselves for a new beginning.

Years ago, when I was a girl,
we had a dog named Winky.
Half-husky, half-golden retriever.
She was so beautiful, with her thick husky tail, always wagging,
and her beautiful golden face and her soft brown eyes.
We ran together and played and barked and laughed.
We loved each other a lot.
But Winky got old, as dogs do.
She got old so much faster than I did.
The time came when she couldn’t see so well.
Her joints were getting stiff.
We all knew she probably wasn’t going to be around much longer.
And right around that time my family had to move.
We ended up finding a new place that was great except for one thing:
no dogs allowed.
My mom and dad did the best they could do at the time.
They decided to put her to sleep.
Looking back, I would have done it differently.
But I know they did what they thought was right.
The thing is, they didn’t tell me in advance.
They didn’t tell me Winky was going to die.
They were trying to protect me.
So they only told me afterwards.

To this day, I carry that regret with me.
Because I never got to see her.
I never got to tell her I loved her, one last time.
I know my parents were trying to protect me.
I know that.
And it would have been hard.
I would have cried and cried.

But the thing is, I did anyway.
I still felt that awful grief,
only it was worse because, unlike the little girl in our story,[1]
I hadn’t been there.
I never got to say goodbye,
except in my heart, over and over again.
Dear ones,
none of us get to skip over the experience of losing what we love.
Because we know everything in this world is temporary,
and that includes us.
Everything changes.
We know it’s true.
Every religion teaches it.
And our own lives tell us,
with constant nudges both gentle and jarring:
that to live is to change.
We cannot stay forever as we are.
Everything changes.
Things exists for a while in a particular form,
and after a time that form comes to an end
and changes into something new.
Relationships, people, mountain ranges, empires.
Everything changes.
This is the nature of things.
This is how the world is.
Mary Oliver puts it this way:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
To love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
And, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.[2]

But we forget.
We struggle and deny and will ourselves to forget
that letting go is part of life.
We struggle against the truth
that everything which begins must also come to an end.
And so we come to think that ending is the same as failure.
But it’s not.
An ending need not be a failure.

Oh, my dear, do not despair,[3]

says the poet. Do not despair that things come to an end.
Don’t despair, but live—
live into the time that is left.
And when it’s time to say goodbye, say goodbye.

In just a week’s time, you and I will have to say our goodbyes
and get our hearts and minds ready
to love someone new.
You have to be free to love your new minister,
I have to love my new congregation.

It’s like the little girl said in our story:
“You’re not Lulu.
Still, I’ll love you too.”

The good news is, I’m not dying, at least not yet,
and neither are you.
But isn’t it strange, the way every goodbye feels a little bit like death.
Church consultant Roy Oswald says, when a minister leaves,
both minister and congregation must be

able to live deeply into the human side of death—;
the death of relationships—;
the death of roles and functions and responsibilities—;
the death of that special relationship a pastor has with a parish.

And to ministers in particular he gives some hard advice:

Dying to the parish
involves dying to our role with people, as well.
Our failure to die to this role with congregational members
gets us involved in pastoral acts with them long after we’ve left.
Our hanging onto these roles is our bid for immortality.
We allow ourselves to be indispensable with people,
insuring our ability to live forever in their lives.[4]

Ouch. This is hard to hear.
When a minister hangs on too long with a congregation,
it’s like trying to deny and fight against our own death.
Hard but true.

For five years, we have worked together,
laughed and cried and wondered and puzzled together
about what it all means.
We have done our best to live out faithfully
what it means to be
the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
in this moment that we’ve been given.
Now we have one more thing to do together:
to say goodbye, well and honestly.

In just a few days, when my ministry here ends,
my job, my duty to you,
will be to get out of the way,
to truly say goodbye
and acknowledge that this is the end of our relationship
as congregation and minister.
Our paths may cross again down the road.
That would be wonderful.
But my most important job right now
is to help you say goodbye to me
and get ready to open your hearts to a new minister.
None of us knows yet who that will be.
But whoever it is, I want that new minister to succeed here.
I want them to connect with you.
I want them to build deep relationships here,
so that, together, you can thrive and grow and continue to grow.

So I’m going to be very disciplined with myself.
I need to be very clear that the relationship we’ve had is ending.
I’m not going to say “see you later,”
because I truly don’t know if we will.
I’m not going to promise to stay in touch,
because that would get in the way of your job,
which is to be open to what your new minister brings.
This might sound harsh,
but please believe me when I say
this is a gift I’m giving to you.
This is making room
for your relationship with your next minister to flourish.
It’s essential.

Now, sometimes people wonder,
does this mean we can never, ever see each other again?
No, of course not.
If we run into each other,
I’m not going to run the other way!
Far from it.
If you ever find yourself in Virginia, where I’m going to be,
come to a church service. Come by and say hello.
I would be delighted to see you.
I would love to hear how you’re doing.
But I won’t ask you how this church is doing,
because I don’t want to get in the way,
even though of course I care. How could I not?
And even though I will always care about you,
I won’t be able to exchange cards or letters
or be Facebook friends or anything like that.
Because when a minister leaves a congregation,
the way we can show our care for your future
is by getting out of the way.

