***

Transformation!
Such a beautiful word.
It sounds like hope, possibility,
the promise that we don’t have to stay the way we are now.
We don’t have to be stuck.
We can change.
We can be different.
Such a beautiful promise. We need it.

But then there’s the kind of transformation we don’t choose
and we maybe don’t like very much.

I was 26 the day I discovered that I too was subject to aging.
I mean, I had known, intellectually,
that human beings get old, if they’re lucky,
and eventually they die,
and I was a human being, ergo, therefore….

But I hadn’t really known it in my gut until that afternoon.
The day started out great.
I’d been happily browsing in a bookstore with my friend.
On our way out I walked through a beautiful shaft of sunlight
streaming in through the window,
and my friend said, “Oh, look, you’ve got a gray hair!”
What?!?
At first I thought she was joking, ha ha!
But she yanked it out for me,
and there it was, shining up at me: my first gray hair.
Ugh. I was not happy.
I thought, “I’m only 26! Why me?”
Inside I was freaking out.

But the evidence was right in front of my eyes.
A gray hair.
Another darn transformation experience,
foisted upon me whether I wanted it or not.

Today I have rather more gray hairs,
and if I’m lucky I will get to have rather more over the years.
Now, I’m sure to some of you, I seem like just a young sprout.
I’m 42, which means I know a little about getting older
but still have a long way to go, if I’m lucky.
So I’m feeling a little trepidation and a lot of humility in front of you
as I set out to talk to you about the unbidden transformation process
we call aging, and also death, and how we can make some peace with it.
I know lots of you know a lot more about this than I do,
because you’ve lived it.
I bow to you and I thank you
for being willing to listen to the ruminations of a relatively young sprout!

I do know feelings of sadness and fear around aging hit us all
at different times.
It’s not just grownups—kids confront aging issues,
the fear and ambivalence that comes with growing up.
Making the transition to middle school,
or high school, or college or working,
that’s a huge deal and it can be very scary, though exciting too.
Transformation, ready or not!
Of course as we get older the issues change.
Lately I’ve had a couple of lines from a Bonnie Raitt song running through my head. She sings:
I see my folks, they’re getting old, I watch their bodies change
I know they see the same in me, and it makes us both feel strange

That’s from her song “Nick of Time.”
And isn’t that just how it is—if we’re lucky?
I feel so blessed to have both my parents still living.
But I can’t deny, it’s very tender to watch them getting older.
We live far away, so I only get to see them once or twice a year,
and I’ve noticed these last few years
I have a younger version of them in my head still,
so when I see them in person,
there’s this jarring, very tender moment of “Oh, they look older.”
And I’m sure that happens for them too when they see me.
The last time I saw my sister,
she mentioned something about seeing gray in my hair (there it is again!)
and there was another little inner moment for me
of “Oh, I guess it shows—
I guess it’s not just me who’s noticing it any more.”

And again, there’s a lot of tenderness there,
but a little bit of pain too,
some sorrow, just feeling nostalgic and sad
in the knowledge that we can’t ever go back.
Everybody knows people get older;
as long as they’re alive they keep getting older
and there’s no going back.
But there’s a big difference between knowing it intellectually
and knowing it viscerally because we’ve had to live it ourselves
and see it in the ones we love,
gray hair by gray hair,
wrinkle by wrinkly,
creaky joint by creaky joint.
Transformation whether we will or no.

And of course aging is child’s play
when you stack it up against the really big transformation we all face,
soon or late, which is death.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I think about dying,
I get scared. Sad, too, but more scared than sad.
Because we don’t know what’s coming.
For all our intelligence and science and faith and intuition,
we don’t know what death is.
None of us do for sure.
I don’t much like the feeling of heading inexorably
toward this huge big thing I don’t understand.
And we don’t get to opt out!
There’s a lot of emotion that goes along with that. Sadness, fear. Worry.

But of course those very emotions—the sadness, the fear, the worry—
are exactly what invites us to change—
to open ourselves up to spiritual transformation.
I don’t wish those painful emotions on anybody.
But on the other hand, isn’t it true that pain can be a motivator for change?
What I mean is, sometimes you can be going along
with a situation in your life, and things are OK, not great but OK,
and then the situation takes a turn for the worse
and it gets really uncomfortable, painful even.
And it is only that extreme discomfort that finally motivates you
to get up and make a change,
to take the steps you need to take to make things not just OK,
but really good.
Positive transformation.
Maybe it’s a shift inside us,
maybe it’s a change that needs to happen in the outer world.
I do believe this kind of pain is the wellspring of all social justice work.
We work for change because the current situation is too painful.
Right?
I love the way the writer Debbie Ford puts it:
“Transformation is…finding the gift of a negative experience,
seeking the light in the darkness.”[1]

Pema Chödrön points to one of the gifts I think we can find
in working with our fears—about aging, for sure,
and, really, in any kind of difficult experience.
We heard her say in the reading today,
it’s natural to experience aging and change as frustrating,
like something to stave off, a problem to be fixed.
But if we relax into what’s happening,
if we can sit with it
and just be aware of our thoughts and feelings around it,
maybe we can open up into a deeper realization that we’re not alone.
“[W]e begin to understand,” she says,
“that we’re not the only one who can’t keep it all together.
We no longer believe that there are people
who have managed to avoid uncertainty.”[2]
It’s just how life is.

And I think that kind of awareness brings with it such a softening,
a compassion and a tenderness
toward other people and what they’re going through too,
a willingness to be kind.
Positive transformation, spiritual transformation that brings
so much more love and compassion into the world.
The fruits of suffering and difficulty.
It’s like that wonderful quotation you might have heard:
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
This is important.

But, listen, I worry that I’m getting too serious about all this.
Because there are some truly wonderful gifts
that come with all this aging business.
A bunch of us at this week’s Lunch with the Ministers named some:
The ambivalent gift of children growing up and leaving home.
The pure gift of relaxation that comes if we can retire from paid work
and enjoy the spaciousness of our lives.
The freedom to volunteer and serve in meaningful ways.
The chance to mentor younger people.

And of course the learning that just keeps on coming.
One of us said, just the other day she was taking a walk
and had a marvelous little epiphany.
As she savored this moment of insight that had come to her,
she thought, “Boy, I wish I’d had this insight years ago!”
But her second thought was,
“Wouldn’t it be sad if I didn’t keep learning
and having new insights as I go?”
I love that!

Another of the gifts of aging for me has been very ironic.
As I get older, I have found that I’m becoming a little bit obsessed
with wondering about what happens after we die
and trying to figure it out, or at least make a good guess!
Now, you can laugh,
because of course nobody can really figure it out in advance!
However, I certainly have found death and dying to be a topic
that provokes not only anxiety, which it certainly does,
but also curiosity.
Do you ever find that?
Do you ever get just wildly curious about what’s coming?
Sometimes I just think
we are all going to be in for such an exciting adventure!

And that curiosity is what really helps me.
I think curiosity is actually one of the most important keys
to living well in the face of change and transformation.
In the face of death, the biggest transformation we know,
it’s curiosity about what might come next
that really helps me.
I love what Jim Kelsey had to say in our second reading.
He says, “when we…focus on things in our lives that are passing away,
we get scared, we get anxious…
and when we focus on things that are coming [into being],
we get excited, we get imaginative, we get optimistic….”[3]
I think that is true, at least for some of us,
even when it comes to death itself.

I’d like to go out on a limb and share a little bit with you
about how my own curiosity is leading me.
Everyone here has their own speculations, their own guesses and intuitions,
so please take what I have to say with a very, very large grain of salt.
I do want to share with you my current intuition, or call it a best guess, about maybe, maybe, maybe what happens.
You’ve probably guessed I’m one of those people who do think,
or seriously hope anyway, that our awareness or consciousness
goes on in some way after we die.
Transformation, here we come! That’s my hope, anyway.
And I take a lot of hope from the Universalist side of our tradition
that says, whatever death is, it’s OK, you don’t have to worry;
it’s not going to be bad or scary. It’ll be fine.

So the particulars of my own little wondering about what it might be like,
I got from an ancient Roman guy named Boethius.
Do you know about him?
Boethius was a philosopher and a prominent politician in Italy,
around the year 500.
After years of public service, one of his rivals accused him of treason,
and he was thrown into prison and eventually executed.
While he was in prison, he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy,
all about all the philosophical and spiritual reasons he shouldn’t despair
even though he was never going to get out of prison.
It was actually the most influential book throughout the Middle Ages,
and it’s a wonderful read.

The part I like best is toward the end.
Boethius believes there is a creative power behind the universe,
which he calls God, and he says,
you know how people experience their lives as past, present, future?
Well, he says, it’s different for God.
The nature of God’s consciousness
is that God experiences everything in the universe—
every person, every creature, every rock, every tree,
every star and mote of stardust—
and everything that has ever happened, the whole sweep of time—
God experiences all of that all at once,
everything and everyone simultaneously present.
So time doesn’t really exist.
Time is just an artifact of our limited human consciousness.
This is kind of wild, isn’t it? Let me read you his own words:

…[The knowledge of God] transcends all temporal change….
It embraces all the infinite recesses of past and future
and views them in the immediacy of its knowing
as though they are happening in the present….
God sees all things in [an] eternal present.[4]

That’s just about the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.
It makes me feel so hopeful.
Of course I can’t prove that this is objectively true, but I find such hope
in the idea that maybe we come out of a consciousness
to which all time and experience,
everything that is and everything that everyone has ever experienced,
is known and held and fully present, all at once,
with infinite compassion and joy and love—
so that my life and my parents’ lives and the lives of everyone I love
and everyone who has ever been and ever will be
are preserved, not lost,
forever present in the universal mind of which I am a part.
I find that amazing.
It’s an enormous comfort to think that maybe things are not lost
as I work through the grief that arises about aging and loss and death.

And it helps me to imagine and believe that we really are connected—
this idea that all of our experiences
and our thoughts and emotions and yearnings
are not only known
but actually all part of the same thing,
the same giant universal thing that is all that exists,
and that we could all know each other in this deep and full way
is quite extraordinary and wonderful to me.

I don’t know if this will speak to you.
I do wish for you a marvelous curiosity about these big questions,
and tentative answers that bring you peace.

Well, I guess the gray hairs have been worth it.
For me, I do feel that my anxieties and fears about getting older
are turning into a gateway to what I hope is a little bit more wisdom,
certainly more peace.
May the difficult transformations of aging,
gray hairs and wrinkles and creaky knees and all,
lead us toward the inner transformation
that blesses every day we are given.

Amen.

***

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it.
Do not demand immediate results
but rejoice that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle
without counting the costs.

Words spoken by a lifelong Universalist who loved her faith
and believed in the great message that all people are precious.
A Universalist who loved her faith so much
that she was willing to fight obstacle after obstacle
to become an ordained minister—
the first woman in the United States
to be fully ordained by a denomination, in fact.
A minister and a tireless worker for the right of women to vote
for over fifty years.
This was Olympia Brown.
She spoke these words in 1920,
just one year after women had finally won the right to vote.
She was 85 years old.
She had been working for women’s suffrage since 1864.
She was a woman who knew something
about not demanding immediate results,
staying faithful to a great true principle,
working and sacrificing.

Today I want to share Olympia Brown’s story with you.
You know I’m passionate about our religious history,
the people who have come before us,
what they thought, what they cared about,
why it matters today.
Olympia Brown is one of those ancestors
who have meant a lot to our faith and to me personally over the years.
I do feel a personal connection to her.
I was an intern minister at one of the churches she served,
what we now call the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church
in Racine, Wisconsin.
And we have the same birthday: January 5, for those of you keeping score.

Olympia Brown as a young woman

Olympia Brown was born into a world
that told her women should stay home,
or maybe teach.
Definitely not lead.
Definitely not take part in the governance of community and nation.
God forbid, vote!
She was born into a world that told her
she had no business caring about the world beyond her home.
No business dreaming about making a difference in her world.
No business having a self that mattered.
But that young girl, born in 1835 in the far western land of Michigan—
that young girl knew she was meant to be more than that.
She wanted an education.
She wanted to make a difference.
She wanted to be a leader and a minister.
Can you imagine?
How do you even hold that possibility in your mind,
when everyone around you is saying, no, be small, be invisible?

Thank goodness for her parents. They believed in her.
Out there in a tiny frontier settlement,
Olympia Brown’s father built the first schoolhouse in their community
and roped all his neighbors into helping pay the teacher’s salary.[1]
So she got to go to school.
When she decided she wanted to go to college,
a very unusual step for a girl in those days, her parents supported her.
She went first to Mount Holyoke, and then Antioch College.
She actually hated Mount Holyoke; at that time it was very strict
and rule-bound. You could get punished for looking out the window!
And the chaplains tried to convert her
to their hellfire-and-brimstone type of Christianity.
She hated her time there, but that was when she really claimed
the Universalism of her mother, the faith she had been raised with—
the faith that God loved everybody and no one would go to hell.

At Antioch, Olympia really came into her own.
She got involved with the women’s rights movement—
this was in the 1850s now.
One day she went to the committee who arranged for visiting speakers
at Antioch, men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley.
She loved hearing them speak, but she asked the committee,
why do you never bring women speakers to campus?
The chair replied,
“There are no women speakers comparable to the men we’ve selected.”
Oh, my. Olympia said, “That’s ridiculous! What about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, all the heroes of the women’s movement?”
The committee chair said to her,
“We can’t do that. Who would come to hear a woman speak?”[2]
Well. Olympia took matters into her own hands
and brought one of her heroes to campus:
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a woman minister!
She’d been ordained by her congregation in New York,
and though her denomination never recognized her ordination,
still, there she was: a woman minister!

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Olympia was so inspired. She too felt called to ministry,
and to see a woman who had done it—
nothing was going to turn her back now.
It took a while, but she found a seminary to take her, St. Lawrence.
In her acceptance letter, the president wrote,
“It is unlikely that there will ever be any other [women ministers.]
…I do not think women are called to the ministry,
but I leave that between you and the Great Head of the Church.”[3]

She made it through seminary.
After much effort she convinced the Universalist association to ordain her.
And in June of 1863, almost exactly 150 years ago,
she became the first woman in the United States
ever to be ordained by a denomination.

Olympia went on to serve churches in New England,
including Bridgeport, CT, where her most famous parishioner was…
have you heard? P.T. Barnum! Yes, he was a staunch Universalist
and a great fan of the Rev. Olympia Brown.

Olympia Brown in middle age

Eventually she ended up in Racine, Wisconsin,
helping to revive a dying congregation—
that same congregation I had the good fortune to serve
over a hundred years later. She did good work there.

And all the way along, she was a huge presence
in the movement for women’s rights and women’s suffrage.
She did lecture tours promoting the right to vote for women—
hundreds of lectures all over the country.
Actually Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
begged her to give up parish ministry and become a full-time activist.
She said no—she loved ministry too much—
but she never stopped working for women’s rights.
In 1913 she started working with the radicals Alice Paul and Lucy Burns,
who organized the march on Washington we commemorated
just last week.
Olympia wasn’t at that march, but she was there in 1917,
protesting in front of the White House in freezing rain—at age 82.

The 19^th amendment giving women the right to vote finally passed,
as you know, in 1919.
In 1920, Olympia Brown was 85 years old.
She had led congregations and campaigns for 60 years.
That year she voted in her first presidential election.

Olympia Brown toward the end of her life

Stand by this faith, she told the Racine congregation in that same year.[4]
And in those words I hear a lifetime
of devotion to her religion, her call, and her cause.
From the young girl who burned to be so much more
than her world would let her be
to the national leader of many decades,
Olympia Brown poured out her life for what she knew was right.

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it.
Do not demand immediate results
but rejoice that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle
without counting the costs.

May it be so indeed.

***

Generosity.
It’s so basic, the act of giving,
being ready to give,
taking pleasure in giving—
it’s so basic, it’s hard to imagine how we could live together without it.
Last month our theme was love—the force that connects us,
that which draws us toward one another.
And of course generosity is the next-door neighbor of love.
Because if you love someone,
almost by definition you want them to be happy, right?
And if you can give to them in a way that brings them happiness,
you just naturally want to do that.
Love naturally calls forth generosity. It just happens.

So, in theory, the better we get at practicing love for all beings,
the more fully we realize our capacity to love,
automatically we are going to become more generous.
Because generosity is just love reaching out.
As Mother Teresa reminds us,
love without reaching out has no meaning.
It has to be put into action.
It sounds so simple.
If we can just get better at love,
if we can just really love our neighbor,
we’ll get better at generosity
and eventually so many of the plagues we human beings
inflict on each other will just go away: poverty, hatred, war.

Right?

Well, maybe it’s not so simple.

Except it is, actually.
It is that simple.
If we all got good enough at love and generosity,
we would not say no when someone asked us for money for food
any more than we would deny ourselves a sip of cool water on a hot day.
We would not declare war on anyone else,
any more than we would chop off our own hands.