My colleague Mark Morrison-Reed tells his story
of leaving a congregation:

[W]hen we left we left.
Well, we left town at least.
Leaving emotionally proved more difficult.
We maintained contact with two couples.
One had been our surrogate parents—Bill and Eleanor.
The other was a friend of mine I’d introduced to his future wife
who was a church member.
We also exchanged Christmas cards
with those—mostly senior members—who wrote to us.
That was a mistake—a misguided courtesy.
Most often it was just that, a courtesy.
But then a long revealing letter would arrive,
or a note from someone I knew had ceased attending,
or a wistful comment about us from someone
who was keeping the new minister at arm’s length.
In those moments I cringed,
for I knew we were intruding upon our successor’s ministry.[5]

It’s a hard thing to hear, but it’s true.
The best gift a minister can give a congregation when they leave
is the gift of getting out of the way—
with love, and blessings, of course!
We don’t have to stop loving each other.
You will always have a place in my heart. Always.
But I do need to get the heck out of the way
out of respect for your future,
which you will chart with your new minister.
And this is why we’ll need to say goodbye.

So what happens now?
I hope in these last few days together
we can really be present to what is happening.
Be aware of the situation,
aware of our emotions, whatever they might be—
sadness, hope, nostalgia, excitement, anger, relief—
whatever it is.
Don’t deny what’s happening.
Just be aware.
This change in the congregation’s life
is bringing difficulties, absolutely.
It’s also bringing new possibilities.
Remember the song I taught you a couple of weeks ago:
We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
Be aware. Be open to what’s coming.

And in the meantime,
let us well and truly celebrate what has been.
I understand there’s going to be a little party after church next week;
it’s our pianist Chris’s last Sunday as well,
so please come.
Hugs and tears and laughter are all welcome!
Let’s celebrate, one last time.

Finally, in the midst of these goodbyes,
remember what is not going away.
You have each other.
Would you look around at each other now?
Look at each other.
You have each other to embrace and encourage and applaud
all throughout this transition, and always.
You have each other to challenge you
and help you stay true to your vision of what this community can be.

And even more than that, you have the faith
which is the living, breathing heart of this community.
Call it what you will—Spirit of Life, the human spirit,
God, Goddess,
infinite creativity,
that which IS—
this holy spark of life and love and joy
which will never leave you.
Call it what you will, it will be with you
in good times and in bad,
in the purest joy and the darkest despair.
For you are part of the life of the universe,
the great and stately dance of the stars and the trees
and the mountains,
and the generations of beings that rise to love
and love again,
through struggle and pain and joy,
part of the great promise that love is never wasted
and hope will never fail
and the future is always before us, beckoning us on
and on
and on.

Blessings to you, always.
Now go forward in peace,
and joy abundant,
and courage, and purpose.
Go forward and find your future.

May it be so.
Amen.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Free Will?

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
July 17, 2011

About 35 years ago, a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet
hooked volunteers up to a machine that measured brain activity.
He attached electrodes to their wrist and their scalp.
He gave them simple instructions: look at a clock.
Watch the time scroll by.
Whenever you feel like it, flick your wrist.
Then write down the moment you first had the intention to move.
Dr. Libet compared their responses
with the information from the electrodes.
What he found was,
the brain signals that went along with the wrist movements
happened consistently about half a second before the subjects
reported their conscious intentions to move their wrists.
By the time the subjects became aware of their intention to move,
their brains had already started to get ready to move.
The subjects thought they were making conscious decisions
about when to move their wrists.
Completely up to them, completely free choice.
But in fact, some part of their brain they were not aware of
had already made the decision to move,
completely unbeknownst to their conscious mind.[1]
Free will? Not in this case, it would seem.

I want to thank our worship associate today
for telling me about this study.
He asked me to preach on this thing called free will.
Is it just a myth?
We feel like we make our own decisions,
but are we kidding ourselves?
Are we all prisoners of fate,
controlled by biology, history, and a million accidents of chance?
Or are we free, free to choose how we will be,
what we will make of our lives,
free in ways that really matter?

Are we controlled by biology, or are we free?
Well, as usual, the answer is yes. And yes.
It’s a paradox and a mystery:
We’re not 100% free. We are limited.
But, ironically, the more we’re aware of the limits on our freedom,
the more we set ourselves free.
The more we understand the limits of our freedom,
the more we are free.

Let me explain.
And let me start by telling you what I mean by “free.”
In the context of “free will,” I’m not talking about freedom
as in, do whatever you want and no one’s going to care. No.
Free will doesn’t mean permission to do anything and everything,
no matter what.
That kind of freedom is reckless.
It hurts other people. We hurt ourselves.
No, the kind of freedom I mean when I talk about free will
is the kind of freedom we celebrated in the responsive reading.
You remember William Ellery Channing’s words:

I call that mind free…:
Which refuses to be the slave or tool
of the many or of the few,
and guards its empire over itself
as nobler than the empire of the world.

I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit,
which does not mechanically copy the past:
But which listens for new and higher monitions of conscience,
and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.[2]

Now, Channing’s coming out of the Kantian tradition
of moral philosophy that talks about freedom
as the capacity to choose what is right.
This is the kind of freedom I’m talking about:
the freedom to act thoughtfully, responsibly, bravely.
Freedom from the fear of what other people will think.
Freedom to challenge the way things have always been done.
Freedom to do what is right because it is right.

This is the kind of freedom we have to work for.
We win that freedom for ourselves over a lifetime.
It may mean challenging our parents, our friends, our society.
And this is why I say,
the more we understand the real limitations on our freedom,
the more we are free.

We all start out with limits on our freedom.
We’re limited by our circumstances.
Our perceptions, our ways of thinking
can’t help but be shaped and constrained
by when and where we were born,
our society, its customs, its history,
the families we grew up in.
We get trained to think in certain ways,
to see some things and not others.
It’s a mix of good and bad.
We learn prejudice and violence
just as we learn kindness and courage—
from our family, from our society.
We all get trained to be in certain ways.
Unconscious limits are put on us little by little as we grow.
And if we want to be free,
if we want to claim that free mind
that Channing challenges us to claim,
we have to come to understand those limits
that we absorbed unconsciously.

You might remember
last fall our congregation organized a film series on anti-racism.
The whole point of those films we showed
was to help ourselves become aware of our own prejudices,
our habits of mind that, largely unconsciously,
keep us from doing the work of justice
that we so fervently want to do.
As long as we stay unaware of our prejudices
and false habits of mind,
we are a prisoner to them. We are not free.
But awareness of those habits of mind frees us from them.
The more we understand, the more we free ourselves to do justice
and be the people we want to be.
This is why I say:
the more we understand the real limitations on our freedom,
the more we are free.

Now, the limits on our freedom
don’t just come from society, from our families.
Our free will is also limited by the very structure of our minds.
We’re limited because our brains are built one way and not another.

We are physical beings, and that includes our brains.
We can’t know everything,
we can’t control everything with our conscious mind.
Ever since Freud we’ve known there’s a whole lot going on
in our brains that we are not even aware of:
our instincts, the unconscious mind—
rich and complicated layers of perception and experience
moving and shaping us under the surface.
Neurologists tell us
a huge percentage of our actions, our choices, our decisions
are shaped by unconscious forces that we don’t understand—
forces within us that we’re not even aware of.
Our brain biology is shaping us at every moment,
constraining our choices,
limiting our actions.

And if that is so,
can we really call ourselves free?
Is free will even possible?
But even here, the more we understand about our limits,
the freer we are. Here’s Channing again:

I call that mind free which masters the senses,…
Which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink,
but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.

I hear Channing saying, if we’re controlled by our instincts,
we are not free.
Now, we all have instincts.
Those instincts have evolved over millions of years,
embedded in the physical structures of our brains.
But here again, the more we understand
the way those instincts, rooted in our physical bodies,
limit our moral freedom,
the more we claim the space to make conscious choices.
We claim our freedom.

In our first reading, we heard from Peter Steinke
about the evolutionary layers of our brain
and how those layers affect our thoughts and our behavior.
At the base of the brain is the amygdala.
We share that part of the brain with reptiles—snakes and lizards.
Something startles us,
we’re thrown into danger:
that’s when the amygdala fires up.
It takes over and suddenly we are in the grip
of unconscious processes.
We need to get out of danger.
Nothing else matters.
Go!

Now, in a moment of real physical danger,
we need this. Get away. Get safe.
The problem is, acute physical danger isn’t the only thing
that triggers the reptilian part of the brain.
We can get triggered by just about anything that makes us anxious.
Peter Steinke says, in congregational life,
all sorts of things can trigger the amygdala to kick in:
money troubles,
staff turnover,
congregational conflict,
all sorts of things that can happen in the life of any church.[3]

And here’s the thing: when the amygdala gets triggered,
it’s very hard to act rationally.
We feel locked down and rigid.
We get jumpy. We feel paranoid.
We feel stuck. It’s very hard to think creatively.[4]
In that state of consciousness, are we free? Not really.

But, ironically, the more we learn
about this very natural and predictable way that our brain works,
the easier it is to snap out of it
and get ourselves back into our cortex,
the part of our brain that can think clearly and rationally.
When we’re functioning in our cortex,

we can be intentional rather than instinctive,
responsive instead of reflexive,
adaptive rather than defensive,
proactive instead of reactive….[5]

That sounds like freedom to me,
the freedom to choose how we will be,
rather than be controlled by our instincts.
And here’s the thing:
simply learning to predict what situations
are going to trigger our anxiety
and hook us into the reptilian brain—
just learning what triggers us
makes it vastly easier for us to snap ourselves out of it
and get back to the thinking brain,
that place of freedom where we can choose wisely.

So once again, I put it to you
that the more we understand the limits on our freedom,
including and up to the physical limits of our brains themselves:
the more we understand these limits,
the more we have free will. That is,
the more we are free to act thoughtfully, responsively, bravely,
free to do what is right, in spite of fear.

Now let me push farther
and invite you into a place of wonder
that this should be how human life is at all.
Because sometimes I wonder why our lives are this way
and not some other way?
Sometimes I wonder why we were born into these bodies, these lives. What does it mean?
So many of us work so hard to free ourselves
from everything that keeps us from doing what’s right.
Why do we have to struggle so much?
Is it the nature of the universe,
or just a quirk of our human selves?

In the Story for All Ages today,
you remember the young girl, Meg, travels to another planet
and meets the creatures who live there.
They have no eyes. They don’t know what it is to see.
But they seem to know things in a way that is deep and profound.
Somehow they know the stars—
not just know of them, but know them.
They feel sorry for Meg because she, in her human body,
can’t access that way of knowing and connecting to the world.[6]

And when I think of that story, I wonder…
I wonder what we’re missing out on,
we with our wonderful but limited brains.

Over the years I’ve often shared with you
my own wonderings and speculations
about what it might be like after we die.
Of course none of us knows for sure.
But I wonder, I hope, actually, that maybe after we die
we’ll get to experience another mode of being entirely,
that would just bypass all these struggles
to free ourselves from the limits of our brains and our bodies.

Of course, a lot of us human beings
have wondered about such things over the years.
1500 years ago, a man named Boethius, a philosopher,
was thrown into prison.
They said he’d committed treason. He denied it.
But there he was.
Trapped in prison, he fought against despair.
He wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy—
today we know it as one of the great classics.
And in this book he wrote himself out of despair.
He reminded himself of what really matters in this life:
wisdom, knowledge, compassion, courage.
At the very end, he wrote about free will.
Boethius believed in a God that knew everything,
everything that had happened
and everything that ever would happen.
And he asked, if that’s true—
if God knows everything that’s going to happen—
are we really free?
How can we have free will
if God already knows what we’re going to do?