It actually is that simple.
If this, then that.
That’s the simple part.
What’s complicated is all the barriers and obstacles and defenses
we put up in our minds and hearts
to stop us from living the way
we really can see would be a better way to live.
We want to be loving, we want to be generous.
But we get stuck with all these habits of mind and heart that trip us up:
fears and anxieties and worries.
In a culture of too much work and too much busyness,
we struggle to be generous with our time.
In a culture of materialism and feeling poor no matter how much we have,
we struggle to be generous with our money.
And in a culture of division and rabid partisanship,
we struggle to be generous with our minds and hearts.
At least I know I do.
I’m speaking as a student, not a master.
We’re fellow students on the path, trying to help each other.

So: time, money, minds and hearts. These are the big three as I see it.
We get so tangled up.
But there is hope!
Today I want to suggest a few tools
to start de-tangling all that stuff
that keeps us from being as generous as we want to be.
Simple stuff, small spiritual practices.
Easy to remember, I hope.
Simple, everyday stuff, working on ourselves in service to the larger goal,
the giant prize of universal love and generosity,
an end to war, an end to poverty and hate.
The cynic in each of us is rolling his eyes—
like that’s never going to happen.
Maybe not.
But can we live as though it might?
And can we live as though what we do ourselves,
the way we live and practice every day, can help or hinder?
Because that’s true for sure.
What we do matters.
The way we live matters.

So, practicing.
First of all, being generous with our time.
This is a tough one for so many of us.
We’re busy, we’re overcommitted, stretched thin.
And yet we want to be generous with our time.
We want to make time for our family, who needs us;
our friends, who need us too.
We want to do our work in a way that feels generous—
we don’t want to just rush around at work checking items off on our lists;
we want to make a contribution, right?
We want to do good work that matters. We all want that.
We want to be generous with our presence and our time.
But it gets hard, especially on very busy days.

So I want to share two simple practices
to help us be generous with our time.
One has to do with a tough one for me: interruptions.
Does anyone else find it hard to be interrupted while you’re working?
You’re focused, trying to crank stuff out, finally making some progress,
and the phone rings,
or somebody knocks on the door,
and you want to respond with a smile, but inside, you’re like, “What?!”
The poet Kabir asks us to live with open hands,
but we close our hands: my stuff, my time.
Our impatience grabs us
and keeps us from responding generously
when, if we stopped and thought about it,
we would remember that there on the other end of the phone
or in the doorway is another human being,
another fellow creature doing their best, just as you are.

What we need is an easy practice to remind us
that an interruption is just a fellow creature who needs our help,
an invitation to open our hands.
I like to use a mantra,
a little saying that helps you get in a different state of mind.
So, when the phone rings or I hear a knock on the door,
I might say something like,
May I be a blessing in this moment.
May I be a blessing in this moment.
Taking a deep, mindful breath is good too.
It helps me get into a more generous space,
so I can respond the way I really want to.
You can make up your own mantra, any phrase that helps you.
May this encounter bring peace,
or May I awaken to the beauty of this moment,
anything that helps you.
Write it down if you want, whatever you need to remember it.
Find a mantra. Use it, any time you feel impatient.

That’s one practice I recommend around generosity and time.
Another practice is a way to help figure out
the big picture of how we want to commit our time.
The other day, in our Leadership Circle meeting at UUCF,
we were talking about how hard it can be to say no
when someone asks you to take on a volunteer role,
and you can see it needs doing, but your heart’s just not in it.
Let me share with you what we came up with at the Leadership Circle.
It’s very simple:
When someone asks you to volunteer to do something and you’re not sure,
take some time and ask yourself, how will I feel while I’m doing this thing?
Do I see myself feeling stressed and resentful as I’m doing the work?
Will it force me to short-change the other commitments
I’ve made already—family, friends, work, other volunteer stuff?
If that’s how it is, you should probably say no.
But if you imagine yourself feeling joyful and generous
as you’re doing the work,
and you have space in your life for something new,
why not say yes?
That’s the practice: when you get an invitation,
imagine yourself doing the work.
Notice how you feel.
If you feel stressed and resentful, just say no.
But if you feel generous and happy, why not say yes?
Imagine—notice—decide. That’s it.

It’s also not a bad idea to try this
when you’re trying to decide about giving money away.
I do want to talk some about money and generosity, by the way,
but let me say right up front: I’m not going to talk about fundraising today.
If you leave here moved to give to our Reach campaign, that’s great.
If you leave ready to bid wildly at the auction next week, great, blessings!
But that’s not really what I’m trying to do today.
I’m also not going to talk much today about the major interfaith practices
for cultivating generosity, wonderful as they are—
like the five pillars of Islam, one of which is charitable giving.
Do you remember the words of Mohammad:
What are the most excellent things you can do?
Feed the hungry and help the afflicted.
Or the practice of tithing.
I preached about tithing here last year,
so a lot of you have heard what I think about that.
I could go on and on about giving money as a spiritual practice.
It’s changed my life for the better.
Suffice it to say, I completely believe in deliberate, systematic
giving money away as a spiritual practice to cultivate generosity.
It’s so powerful.
I would be glad to talk with anyone who wants to know more.

But today I want to go in a different direction.
Someone in our congregation recently shared with me
a challenge they are facing around being generous with money.
They gave a fairly substantial sum of money
to a relative who was struggling.
They tried to give in a spirit of love…
but, honestly, they told me, it’s been hard
watching the relative spend money on things they wouldn’t—
making bad choices, in their opinion—
and feeling like their money is underwriting those bad choices.
Such a tough one.

It’s so complicated,
this question of how we can be generous to people we care about
when we don’t think they’re making good choices.
It can get pretty serious.
I’m thinking about all the people I know
who have been affected by addiction to drugs or alcohol.
Stuff like that has caused so much pain
as families struggle to figure out how to support their loved ones
in ways that don’t feed the addiction.

This question of how and whether to be generous to someone we love
when we don’t approve of what they’re doing—
it’s just so tough.
I don’t pretend to have it all figured out.
I do think the best we can do is, first, decide what you’re willing to do,
make sure you feel good about whatever you give when you give it.
Go back to that practice of imagining how you’re going to feel
if you say yes to giving.
Be smart and make sure it feels right before you give.
But after that, if you choose to give, you have to let it go.
You just can’t control what people are going to do with a gift
once you’ve given it. You have to let it go.
This is hard, but what helps me with letting go
is remembering we just never know what the long-term results
of our actions will be.
Every action ripples out, like a pebble in a pond,
and changes things far beyond our knowing.
Maybe it doesn’t look so good now,
but down the road you have no idea what the ultimate effect is going to be.
Nobody is going to know until the end of history itself.
We cannot predict the ultimate results of our actions.
All we can do is our best in the moment.
I hope that doesn’t seem too esoteric.
To make it simpler, you might think of it as,
Be smart. Let it go. You never know!
I hope that helps.

And if the letting go and having faith part is just not working,
the best I’ve got is falling back on practicing generosity of mind and heart.
What I mean by that is an attitude of openness to other people—
being nonjudgmental, loving, compassionate;
giving people the benefit of the doubt,
trusting that people are doing the best they can.

Mary Katherine is going to take us deeper into this kind of generosity
in just a couple of weeks, so for now I just want to share with you
one last practice that helps me with this one.
Simple but maybe life-changing:
the practice of Buddhist metta (loving-kindness) meditation.
It’s very simple—another kind of mantra practice.
There are different variations of the words,
but the version I like best is the one in our paperback hymnal, #1031.
You say,
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be whole.
You can use it any time you’re trying to be more generous and open.

The hard-core advanced practice
is when you’re angry or upset with a particular person,
and you work on opening your heart by wishing them well.
This may be challenging, but take courage from the words of St. Francis:
where there is hate, let me bring love.
Not someone else, but me. Let me bring love.
So you imagine the person in your mind and say to them,
May you be filled with loving kindness.
May you be well.
May you be peaceful and at ease.
May you be whole.
You might have to do it 10 times or more before you actually mean it.
But that’s the point—that’s when the practice really bears fruit,
when you mean it.
You don’t have to like the person, but you can still wish them well
as a fellow human being who is doing their best, just as you are.

Because it really is about touching our common humanity, right?
Remembering that no one wants to be in pain.
Everyone wants to be happy.
Everyone wants to be safe and well.
Remember that larger goal,
the giant vision of universal love and generosity,
an end to war, an end to poverty and hate.
The only way to get there is person by person, step by step.

So are you in?

OK, let’s go!

May it be so.
Amen.

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.

But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.

But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

***

Do you know the story of Babette’s Feast?
It’s a strange story, very beautiful, by the Danish writer Isak Dinesen.
Two sisters live in a small town in rural Norway
in the latter years of the 19^th century.
They are the daughters of a clergyman, the founder of a small sect
whose members, we are told,

renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem toward which they were longing.[1]

For many years the sisters have devoted their lives
to caring for their neighbors in need.
They dress in somber gray or black.
Their food is plain fish and plain bread.
Every penny they can spare, they give to the poor.
For many years it has been so.

They have a maid named Babette, a Frenchwoman,
a political refugee from the barricades of the Paris Commune.
When she first came to them, she bore a letter from an old friend
saying, “Babette can cook.”
They’ve taken her in.
For twelve years now Babette has kept house for them.
She cooks—plain fish, plain bread.
Sometimes the sisters come upon her unawares
and find her brooding, staring off into space,
lost in distant memories, they suspect.
But she does her work simply and well.
She has just one little quirk:
every year she buys a ticket in the French lottery.
The years pass.
And after twelve years, one day a letter comes: she has won the lottery!
A fortune: 10,000 francs.
Enough money, surely, for her to return to France
after so many years in this cold, foreign place.
Enough money to do whatever she wants.
The very first thing she proposes to the sisters
is that she will pay for a dinner
to celebrate the anniversary of their dear father’s birthday,
a dinner she herself will prepare:
“a real French dinner, for this one time.”[2]
The sisters are not quite sure what a real French dinner might entail.
But it seems likely to be something other than plain fish and plain bread.

***

We’ve heard another story today which is not unrelated:
the Gospel story of the anointing at Bethany.
This story comes right at the end of Jesus’s life.
Mark tells us Jesus knows he’s going to die soon.
But the disciples don’t seem to understand.
One day he’s having dinner with friends in Bethany,
a little town a mile or two from Jerusalem.
And here comes this woman bearing this beautiful alabaster jar.
Who knows how she came to have it.
Maybe it’s an old family treasure?
Maybe she had money enough to buy it?
We don’t know anything about her except that she comes bearing this gift.

Do you know what alabaster looks like?
It’s a kind of mineral; when you polish it,
it takes on this beautiful shimmery translucent tone,
orange-beige-brown, almost like if you could turn the earth right into glass.
And sealed inside this beautiful shimmering alabaster jar
is the most precious perfumed oil on the face of the earth.
It came from far away, from the mountains of the Himalayas.
It smelled like heaven and cost a fortune.
Literally: the story tells us it cost 300 denarii,
as much as an average person would make in an entire year.
And look:
the woman comes up to Jesus and breaks open the bottle
and pours out the oil onto his head, all of it, every last drop,
every precious drop poured out onto the body of this living man
who was beginning to prepare for his death.

Did she do it for love?
He didn’t ask for it, but there it was:
this gift of love, beyond extravagant, completely over the top,
holding nothing back,
everything poured out to honor and bless and love
the spirit she saw in him.

Well, the friends waste no time:
the oil is still dripping out as they start to reproach her.
They say, Why did you waste all that money?
You could have given it to the poor.

But Jesus says, no, she has done a beautiful thing.
She has anointed my body for burial.
And wherever my story is told,
what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.
 
It’s so strange. All along, Jesus has taught us to care for the poor,
to give what we have to feed the hungry.
The prophets teach it and Jesus proclaims it:
Give to anyone who asks,
give it all away to those who are in need.
Give everything away, that you might be free.
But now we hear him saying something
that feels different and strange.
The poor you will always have with you.
But this woman has done a beautiful thing,
pouring out this precious oil: it isn’t wrong; it is worthy of honor and praise.

Mary Katherine preached on this story last fall,
at the installation of a colleague at one of our neighbor congregations.
She told us that, in her imagination,
this story is about the love we offer one another.
She imagined aloud that Jesus must have been “grateful…
and relieved to be loved as he was preparing for his death.”
And she reminded us that all of us need to love and be loved
when our time comes.
To me this is a very beautiful and tender reading.
I think it should probably be a book, or a poem,
something we can hold onto and come back to.
I would like to have such a book near me when I am afraid.

But one of the great gifts of these ancient stories
is the way they speak to us so differently.
I want to tell you about the gift this story is giving me
as it lives in my own heart.
The voice of the disciples, the one that says,
You should have given that money to the poor—
You should have done what we think is right…
You should have done more,
You should have…
You should have…
The voice of duty, not without truth or compassion for others,
but also the voice of control and demand,
the voice that thinks it knows what you should be doing
and how you should be living your life.

I don’t know about you,
but all my life I have been all too familiar with all those voices
telling me what I should do,
what I should be,
what I should love.
I’ve found those voices hard to resist
even when my heart is telling me otherwise.

Years ago, I held out against my call to ministry for a long time
because I heard so many voices saying what ministers were supposed to be.
What I heard was, they were supposed to be always giving, always good—
and good in that boxed-in, narrow, dutiful way
that I think Mary Oliver means
when she tells us, You do not have to be good!

Do you know her poem “Wild Geese”?
It starts like this:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

You do not have to be good.
And I knew that I wasn’t “good” like that.
I wasn’t able to build my life around total selflessness
in the way I thought I would have to.
For a long time I told myself, I wasn’t good enough for ministry
because I had never joined the Peace Corps and given all my savings
to help starving children on the other side of the world. You know?
I thought that was the only way to be good.
I deeply honored the people I saw around me
who were serving in ways like that.
I would have done it myself, but my heart wouldn’t let me.
My heart wanted beauty and joy and life abundant,
and I didn’t feel it there. I tried, but my heart kept whispering to me,
that’s for someone else. That isn’t your path.
I could see the beauty in a life utterly devoted to service and justice work,
but I knew it didn’t belong to me.

For a long time I thought that meant I was a lesser person.
I wasn’t good enough to do what I longed to do.
I didn’t understand, back then, that the people who choose a life of service
do it out of love. They do it because it feeds them too.
It took me a long time to discover
that it is not wrong to let ourselves love what we love.
There is a mystery that makes us all beautifully different,
with different hearts and minds called to different work,
and the goal for each precious one of us is to become ourselves,
to live out our own work, our own call, our own life abundant,
not someone else’s but our own.
To pour out our hearts, our minds, our lives
for whatever it is that we cannot help but love.
It’s not wrong; it’s how we’re made.
I don’t think it can be wrong to love what we are made to love.

And in this story of the anointing
I hear Jesus’s words as an affirmation:
yes, bring your gifts,
your gifts, not someone else’s but yours;
bring it all, pour it out,
because it’s all about the giving;
it doesn’t matter where and how your heart draws you to give,
just give that
and know that you and your gifts are welcome.
You are needed.
You are beautiful.

And yet there is another way of looking at the story,
a challenge that I find I can’t ignore.
Let’s get practical for a minute
and look at it from the point of view of those friends of Jesus,
the ones who watched as the woman broke the beautiful jar
and poured the precious oil over Jesus’s head—
like pouring money down the drain.
The story tells us that oil was worth a full year’s wages
for an average worker.
In the United States, the average full-time salary is about $50,000.00.[3]
Imagine I have $50,000 right here in my hand and I just rip it up,
gone, just like that.
I wish that money were real!
What we could have done with it—
so many people we could have fed….
On the eve of our annual Hypothermia shelter week,
I don’t have to tell you how much need there is right here,
how many people are cold and hungry
while others walk in plenty.
So it can’t be right to waste money like that, can it?
I don’t think it’s right to hear this story as Jesus literally saying,
“I love that someone just blew $50,000 on scented oil for me!”
Of course not!

If you read the story like that, it’s terrible.
It undermines everything we believe
about justice and compassion and helping our neighbors,
everything we believe and teach and live for.
It can’t be that.

But, you know, the American labor movement used to sing,
Give us bread, but give us roses.
Hearts starve as well as bodies;
give us bread, but give us roses.
So you might say, this story is about the roses:
the moment when the jar is broken open
and all this extravagant beauty suddenly explodes into the world.
Into a world that is dusty and dutiful and dreary
comes this riot of delicious scent and texture and color,
a pouring out of beauty and art and sensuality,
this one moment of concentrated amazingness,
wonder,
joy,
this one moment before the darkness descends,
and in that one moment our spirit drinks its fill,
our heart may be fed for a lifetime.
Everyone deserves that, rich or poor—everyone.
There is goodness in the bread, but also in the roses.