He answered,
it’s all because within the consciousness of God, the divine,
time has no meaning.
This is complicated, so stay with me.
Boethius said, look, we human beings are built in such a way
that we can only experience one thing at a time.
We experience life moment to moment,
we experience time, and we think time is an absolute.
We think time is a fundamental part of reality.
But, he said, that’s where we’re wrong.
Long before science fiction taught us to imagine
what alien minds might be like,
Boethius said, the divine consciousness is so vast,
it sees and knows and understands
past-present-future all at once:
“the whole of…life in one simultaneous present.”[7]
Can you imagine—
can you imagine what that would be like?
For divine consciousness, time doesn’t exist
because it doesn’t need to.
We humans experience time
because our limited minds can’t hold everything at once.
Our way of knowing the world is not the only way.

Boethius concluded,
yes, God, the divine, knows what we’re going to do,
but that’s because the nature of divine consciousness
is to see and understand everything all at once,
in one infinite present moment.
But we, while we live as human beings—we experience life in time.
For us, the future hasn’t happened yet.
So we are still free. Our choices are ours.

And once again we circle back to where we started from.
Reading Boethius, we discover the limits of our own consciousness.
We struggle to glimpse a kind of consciousness
which is beyond us, almost unfathomable—
and yet, even in the struggle,
do we not taste a strange freedom that—who knows?—
might be out there somewhere?

So, friends, go boldly.
The more we understand the limits to our freedom,
the more we free our mind
to choose wisdom and courage.
Claim your freedom.
Use it well.

Amen.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Dog Days: Spiritual Practice for Tired Times

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
July 10, 2011

Imagine you’re washing the dishes.
It’s the end of the day, the end of the night in fact,
and you are tired, dog-tired.
You don’t really want to wash the dishes, but they’ve got to be done.
You could always put them off until tomorrow,
but then they’d still be there in the morning,
all yucky, encrusted, and dirty.
You decide it’s better to crank out this one last chore
and then you can go put up your feet and relax, o blessed be!
You scrub the plates and the forks
and the glasses
and the pots.
Your energy’s fading,
but with one final burst of productivity
you scrub the crud off the last pot in the sink,
you rinse it off and put it in the drainer,
you wring out the sponge
and peel off the gloves
and sigh with satisfaction and release.
You turn to go into the living room, free at last.

That’s when you see it.
Your heart sinks:
another dirty pot, still on the counter.

You know, that’s the image I get
when I think of what this congregation is facing right now.
Here at church, summer’s usually a low-key time.
From September to the beginning of June,
we’re on task. We’ve got events happening, classes, programs,
and it’s all good, but it gets tiring,
especially for all our volunteer leaders.
By the end of May, we are yearning for a break!
Summer comes, and it’s time to rest,
lovely time to rest and recharge and relax.

Only this year, it’s not so restful.
All of a sudden there’s a pretty big pot in the sink,
demanding your attention.
Searching for a new minister isn’t the end of the world,
and it’s not the only challenge you’re facing,
but it is a big deal.
And I just want to say,
if I were you, I would feel pretty tired right now!
This is a hard time to have to face the big questions that come up:
what’s next? What will your future look like?
For our leaders, it’s a hard time to have to put in the time
and do all the tasks
and get everything organized
and do what needs to be done.

This is your work to do.
No one can do it for you, and it has to be done,
not only for yourselves,
but for everyone in this congregation
and everyone who is not yet a part of it
and all the people who will be touched
by your ongoing ministry in this community.
You know this already.

But I hope you will find a way
to do what needs to be done
with some measure of grace and kindness toward yourself.
In fact, I hope you will find ways to make this time
a blessing for yourselves,
a time of deepened insight
into what you need,
what others need,
what the world needs.

Think of the story of Jacob,
wrestling a blessing out of the stranger who accosts him.[1]
This was our Story for All Ages today.
You remember Jacob wasn’t looking for a fight.
That night he was taking time out to be alone and quiet
and prepare for the day to come.
He gave himself time to rest and be still
and think and wait,
time for quiet, restorative spiritual practice.

But that’s not what happens!
Here’s Jacob minding his own business,
maybe meditating by the campfire.
And what happens? A strange guy shows up
and tackles him and wrestles with him all night long.
Not relaxing,
not restful.
Two guys trying to pound each other into the ground!
They wrestle all night.
When the sun comes up,
the stranger dislocates Jacob’s hip, and you know that has to hurt.
It hurts like a bear.
But Jacob doesn’t let go.
The stranger says, “Let me go!”
But Jacob says, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”
I will not let you go
unless you bless me.

And so, perhaps, with you.
In this moment, you’ve gotten tackled
with an unexpected, huge challenge.
You’ve got to wrestle with it.
There’s no other way.
But can you wrestle a blessing from it?
In all those moments in our lives,
when our energy is fading
and our to-do list is long
and people are depending on us,
can we grab ourselves a blessing?
Can we do what we need to do
and seize the time we need to restore ourselves
so we can recommit to service in ways that are joyful?
This is not easy, but it can be done.
This is how I would do it.
You’ll have your ways—we can learn from each other.
This is what works for me:
When you are worn out and tired,
as soon as you can possibly take a break,
do it. Take a break.
Find a quiet place. And in that moment,
sit quietly, look inside, and ask yourself,
what is at the heart of the exhaustion I’m feeling?
What is at the heart of this?