***

Back in that tiny Norwegian town, Babette prepares her feast.
The sisters watch in amazement and alarm as crates of wine arrive,
boxes and boxes of food and china and crystal and who knows what else.
On the night of the dinner, they sit down with their friends
to course after course of the most spectacular food and wine
you can possibly imagine.
For what they did not know
is that, before she was forced into exile,
Babette had been the chef at the finest restaurant in Paris,
the Café Anglais.
For twelve years the finest chef in all Paris
has been cooking plain fish and plain bread.
Tonight will be different.
The sisters and their friends know nothing
of what they are eating and drinking.
But let me read to you from the story:

Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had been blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air…. The vain illusions of this earth had been dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is.[4]

The next day the sisters thank her over and over again.
They say, “You’ll be leaving for Paris soon, then?”
Babette replies,
“And how would I go back to Paris, Mesdames? I have no money.”
“But the 10,000 francs?” the sisters ask in astonishment.
Babette answers, “What will you, Mesdames…. A dinner for twelve
at the Café Anglais would cost ten thousand francs.”[5]

***

I think Jesus would have understood—
the Jesus whose very first miracle, after all,
was to turn water into wine;
the Jesus who looked at the woman with the alabaster jar,
the heavenly scented oil still  dripping down his cheeks,
and said, “Bless you for your gift.”
A taste of heaven on earth.
It isn’t squandering,
but giving it all for this one moment,
this magnificent taste of heavenly beauty,
a glimpse of the glory and wonder that lies just beyond our ordinary world.
It fills us,
it’s worth it
because we cannot live without this beauty—
not just the bread; we need the roses too.
Beauty poured out on us in rare moments of grace.
Filling our hearts,
preparing us to pour ourselves out
as we are called,
loving what we are made to love,
giving as we are made to give,
serving as we are made to serve,
blessing as we are made to bless.

May it be so.
Amen.

It will matter, in that moment, that our president means what he says.
It will matter that he is sincerely promising to do the best he can.
To say those words, formally, publicly,
and not mean them
would be deeply, deeply offensive.
But to say them and mean them: there is power in that.

We all make promises all the time,
most of them small,
a few of them big.
But today I want to talk especially about the formal, public promises
we make about things that matter a lot:
promises to one another
and to our deepest values.

It happens at an inauguration.
It happens at church when we ordain or install a minister—
if you were there for Mary Katherine’s installation,
or if you’ve ever been to an ordination,
you know the power in that moment of saying the words,
making a solemn promise in front of the people gathered to witness.
In religious traditions around the world
it happens when someone takes a vow
to commit their life to a way of being
they believe will transform them for the good.
It happens at a marriage or commitment ceremony,
when two people join themselves together by the power of their words.
They promise to love each other not just now but forever, come what may,
and with those words they change their entire future.

Of course we all know making a promise like this is no guarantee
that we’ll be able to do what we say we’re going to do.
We have all felt how much it hurts
when someone breaks their promise to us.
And we’ve all been the one who breaks our own vow,
in small ways or in great.
Sometimes we have to leave because our own safety is at risk,
or the pain is just too great.

But still we dare.
We dare to pledge ourselves to one another
and to our own highest aspirations.
We dare to make these sacred commitments—
and when I say sacred
I mean that which comes from the best that is in us,
hope and love
and the opposite of cynicism, which is faith.
We dare to make these sacred commitments
and do our best to keep them.

At our Lunch with the Ministers last week we were remembering a song
we often sing together here:

Come, come, whoever you are,
wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair,
come, yet again, come.

(The text is by the Sufi poet Rumi, set to music by the Rev. Lynn Ungar.)
Did you know there’s another part to the song we don’t always sing?
It goes like this:
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times,
though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times,
come, yet again, come.

Now, please hear what this is not saying.
It’s not saying, “Though someone has betrayed you a thousand times.”
No, this is not about staying past the point of safety or sanity
when others let you down.
This is about you and your relationship to your own aspirations.

And that’s the promise of the community we try to create right here:
Though you’ve broken your vows before,
though you will break them again,
still, again and again, if you can, come back to them,
come back to what you truly aspire to do with all your heart.
None of us is perfect,
none of us is able to be perfectly faithful 100% of the time,
but as long as you are willing to try and try again and again,
come, yet again, come.
Come and be part of this community.
Come and walk with us.

And in our tradition, where we start, the way we join, is with a promise.
People often ask, if we don’t have a creed,
a statement of what you have to believe—
and we do not have such a statement, we never have—
then what holds this community together?
What holds us together is a promise.
Alice Blair Wesley put it like this in our reading:

The center of the free church, the heart of the whole thing,
is a promise of fidelity, a covenant,
which each member freely makes upon joining.[1]

The way we become part of a congregation like this one
is by joining,
and the way we join is by searching our minds and hearts
to see if this place feels like the right place for us,
and then promising to stay.

For most of us, that means signing our names in the membership book,
and when we sign our names
it’s actually one of those moments of promising,
serious, public promising.
But even if we never formally join,
I think there is a moment for most everyone where we say to ourselves,
I’m here. This is my place. This is where I belong.
That too is a sort of promise.

And in the free congregation, what we promise is this:
To stick around—to stay as long as we can in good conscience.
To do our part to support the community.
The promise is also to be part of a community of people
who are sometimes going to be very easy to love,
and sometimes very hard to love—
and here’s where it starts to get hard—
the promise is to hang in
with people who will sometimes think the way you think
and sometimes think very differently from you,
and the kicker is that sometimes they’re going to see more clearly than you
and you’re going to have to admit that you were wrong!
The promise is to stick with a community of people
who will, mostly, do their best to do right by you,
and will sometimes disappoint you in small ways and in great.
People who have broken their vows a thousand times
and still, mostly, keep showing up and trying to do right.

And the spirit that keeps us showing up and trying our best
is a spirit of love and hope.
Because the good news we proclaim here is this:
News flash: it’s OK that you aren’t perfect!
No matter what you’ve done or haven’t done,
no matter how many promises you’ve broken,
no matter how badly you’ve messed up in your life—
and we’ve all messed up in ways small and great—
you are loved.
No matter what, always and forever, you are loved,
and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
That love gives us strength to try and try and try again.
For me this is the core teaching.
I hope we will never lose it.

The other day I was meeting with one of the small groups I lead,
and we were talking about the early Universalists.
Do you remember these folks?
Two hundred fifty years ago, our Universalist ancestors were on fire
with the faith that their God loved everyone.
Their neighbors told them God was going to punish them
for being so messed up and bad,
but they said, No! God loves you and me and everyone who has ever lived and everyone who ever will live
with an unquenchable love,
a love that cannot be stopped or defeated by anything.
They said, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times,
you are loved and you can never be un-loved.

Though many of us use different language now—and that’s fine—
we are still on fire with the faith that no one, absolutely no one,
is outside the circle of love that we believe in,
a love we promise to do our absolute best to embody every day,
a love that is bigger than us
and stronger than us,
a love that holds everybody and everything, always and forever.
A love that gives us strength to do our best
with our imperfect human hearts and hands.
I hear it in the words of our hymn this morning,
“Help us bind ourselves in union,
help our hands tell of our love.”

There it is: that’s what we’re trying to do here.
To bind ourselves in union,
to witness to love,
with our hands and our words and our actions and our very being.
And I think it’s that love that gives us the courage to try.
I think, when we make a promise that binds us in community,
knowing it’s not always going to be easy,
I think that promise we make is almost like a crystallized bit
of that larger love,
not just the love in our own heart,
but it’s like grasping just a tiny, precious bit
of the love we sense around us
which is so much bigger and stronger than we ourselves.
We say the words,
and they don’t just vanish;
they live in our minds and hearts
like a solid thing, something we can lean on,
something true and important.

I don’t know if this will make sense to you.
Let me try to explain what I mean.
I have often experienced my own vows,
both my marriage vows and the vows I took at my ordination,
as almost a physical support,
like a scaffolding for my moral life.
I feel like I can reach out to those vows I made, when I need to,
to give me strength and hold me in place.
I feel they are helping me build myself
into the person I aspire to be.

In my marriage, there have been days when I get cranky
because I don’t like the way my husband does something,
or maybe he doesn’t do what I wish he would do,
or maybe I’m just in a cranky mood and I’m taking it out on him.
That happens more often than I wish it would!
But in those moments I’ve discovered it helps, a lot,
to remember the vows I made to him and to myself:
“for better, for worse,
to love and to cherish.”
On the “better” days, it’s easy to love.
On the “worse” days, I have to work at it a little…or even a lot.
But still, I try to remember, I promised.
I promised.
And in those moments when it’s not 100% easy,
I reach out in my mind to the vows I took
and I do feel them almost like a physical presence,
I feel them as a scaffolding holding me up
when I’m not so very kind and not so very patient.
It holds me up when I am not strong
and gives me something to hang on to.
It calls me back to the person I know I want to be.
It helps me remember my highest aspirations
to be a loving partner and a good human being.
It helps me be strong.

(And by the way,
this is partly why I feel so strongly about marriage equality,
because I know how much my own marriage vows
have helped me hold on to my aspirations.
I want that for everyone who wants it for themselves.)

I think this is how it works:
We put our best, most noble aspirations into words
and we say those words as a promise
and then we hold onto that promise like a solid thing,
a scaffolding, or maybe a star,
a light to guide us, a way to walk by.
And we need that light because we don’t know what’s coming;
we can’t know what the future is going to bring.
I love what Wendell Berry says in our reading—do you remember?
He says, when you promise to stay and hang in there,
you have to promise unconditionally,
because you don’t know what’s coming and you can’t know.
He says, “We can join one another only by joining the unknown.”[2]
We can join one another only by joining the unknown.
He goes on to say, and I think this is true in a marriage
or in a faith community or in any deep relationship,

no one party to it can be solely in charge.
What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be.
Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go….
You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way….

The promise that creates the relationship
is like a key that unlocks a gate,
and the gate swings open to the road that is our life,
and we don’t know what’s coming,
and we are sure going to learn
that what we hope for is not always what we get,
and what we think should happen is not always what happens.
“[N]ot everything that we stay to find out will make us happy.”
And sometimes we will have to leave, to keep our spirit whole.

But here’s the deepest part:

The faith…is that by staying…
we will learn something of the truth,
that the truth is good to know,
and that it is always both different and larger than we thought.

Only you can discover what truth will come
from this practice of promising to stay and doing our best to stay.
But this idea of truth beyond,
truth that is different and larger than we thought,
I think this is right.
Can you taste it, a little bit?
Truth like a star, a light to guide us.
Truth like a beautiful temple, built with years of faithful labor.
Truth that gives us hope.
This is why we stay.
This is why we do our best.
Though we’ve broken our vows a thousand times,
we come back again and again,
to promise ourselves,
to bind ourselves in union,
to witness to love,
with our hands and our words and our actions and our being.

May it be so.
Amen.

–Rev. Laura

***

A Winter Story of Justice and Joy

Choose to bless the world.
That’s what Rebecca Parker says in our reading—
I hope that’s what we say, one way or another,
every week in this beloved place:
Choose to bless the world.
Choose to “feed the hungry,
Bind up wounds,
Welcome the stranger,
Praise what is sacred,
Do the work of justice
Or offer love.”[1]

In that spirit I want to share and savor with you
the stories of three good and brave people who chose to bless the world.
These stories may be a little bigger and more adventurous
than our own daily lives—larger than life, or everyday life at least—
but I am convinced those are just the kind of stories we need
to inspire us to do the right thing in our own lives,
in ways both large and small.

The first story belongs to Good King Wenceslas,
the king who looked out and gave from his heart.
Wenceslas was a real person, though his story lies in the land of myth.
The real Wenceslas lived about 1100 years ago
in Bohemia, which today is part of the Czech Republic.
He was actually a duke, not a king, the Duke of Bohemia;
but he was so famous for being a good and wise ruler
that one of the Holy Roman Emperors actually declared him a king
a few years after he died.
Even today the Czech people remember Wenceslas as a hero.
Legend says that when the land is in its darkest hour,
Wenceslas will wake again and return with a great army to save the people.

But the most famous legend of all
tells of what happened on a faraway December night.
We sang the story just now—you remember:
King Wenceslas steps out on his balcony
to breathe in the cold, clear night air.
This is no ordinary night;
it is the night of December 26, the Feast of St. Stephen,
the day our neighbors in England call “Boxing Day.”
Do you know about Boxing Day?
It’s not about the sport of boxing,
as I used to think when I was a child.
Boxing Day is about boxing up presents and perhaps money
to share with your neighbors
who are having a harder time in life than you are.

And on this Feast of Stephen, this day that calls everyone to generosity,
King Wenceslas looks at the moon, shining clear overhead.
He looks out on the bare trees,
with their branches silhouetted black against the night sky.
He looks out on the snow where it lay,
deep and crisp and even.
A beautiful night, a night of stillness,
but bitter cold.

And as he watches,
a man appears at the edge of the woods, all alone.
The snow is deep, the going is very slow.
The man carries a pile of sticks and branches on his back.
Gathering firewood, he is, winter fuel on this cold, dark night.
And the king wonders,
what desperation has brought this man out
to search for firewood so late at night, alone in the dark.
What desperate need has brought him out on this cold, dark night?

Do you remember what happens next?
Wenceslas calls to his page, the young boy who serves him.
I imagine the boy is shivering, it’s so cold on the balcony,
but he comes when he’s called.
And Wenceslas asks him:
“Do you know that man over there in the woods?”
The page squints to make him out—
“Yes, sire, I know him!
He lives a league away from here,
underneath the mountain;
right against the forest fence, by Saint Agnes’ fountain.”

And it’s so marvelous to see the name of Saint Agnes come into the story.
Let me tell you why. Do you know about Saint Agnes of Bohemia?
She was a real person too.
She actually lived about 300 years after our Good King Wenceslas,
and as it happens she had a brother who was also named Wenceslas,
but not our Wenceslas (if you follow);
so obviously the timelines are not historically accurate in this carol;
she wouldn’t have had a fountain named after her at this time
because she wouldn’t even be born for another three centuries.
But: on a symbolic level, she is absolutely perfect.
Because Saint Agnes was a princess, a Bohemian princess
who refused to enter into a political marriage
the way princesses were supposed to do.
She gave up her crown and all her wealth and became a nun.
And not only a nun, a Franciscan nun,
the Franciscans who were devoted to serving the poor.
Agnes herself founded a hospital and personally cared for many patients,
even people with leprosy.

What I love about Agnes’s story
is the way I imagine she must have found joy in that service.
She could have so easily lived the life that was expected of her,
married, kept all her possessions,
but her gifts, her passion, her joy led her in a different direction,
one that looked poor on the outside,
but so rich within.
And so Saint Agnes’ fountain in the story of King Wenceslas, I think,
is there to remind us of this strong, passionate woman
who gave up a crown to serve the poorest, most vulnerable people
in her community, for love, for joy.

Our King Wenceslas doesn’t give up his crown—
in this story the king stays a king,
and probably the poor man stays poor.
It seems the class differences
are going to stay much as they’ve always been.
So in a way the story is a bit reactionary…
except for that radical, bold Saint Agnes lurking on the fringes…

Wenceslas doesn’t give up his crown;
and yet he gives so freely of his heart, for love, for joy.
On this night of bitter cold,
he answers his page:
“You know the man in the woods: Good! Good!
We shall find him and bring him gifts
of meat and drink and good thick logs for burning.
We will celebrate with him tonight!”

Now, remember, the poor man lives a league away.
And a league is not close!
It’s three miles away!
It would take you an hour to walk there
on a nice warm summer evening, right?
But this night the ground was covered with snow.
How many people here have walked across a field
where the snow is thigh-high? Or even knee-high?
You know how hard that is! And this was three miles away.
So what it it that made the king want to go plunging through the snow
like that? I think it must have been joy,
the excitement of doing something a little bit crazy
and altogether wonderful!

Whatever it was, off they went, page and monarch.
The king led the way through the trees and the snowdrifts,
and the little page keeps up very well at first.
I imagine he is very happy and proud
to be helping out with such an important mission.
But it’s so very cold out here.
He starts shivering, first in his fingers and his toes,
and then all over.
He tries to be like the king, striding along with big, confident steps,
but he’s shivering so hard now!
He’s so cold, his mouth is all stiff
and he can’t make the words quite right,
but he calls out, “Sire, I’m cold,
I can’t—I can’t—”

The courage it takes to keep going, through the cold and the dark—
and what do you do when your strength fails you?

I’m reminded of another story,
another man who chose to bless the world
at a time when darkness and cold were closing in all around.
This was the terrible years of World War II in occupied France.
Jewish people were being rounded up and sent to their deaths every day.
And in the mountains of southern France,
in a small village called Le Chambon,
a pastor named André Trocmé began to organize his congregation and his village
to smuggle Jewish people to safety.

For four years, while the war raged,
they met the refugees when the trains came in,
placed them in people’s homes,
gave them false names,
smuggled them on when they could.
Many of the refugees were children.
It was very, very dangerous.
Anyone caught would have been sent to prison, possibly to death.
And so many people in the village had to know, to be in on the scheme,
to protect the refugees.
So many people had to risk their lives.
And they did it.
All throughout the dark years of the war,
they put service at the very center of their lives.
By the time the war ended in Europe,
the people of Le Chambon had saved some 5000 people.

I look back and marvel at their courage.
So many people, choosing to bless their world,
at the risk of their own safety and indeed their lives.
Maybe you and I will never be put to that kind of test—
or maybe we will; you never know what life will bring—
but even just as I go through the most ordinary day,
it does me so much good to remember
we can choose to do the right thing, wherever we are,
whatever is happening around us.
Their strength gives me strength.
We tell these stories to give ourselves strength
for what life asks of us.