See what comes up for you.
Maybe it’s just tiredness pure and simple.
Your body’s tired, your mind’s tired,
you’ve got that dry, twitchy feeling on your eyeballs
that means you just need to rest.
If that’s the case, you just have to take a break and rest.
Unless there is a life-or-death situation in front of you,
you have to step off the treadmill and rest.

Even the busiest people among us need a break
from being responsible and productive,
no matter how much we love what we’re doing.
We need time off to rest,
time to rest, daydream, read, watch TV,
sit in front of a fan and cool off.
We all need time where we are not in charge
and the weight of the world is not on our shoulders.
Today’s reading says it:
“constant activity [destroys] our connection…
to ‘the Divine mystery at the heart of all that is’…”[2]
We need rest.
We need fallow time.

Now, you might say, “I can’t do that!
People depend on me. I can’t take a break.”
But could you maybe take a break if you got some help?
Remember, none of us is in this life alone, not here, anyway.
Figure out what kind of help would let you take a break.
Make a plan.
Then ask for help.
And tell the people depending on you what you’re doing.
Reassure them you’ll be back.
Do whatever you need to make it happen,
but make it happen. Give yourself time to rest.

One summer a friend of mine found herself
unexpectedly caring for a very sick relative.
When her father-in-law had a stroke,
he was temporarily disabled.
He couldn’t be by himself right away.
But he was a widower.
He needed someone to help him with meals
and drive him to doctor’s appointments
and just be there.
It made sense for my friend to be that person.
She works at home; her spouse doesn’t have that luxury.
So her father-in-law came to stay with them.
Overnight she became a full-time caregiver.
And she was shocked at how exhausting it was.
It wasn’t the amount of work so much
as the sudden and heavy weight of responsibility
for a vulnerable, fragile person
who was understandably freaked out and depressed
about what had happened to him.

She loved her father-in-law,
but after a week of being on call 24/7,
she was ready to cry or scream or punch something,
or all of the above!
She needed a break, desperately.
She sat down one night with her spouse
and said, I just can’t do this on my own any more.
I need your help.
I can’t do this alone.
Her partner got it.
That night they scheduled some blocks of time
when her partner could take over
and she could just relax and get back to all the regular stuff of life.
She said later, “In that moment I just felt the weight lift.
I could smile again.
I could reconnect with my love for my family.
It was still hard, but now I could breathe.
I knew it would be OK.”
And it was.

If that story sounds familiar—
if you are truly exhausted, so tired you want to weep—
you need to help yourself.
Make a plan that will let you take a break.
Ask for help.
Communicate and communicate and communicate some more.
Reassure people you’ll be back.
Here I’m thinking especially of our leaders here at church.
You all have been faced with important work you weren’t expecting.
If you need to take a break, you need to find ways to do that.
Just communicate. Let everybody know what’s going on.
Because they want to support you.
They know you are carrying a lot of responsibility right now.
With just a little care for their need to know
what’s going on, what the plan is,
you can take care of yourselves too.
Because we all need time to rest.
We all need time for our spirit to be fed.

It’s so ironic, but in this culture
we really have to seize our times of rest.
We have to wrestle and struggle to block out those times
of rest and peace and non-struggle.
We all have to grab that blessing in our lives.
And when you do, you can unclench and unwind
and get back in touch with why you said yes to your commitments
in the first place.
Reconnect with your love for your family, your friends,
your congregation, your working life.
And when you do that,
when you give yourself a chance to rest and reconnect,
other insights may have the chance to come out,
more elusive blessings and wisdom.
In that quiet space, ask yourself again,
what is at the heart of this feeling so tired?
What is at the heart of that?
You might discover you’re exhausting yourself
and you can change things for the better.
That happens in a couple of different ways at least.

So often we exhaust ourselves
by trying to serve in a way that doesn’t use our gifts.
Think back to a job you’ve had that you just hated.
Chances are, that job was forcing you
to do something you just didn’t do so well.
That’s not the worst thing in the world,
but it is exhausting.
I still remember one night years ago
when I worked at a fundraising telethon for a group I belonged to.
Two hours of calling strangers and asking them for money—
oh, it was awful. For me. I was so tired at the end of the night.
But a few months later,
when they asked me to design a poster for them,
that was such a joy! I loved it. That work gave me energy.
When we find ways to serve
that use our best gifts,
it’s magic, for us and for the world.
When we’re trapped in roles that call on skills we don’t have,
we droop. We struggle. We exhaust ourselves.
Don’t get stuck there if you can help it.
Find work that you do well, if you can.
Seize that blessing, for your own sake and the world’s.

Another way we exhaust ourselves
is by bottling up our feelings and thoughts about what’s going on.
Repressing something that needs to be said
takes an enormous amount of energy.

Remember that dreaded washing-the-dishes moment?
I confess, that was one of mine.
I couldn’t believe how tired and discouraged I felt
when I turned around and saw that pot that still had to be washed.

But when I thought about it later,
I realized the real problem was,
I was bottling up something that needed to be said.
I wanted help from my partner, and I didn’t know how to ask for it.
Growing up, mostly my mom did the dishes after dinner.
When my dad lent a hand, he often made a big production of it,
as if to say, this isn’t my job, it’s yours,
and I’m being magnanimous to help you with it.
Now, I love my parents, very much.
But what worked for them when I was little
doesn’t always work for me.
Yet that early conditioning runs so deep!
Against all my radical feminist leanings,
it turns out I had absorbed that lesson:
doing the dishes is the woman’s job.
It was incredibly hard for me to ask my partner for help with them.
But in the end I had to, because not asking
was making me feel bitterly resentful.
And bottling all that up was not only unfair to my partner,
who had no idea how I was feeling;
it was also simply exhausting to me.