The people in Le Chambon, looking back,
say it was Pastor Trocmé who helped them keep going.
He encouraged them, he told them stories—
like the story we heard at the beginning of our service today—
he reminded them about bravery and service
and being a decent human being, no matter what.
He was right there with them, putting his own life on the line.
They followed in his footsteps.
And his example, the force of his presence and his courage,
melted their fear,
made it possible for a whole town to be unbelievably brave,
to do the right thing,
to bless the world.

***

Back in the dark woods of Bohemia,
King Wenceslas turns back and sees how cold the little boy is.
And this is where the magic happens.
He gives the little boy a big kingly bear-hug
and says to him, “Don’t be afraid.
Just step where I step, right in my footsteps,
and you’ll be warm again in no time.”
The page is not so sure about this,
but he says, “OK,” and he tries very hard not to cry—
he so wants to be home again and warm.

But he wants to do a good job, too,
so he makes himself take one more step,
right into the big king’s footprint,
and another, into the next footprint,
and it’s strange, but he does feel a little warmer now.
The footprints feel like holding your feet to a wonderful warm fire!
He takes another step, and another,
and now the blood is coming back to his fingers and toes,
and another step, and another,
and now he’s all toasty warm,
and he feels so cozy, and the whole thing is so strange and funny,
being toasty warm out in those dark, cold woods,
it’s so funny that he starts to giggle,
and the king joins him with a big belly-laugh,
and the two of them run and gallop and frolic
all the rest of the way to the cottage of the poor man,
all the way to the edge of the woods at the foot of the mountain.
They laugh and laugh,
thinking of how happy that man is going to be
when he opens the door to their knock.

That joyous, giddy laughter—I think they must have laughed!
The beauty of being warm in the cold,
finding your courage when you thought it was lost;
the revelation “That in the midst of a broken world
Unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide”[2]—
how can that be anything but joy,
so pure and wonderful that it is very close to tears.

***

I want to tell you just one more thing about Pastor André Trocmé,
the pastor who led his people to save so many lives.
He has become rather famous.
Books have been written about him; there is a film about him too.
Well, I was blessed to know his daughter, Nelly Trocmé Hewett.
She was my French teacher in high school, a wonderful person,
full of life and humor and sparkliness. She still is.
And my Mme Hewett was a young girl in Le Chambon
during those war years. She was a part of it all.
She never talked about those times, never told us about her father;
it was only as an adult that I learned that history.
To us she was a great teacher, lots of fun, but a hero?
We didn’t know.
Who would have thought she had been part of something so amazing,
so brave?

But there it is. When ordinary people choose to bless this world,
in a faraway village,
in a dark forest in Bohema,
and right here in this world,
sometimes, sometimes, magic happens.
Wounds are healed.
The stranger is welcomed.
Lives are saved.
The work of justice is done.
And love shines like a star.

May it be so, today and forever.
Amen.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

The Zen Buddhists have a tradition of meditating on spiritual puzzles
they call koans.
A koan is sort of a riddle, sort of a story,
a puzzle that you have to sit with for a very long time
before it reveals itself to you completely.

I’ve often thought some artworks are like that too.
I’m so grateful to Mark for playing that nocturne[1] for us today.
It’s a piece I have been living with for a long time
and, in a way, it is the sermon for today.
What I mean by that is, this piece has held for me
a lot of complicated and tender emotions
around acceptance and surrender in my own life.
It has held out for me the promise that we can get through
the very dark times,
the times when everything feels messed up and wrong—
we can get through it and come out on the other side
and rediscover our joy in life.

So I wanted to offer this piece to you too.
It starts with such sweet innocence, doesn’t it?
But that sweetness doesn’t last—all of a sudden there’s this storm,
everything’s disrupted and whirling and scary—
The power of that disruption and darkness and chaos is so real.
But we come out on the other side,
back to that sweetness from the beginning,
only in my imagination it is so much richer the second time
because of the struggles we have come through.
The sweetness here is hard-won. It comes through faith and endurance.
It means something more than it did at the beginning.
And the darkness is a part of it too, part of the whole.

That story—
that promise that we will make it to the other side—
has come to mean a lot to me.

I know there is not a person in this room
who has not lived through very difficult struggles.
And one of the foundational aspirations of our community here
is that we are one in a universal story of human hope and grief and joy.
Each person’s story is unique,
yet there are so many commonalities that bring us together.

I think today is the right time to share with you
part of my own story around acceptance.
I personally have been living with infertility for several years now.
My husband and I have hoped to have children,
but after many doctor’s visits and tests and procedures,
it just hasn’t happened for us.
For me, that has been hard to accept.
I’m in a better place with it now than I was,
but it has been deeply, deeply challenging.

I’ve thought a lot about when and how to share that with you.
I think all preachers hesitate to talk too much
about their own personal dramas.
But this infertility thing has changed me in significant ways.
It’s become a part of who I am.
It’s also something you can’t see just by looking.
I think part of the covenant any minister has
with a congregation
is to share something of the very important things in our lives,
not to hide ourselves,
but to offer up the truth that has come to us in our living.
And to keep faith with our belief
that community is all about supporting and challenging
and strengthening each other in good times and in bad.

So many of us are struggling with issues of acceptance in our lives.
At one time or another,
we have all struggled with things that are painful and unresolved,
things that don’t work out the way we imagined they would.
We have all struggled with the parts of our life that feel broken.
We have all felt less than whole.
I think often of that beautiful line that says:
“Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle.”
If you remember nothing else from today, remember this:
you are not alone.
This is a community
where we can be in that muddy middle space together,
learning how to live joyfully in the midst of everything,
living into this very difficult teaching called acceptance.
That’s my hope. That’s my aspiration.

So I want to offer just a bit of my own story in that spirit.
Like anyone, I’ve been through tough things before,
but infertility has definitely been the most spiritually challenging.
Getting diagnosed was a shock.
I couldn’t understand; it was so contrary
to what I had expected my life would be.
For a long time I did feel broken.
Less than whole.
I was sure there had to be a way to fix it;
I just hadn’t found it yet.
I really struggled against the emerging possibility
that maybe kids were just never going to happen for me.
And yet that possibility began to loom larger and larger.
For a long time I carried it with a lot of deep sadness and anger.
Day-to-day I was functioning pretty well.
My husband and I were and are doing fine.
I like to think that my ministry has been strong during this time.
But it was as if there was a constant simmering heartache
underlying everything else that was happening,
this mental loop that was on constantly,
continually trying to process this bizarre thing
that was happening to me.
I didn’t know what to do.
It was scary to just be with what was happening,
the uncertainty, the disappointment.

Do you know the opening lines from Dante’s Inferno?

Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.[2]

Per una selva oscura, says Dante:“in a dark wood.”
Una selva oscura: that little phrase has become for me
a sort of touchstone of that time.
In a dark wood, the right way lost.
The right way lost: and yet here we are, we have to keep going.

Dante continues:

To tell
About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I’ll tell what I saw.[3]

To honor the good we have found in that dark forest,
we tell what we saw.
This is what we all do for each other, I think—
we tell our stories as a signpost for each other,
to light the way,
to hold out a hand,
to remind each other there is a path, there is a way through.

As we’ve worked on practicing acceptance this month as a community,
I’ve thought a lot about the guides who have helped me.
I want to tell you about two of them especially,
my own heroes of acceptance and surrender—two very different people
whose lives did not go as they expected or hoped,
yet still they found ways to make peace with what was
and live with grace and joy.

Lucy Barns is one of them.
Lucy Barns, who lived 200 years ago, the daughter of a Universalist
circuit-riding minister up in Maine.
She herself was a poet, a writer who became rather famous
for her defense of the new Universalist movement.

She was also very sick.
She had severe asthma at a time when there were no inhalers,
no effective treatments.
She spent many days just struggling to breathe.
I imagine it must have been terrifying.
Yet she had this amazing practice of acceptance.
We heard in the reading how, on days when she was very low,
she deliberately cultivated this practice of listing her blessings,
naming all the things she had to be grateful for,
and she found it changed her outlook so much
that she was really able to live in a spirit of gratitude and acceptance.
I know this isn’t original to her—
I offer her example to you not because she’s the only person
to ever figure this out—of course not.
But here she is, this young woman—she died at 29—
she was stuck in bed most of the time,
and she kept her spirit so strong.
That inspires me.

I turn to her too because she is one of those people
who never lose their faith that life is fundamentally good.
She said over and over again
that the God she believed in loved us all
and that we would all be blessed and happy and well in the end.
I hear in her the spirit of that beautiful Advent hymn, People, Look East.
Have faith, because things are going to change.
The way things look now are not the way they will always be.

Lucy Barns believed that her suffering had meaning,
that it would work for good in the end.
When you are suffering, no one else gets to tell you that.
No one else gets to tell you the meaning of your suffering.
But if you can get to that place in your own heart,
it can sustain you through a very dark wood to the other side.
She’s one of my guides.
I offer her light to you.