I’ve found that when you’re really frustrated about something
and you can’t find a way to say it,
it is exhausting!
But if you give yourself some space to think
and ask yourself, how can I say what I need to say?
or talk about it with someone you trust—
maybe insight will come.
You’ll find the words.
You’ll find a way forward.
And with it comes renewed, liberating energy.

So don’t give up.
That night in the desert,
Jacob wrestled all night long with the mysterious stranger.
He wouldn’t let go,
because he was after a blessing.
I will not let you go, unless you bless me.

For his courage, he gets his blessing.
The strange maybe-angel man blesses him right there.
And Jacob says, in a voice filled with awe,
“I have seen the face of God, and I’m still here to tell the tale!”

In these dog days of summer,
you have been called to renew your energy to serve this community.
May you know both rest and joyful work,
and always, always,
great blessings in the struggle.

Amen.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Pass It On

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
June 19, 2011

A personal story from years ago:

Chapter 1. I’m ten years old.
It’s the weekend, nothing to do but have fun,
and my sister Amy and I
are lolling on the floor of the room we share.
Beige carpet, bare toes. Goofing off.
Sipping nice cool Seven-Ups with ice.
We’re talking about this and that.
For some reason, we start talking about breakfast cereals we like.
Golden Grahams, that’s a good one.
Fruit Loops. Count Chocula, yum!
Apple Jacks.
And I was about to say another one,
but unbeknownst to me, a big burp was welling up inside me,
and what came out was not
“Sugar Smacks,” as I meant to say,
but Sugar SmAAAAAAcks, as the big burp flew out of my mouth.
Oh, my, it was funny. A moment which has long been remembered!

Chapter 2:
I’m all grown up now.
The phone rings and I see it’s my sister calling.
I snuggle into the couch cushions as I pick up the phone.
“Hi, Aunt Laura, it’s Grace!” my little niece says on the other end.
After we say hi, she launches into the tale of the day.
She says, “Mommy told me a funny story today
about when you were going to say Sugar Smacks
but you said Sugar SmAAAAAAcks!”
And she laughs and laughs.
I laugh too, because it’s sooo funny
hearing her retell the infamous burp moment.

But, you know, I thought about it later,
and I found it really touched me to know
my sister is teaching her daughter the stories of our childhood,
even the ones that are just completely silly.
It touches me beyond measure to know
my niece loves the stories of what her mom and I used to do
when we were kids.
These little moments—it’s not like they’re anything so special,
except that maybe everything like that is special.
It sparkles, doesn’t it, those little moments,
the ordinary legacies each generation passes on to the next—
the stories, the shared silliness,
the everyday foundations of love that lasts way beyond a lifetime.

This Father’s Day, my present to all you dads in the room
is the poem we heard earlier,
Ric Masten’s poem about his adventures
with his granddaughter Cara.[1]
It’s so simple on the surface, isn’t it?
Ric and Cara take a walk in the woods,

up the “barking dog trail”
to the “creaky swings”
…[and] the “sneaky table”
…[and then] through the “witchy woods”…

Little kids know how to name things, don’t they?
So perfect, so personal.
When I was little, in the woods by our house
lay a fallen-over branch that looked kind of like a broomstick.
The perfect size for sitting on, legs dangling.
So of course we called it the “witch tree”!
The perfect place to pretend and imagine….

When we’re little, we invent whole worlds in our heads.
Even when we’re grown up, we do it too.

Remember in the book of Genesis,
the very first thing the very first human being does
is to name things.
God tells him, go ahead, don’t be shy,
name what you see.
And he does—
as do we all.

We all carry stories, memories, feelings about places
that maybe no one else knows about.
I think of a little stretch of woods I know—
in my mind it’s “the Robin Hood forest”
because one day when I was walking there
the light glinted just right through the leaves
and I could almost imagine leafy green men and women
moving silent through the trees…hushed, magical.
Ever since then, every time I go there,
I smile and give a silent nod to that lovely forest
that lives in my dreams.

I wonder if you have a place like that too,
or a memory, a story that conjures up a little bit of magic and grace.
And I wonder if maybe the best gift we can give our kids
is to share with them those places, the memories,
the stories that make our heart sing.
We don’t have to say or even know what they mean exactly.
The sharing is enough. It will speak.
Listen again to what we heard in the first reading.
St.-Exupéry speaks of “all of us that is wordless and full of wonder.”[2]
Wordless and full of wonder.
And he says:

We live, not by things, but by the meanings of things.
It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

We live by the meanings of things,
the magical worlds we carry around with us,
the real truths of our lives
that perhaps we may never, ever speak aloud.
Unless we share them,
those worlds may be lost when we are gone
and something that matters, something of beauty
will have been lost to the people we love best.

So don’t hold back with the people you love.
Pass on the crazy stories,
the things that make you laugh and cry
and feel part of this gorgeous, gorgeous, heartbreaking world.
Pass it on.
Pass it on,
fix it in your mind and pass it on,
even though,
even though we know none of it will last forever.

Ric says in his poem,

last summer
Cara and I collected
and polished these moments
leaving them along the path
like pebbles
to be used
in the distant future…

He calls his poem “Pebbles and Crumbs.”
The title comes from an old, old story.
Do you remember Hansel & Gretel,
the poor children lost in the fairy-tale witchy woods?
In one version, they have to go into the woods twice.
The first time, they leave pebbles along the path
so they can find their way home.
The pebbles last and last and guide them home.
But the next time, they don’t have any pebbles,
only crumbs. They drop the crumbs along the way,
hoping they’ll be there when it’s time to go home,
but of course the birds eat them.

it all becomes
a banquet for the crows,

as Ric reminds us.
Even those beautiful pebbles of memory
will turn into crumbs one day soon.
In the end they vanish into air.
Nothing lasts forever.
It’s all impermanence, all the way down.
Time keeps going and nothing lasts.
Even the dearest, most precious private memories
only last a generation or two.
But we love anyway!
We love anyway.

You know, Ric knew he was dying when he wrote this poem.
He found out in 1999 that he had prostate cancer.
He lived nine years after that.
He wrote about his cancer in poems and books.
He called his last book Going Out Dancing.
And what a way to go.
Going out dancing and loving
and keeping faith with everything he loved.

We could all do a lot worse.
Nothing lasts forever.
Ric says it so simply:

on some far away tomorrow…
these things, with Cara’s help,
can bring me back
to life again
and thankful as I am
for such life-extending crumbs
sadly I also know…
in a couple of generations
it all becomes
a banquet for the crows.

Nothing lasts forever.
But still, still we sing the songs
and remember the stories
and love like crazy.
That’s what we do. That’s what this life is.
We tell and retell our stories,
those crystallized moments we pull out of the fleeting stream of time,
those moments when something happens,
joy sparkles,
some wordless truth is revealed.

Friends, here in this community
I’ve been wondering how we are going to pass on
the stories of the years we’ve shared together.
I’m not dying and neither are you…
not yet, anyway, we trust.
But losing a minister (and for me, losing a congregation)
is a kind of death.
We won’t be able to be in relationship the way we’ve been.
Little things of great worth will be lost
unless we lift them up and commit them to memory
and pass them on.
So can we name together the good and bad,
the joys and sorrows?
I hope we will in the time we have left together.

We’ve known some good times.
I think back to the night we had a dance right here in the sanctuary,
a jazz band playing on the chancel, right here,
and we danced and danced. Such fun,
such lovely, lively energy to bring into this sacred space,
proof that joy and life are sacred.

I think of the small groups I’ve been a part of—
classes and conversations—and I remember moments
when we felt something shift in the circle—
someone shares something
and trust is deepened,
a burden is lifted,
we see each other in a new and gentler way.
Moments of holiness.

We’ve also known pain and confusion.
I think of the loved ones we’ve lost,
all the people we’re still mourning.
There is such holiness there too.
And I think of the times we have disagreed
and struggled to understand each other,
times we’ve made each other angry,
times we have been hard-pressed to honor each other,
and even here,
even here there is holiness in the struggle
to understand, to bridge the divide, to speak,
to love more fully.

And through it all runs the tender and sorrowful truth
that nothing lasts forever on this earth.
It’s all impermanence, all the way down.
Time keeps going.
But it’s OK, it truly is OK.
We pass on our love and our memories,
and it will be OK.

Just the other day I came across an old church newsletter column
by the interim minister who served you a few years back,
Sean Parker Dennison. I want to read you what he said
about impermanence:

Our time together is temporary, but that’s okay.
Things that don’t last long are often very precious.
We treasure the blossoms in their season,
the oh-so-short sweetness of our children’s baby days,
the sudden flare and disappearance of a shooting star.
If we make the most of them,
our days together will be a time we can cherish and then let go,
knowing they were days well spent.

Soon enough it’s all a banquet for the crows.
But here we are today,
this precious day we have been given.
Live it now.
Savor it now.

And I wonder, I wonder, if behind the truth that nothing lasts
lies a deeper truth that nothing is lost,
all is remembered and known and cherished,
sung by the spirit that made the stars
and the crows and the children.
Could it be?
Could it be?
A banquet indeed.

Peace to us all
and joy forever.
Amen.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Spirit-Filled

The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton

June 12, 2011

Friends, will you look around at one another?
I wonder if you see what I see—
your beautiful faces,
shining with life,
and the flowers you hold,
white and pink and yellow,
purple and gold,
the sweetness and life and gorgeousness of it all.

Very soon you and I will have to say goodbye to one another.
But I will never forget this moment,
here in this sanctuary which has held us through so much,
the community gathered to lift up our hopes
and our commitment to the future, whatever it brings.

It’s never easy for congregations and ministers to say goodbye.
But I want you to know, even though I need to go,
you are not being left by what matters most.
Ministers come and go because that’s what human beings do.
But the Spirit of Life and Love will never abandon you.
The spirit, the mystery, the reality—call it what you will—
the spirit that called this church into being
has been here
and is here
and will always be here with you.
Ministers are only human. We can’t stay forever.
But the spirit that gives life to this church will never leave you.
So, even now, even in this time of serious change,
I want you to prepare
for great blessings in your future.
I want you to trust that good things,
no, great things are on their way for you. 

Do you know, I got shivers when I realized what today was.
Today is Pentecost on the Christian calendar.
And Pentecost is the story
of how the very first Christian community
survived a huge change in leadership
and lived brilliantly into the future.

Luke tells the story in the New Testament book of Acts.
Jesus has come back from the dead.
It’s a miracle.
The disciples are overjoyed.
They never want him to leave.
They want him to stay and stay and stay.
But he can’t.
After just a few days with them, he has to go.
They don’t want him to leave.
But he tells them: don’t be afraid. Don’t worry.
Just be patient and wait for a while,
because the Holy Spirit is going to come to you
and give you power,
and you are going to witness for me all over the world.
And then he’s lifted up, way up into the air,
and he disappears into the clouds.

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic exit than that!
Now, we all know ministers aren’t Jesus.
We’re just people.
When it’s time to go,
no minister I know plans on taking off via cloud.
But as I think about our situation,
and how it is for any people when one of their leaders goes away,
I think there’s at least some connection here.
If that early congregation could survive the loss of Jesus himself,
I know we can figure out how to manage
getting from one regular human minister to another.

So let’s see how they did it.
Back to our story: Jesus has gone.
The disciples wait.
And the sun rises on the Jewish holy day of Pentecost,
fifty days after Passover and the Last Supper.
The disciples are in Jerusalem, all together.
Here’s what Luke says happens next:

Suddenly from heaven
there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,
and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,
and a tongue rested on each of them.
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in other languages,
as the Spirit gave them ability.[1]

Can you imagine?
It’s like something out of a fantasy novel,
the wind and the flames,
and though I know, I know, this is not one of those stories
that we have to take literally,
still I want you to imagine:

Imagine yourself as one of those disciples.
You’ve been waiting and longing for direction,
waiting for a sign to tell you what on earth you’re supposed to do.
And suddenly the wind sweeps in, whooshing all around.
A scrap of paper blows off the desk.
The breakfast dishes rattle on the table.
Your hair blows wild,
the dust kicks up into your eyes.
And now you’re squinting—what is that?—is the house on fire?
Fire above Peter’s head, my God,
and John, and all the rest of them—what’s going on?!
And now they’re staring at you too,
and everything goes silent for a long moment,
the wind still whipping through the room,
but the most tremendous stillness
and energy inside you vibrating and spinning just a little bit
and then more and more, rising up and up and up to your throat
and it’s lifting you up to your feet
and now you’re speaking, singing, you can hardly tell,
the words are just rushing out of you,
words of praise and power and devotion—
rushing and tumbling out—the feeling is incredible,
you’re lifted up, carried by this incredible Spirit-energy,
you’re vibrating and singing with it,
and slowly, slowly you come back to yourself,
washing back to yourself,
stillness,
stillness.

Can you imagine?

Now Luke takes up the story again. He tells us,
Jerusalem was home to Jews from every nation in the known world:
people from Egypt, Libya, Rome,
Mesopotamia, Judea,
Cappadocia and Pontus in Turkey—
Jewish people from every place in the Roman Empire
lived here in Jerusalem.
And all those people had grown up speaking different languages.
You hear a lot of different languages here in Stockton—
Jerusalem was just the same, even more so.
Now the disciples were from Galilee,
just a little part of what we call Israel now.
They only spoke their own language.
But now those disciples
taken over by the Spirit,
were speaking all these different languages,
from Egypt, Turkey, Rome, every place.
The people gathered round, “amazed and astonished.”[2]
They heard those Galileans talking to them in their own languages.
Imagine if we all went out and started speaking not just in English,
but in Spanish, Cambodian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hmong,
Japanese, Chinese—every language in our city,
imagine if all of a sudden each one of us could speak a different one
and we all went out and started telling people about our faith
in their own languages.
This is what happened in Jerusalem.
The crowd is amazed.
They don’t understand. It seems like a miracle!
The energy is building in the crowd.

But then somebody laughs in a mean voice and says,
those guys over there,
they’re just drunk!
The crowd hesitates.
They don’t know what to think.
Are the disciples for real?
Should we listen to them?
Maybe they are just drunk…though it all seems pretty weird…

And then.
And then the leadership moment happens.
Peter steps forward—
Peter of whom Jesus has said,
You are my rock—
Peter steps forward and says,
Everyone, listen to me!
These people are not drunk.
It’s only 9:00 in the morning!
They’re not drunk.
No, what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing,
is a prophecy being fulfilled right here.
Remember what the prophet Joel said:

‘…God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams….’[3]

Peter says, this is what’s happening.
Jesus is gone now,
but here is the Spirit
filling the people who loved him,
the people who followed him.
This is what’s happening now.
The Spirit is working in all of us,
not just one, not just a few,
but all of us.
Our children will prophesy.
Our young people will see visions,
our old people will dream dreams.

This is what Pentecost is all about.
The community that loses its primary leader
is given power and wisdom and insight to go forward.
For years the disciples have been following Jesus,
listening to him,
trying to understand him,
but he was always the one with the power.
He was the one with the vision.
The disciples were just along for the ride.
When Jesus left, they were discouraged and fearful.
They had to take time to grieve.
But now things have changed.
The disciples have had an experience of spiritual power.
The spirit has entered them
and given them the power to speak for themselves.
It has charged them to go out
and tell the world what they have experienced,
to tell the world about their faith.
Everybody is charged to be a visionary and a leader.
And that small group
went out and built a movement
that has transformed billions of lives from that day to this.

This is why I say to you:
No leader can stay forever.
But the spirit that gives life to this church will never leave you.
I want you to trust in your future.
Because great things are on their way for you.
Beautiful adventures are coming to you.
Can I teach you a song that’s been guiding me in these last days?
It’s very simple; it goes like this:
We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
In the midst of sorrows and joys,
We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
In the midst of uncertainty and confusion,
We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
And in the midst of change and challenge,
We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
We give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.

For in the days to come,
you will be challenged.
You now have the immense privilege and responsibility
to chart a new future,
to figure out, who are we now?
Who do we hope to be?
And most importantly, who must we be
to remain true to our faith and our vision?
You will be challenged and changed, without a doubt.
But you will carry forward everything good
from what has been, always.
You will stretch and grow and learn.
And you will be blessed forever.
May the spirit of wisdom and peace,
justice and passion,
life and love, be with you always.

Amen.