Yet I know also that there are times in everyone’s journey
when hope and confidence run very thin,
when this kind of light is not what we need—
times when hope feels like torture
because it has been disappointed so often and so fiercely.

At those times we may need a different kind of guide.
Myself, I have turned again and again to another of my guides,
Matt Sanford. You heard in the second reading,
Matt is a yoga instructor who, at the age of 13,
was in an accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down.
He’s written a memoir called Waking
about his struggle to feel whole again
in a body that has been severely damaged.
His doctors told him that he would never feel anything in his legs again.
For a long time he experienced his legs as dead, alien, useless.
Can you imagine? To be so cut off—
But as he began to practice yoga,
gradually he discovered the doctors were wrong.
He cannot move his legs; this is not some feel-good Hallmark story;
but he discovered that if he really quieted down and listened,
he could feel a very subtle energetic connection to his legs still;
he could sense them still; they weren’t dead;
they were still a part of him, just waiting for him to notice.
And the healing in that re-integration was powerful,
even though his body will never move the way it used to.

Matt’s story speaks to me on so many levels.
But what I really want to lift up today
is the way he steadfastly refuses to turn his life experience
into an easy, uplifting story.
He insists that his pain has been real and terrible.
He refuses to deny that truth.
He also names with beautiful clarity
the joy he has found in his yoga practice,
in his relationships with the people he loves.
It’s both. It’s always both. Broken and whole.

The gift I take from him is an invitation to tell the truth about what is.
An invitation to awareness, to pay attention,
stay with it, don’t run from what is.
It’s kind of terrifying
because there is no promise of an easy happy ending.
And yet it’s the only thing that frees us to be with our life as it is,
not as we wish it were.
I think of a dear friend who once said to me,
“I wish for you an open heart for whatever comes.”
Tough words to hear when we are caught in wishing for one outcome,
needing things to be a certain way.
But, over time, healing words.
An open heart for whatever comes.

Lately I’ve been living with a line from T. S. Eliot:

…wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing…[4]

It sounds very dark, but let me explain what it means to me.
On my own journey, for a long time I hoped and hoped and hoped
for something that didn’t happen and didn’t happen and didn’t happen.
And that cycle of hope and disappointment built up in intensity
so much that it was suffocating, crushing,
like a heavy weight in my chest, an actual physical weight.
I had diagnosed a gap in myself,
an emptiness, an inadequacy, a flaw,
and I used my hope to strengthen my resolve to fight against it.

But more and more this feels like foolishness.
Lately I have been trying to allow for a space inside—
a sort of vacancy or void,
a letting go of hope
which feels oddly freeing.
I find it is allowing the prism of my life, the lens I look through,
to shift to entertain the possibility
that my life is exactly the way it should be,
nothing missing, no inadequacy, no lack of wholeness,
just as it should be,
staying open to change as it comes,
but no need to hope for what is not.

I wonder if this has happened to you too,
a letting-go
and an opening up to a new vision of what your life might be about.
Different from before,
but whole and lovely in its own right.
It doesn’t happen all at once.
It doesn’t fix our suffering or take away our pain,
but it does bring joy. And peace.

I spoke earlier about the koans of Zen Buddhism.
It seems to me lately
that perhaps our life itself is the biggest koan of all.
Could it be that our deepest challenge, our fiercest grief
is the koan that will break us open and transform us?
There may be no way to solve it,
it may make no sense to our minds.
But if we can sit with it and let it be what it is,
if we can stop flailing and sit quietly,
maybe, maybe a different space will begin to open up,
with the promise of transformation,
of life re-formed, never less than whole.
I wish this for you and for all the world.

May it be so.

We began with a call to worship celebrating the love between two women, Ruth and Naomi:

Our Call to Worship comes from the Hebrew Scriptures,
the beautiful passage from the Book of Ruth so often read at weddings:

Entreat me not to leave thee,
or to return from following after thee:
for whither thou goest, I will go;
and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:
where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.
(Ruth 1:16–17, KJV)

These words, so traditional, so often read at weddings—
such a beautiful declaration of love from one person to another:
what we so often forget is that these are the words of Ruth
not to her husband, but to Naomi:
Ruth who loved Naomi so much,
she wanted nothing more than to be with her forever.
And was this not a holy love?
Whomever you love, you are welcome here.
Your love is a blessing to us all.

And here’s the sermon:

Part 1: The Tricky Texts
This past Thursday was the 25^th annual National Coming Out Day.
Next Friday and Saturday, we’ll be welcoming people to our campus
for a conference on how faith communities can welcome people
of all different sexual and gender orientations.

In honor of these events I want to lift up two things from the heart.
The first thing is to proclaim to a world that still needs to hear it
that this congregation affirms the holiness of all loving relationships,
gay or straight, it does not matter in the least.
If you love each other and honor and respect each other,
we affirm and celebrate that precious and sacred gift.
Whomever you love, you are welcome here.
I am so thankful to be a part of this welcoming congregation
of respect and mutual appreciation,
our home base, our place of safety
from which we can reach out and share with the world
what we have found to be true and holy.

And the world needs us to do that, as people of faith.
Too many people in our community and around the country
still believe the Bible condemns homosexuality.
We also have probably heard this kind of Scriptural interpretation.
It’s in the air.
And if you haven’t actually read the Bible,
studied its history and its context and actually read the text,
how would you know otherwise?
But that’s not what I believe,
and that’s not the Bible I’ve gotten to know.

So today, I also want to lift up my conviction
that the Bible itself has gotten an incredibly bad rap
in our cultural conversations about sexuality.
I want to walk us through the key passages in the Bible
that many people say condemn homosexuality,
because I believe those texts have been thoroughly misread,
misinterpreted, and misused.
My hope today is to liberate those texts from false and bigoted readings,
to liberate you to have those conversations
with your family, your neighbors,
and to liberate a possibility that the Bible
might nourish you in your spiritual and ethical life.
After all, this is the sacred text
by which the Unitarian and Universalist ancestors of this church
oriented their entire lives.
Our faith today has grown out of a religious tradition
that loved the Bible
and loved to wrestle freely with its meanings.
That’s a tradition worth preserving.

So let’s get going.
There actually aren’t that many texts that come up in these debates,
and I think we can get to just about all of them.
The first is the biggest: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Can I see a show of hands—how many of you know this story?
And how many of you were taught that this was a story about homosexuality?

Actually, the scholarly consensus today is that
the story of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t about homosexuality at all.
It’s about hospitality and how outsiders are treated.[1]
The story begins with two angels descending to earth,
disguising themselves as men,
and visiting the town of Sodom.
When they arrive at the town gate, they meet a man named Lot,
Abraham and Sarah’s nephew,
who himself is a newcomer to the town.
Lot has no idea these guys are angels in disguise,
but he offers them a meal and a place to sleep.

This is what Genesis says happened next; it’s very dark:

“But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man,
surrounded the house; and they called to Lot,
‘Where are the men who came to you tonight?
Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.’”

“Knowing them,” in this context, means “having sex with them.”
And they are not looking for consensual sex,
as we learn when the story goes on.
Lot refuses to hand over his guests,
and the men of Sodom start to threaten him too.
After all, he’s a newcomer, an outsider, not one of them.

Basically the men are demanding to gang-rape the visitors,
who, remember, are angels in disguise.
At this point, the story takes an even creepier turn.
Lot tries to cut a deal with the mob.
Leave my guests alone, he says,
and I’ll send out my two virgin daughters instead.
Can you imagine?
This is horrific, isn’t it?
Anyway, the mob refuses the deal and breaks down the door—
and the angels intervene just in time
to save Lot’s family and destroy the city.

That’s the story.
This is the story that too many people today read as an anti-gay story.
But please notice that there is nothing whatsoever here
about consensual sex, either gay or straight.
This story has nothing to do
with the kind of loving relationships that we affirm today.
It’s a story about a community ganging up
to violently assault strangers in their midst.

You should know, also, that there is a lot of discussion of Sodom
in the other books of the Bible,
and nowhere is it claimed that homosexuality was the sin of Sodom.
The prophetic book of Ezekiel, written in the 6^th century BCE,
says, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom:
she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease,
but did not aid the poor and needy.”[2]
In the Gospels, Jesus says Sodom and Gomorrah
were hostile to visitors—nothing at all about sexuality.[3]
So I would ask, if the Bible itself testifies
that Sodom’s sin was turning its back on strangers and poor people,
who are Biblical literalists to say otherwise?

So that’s one text.
Now, another tough couple of texts in the Bible
are in the book of Leviticus,
in which God gives Moses a lot of detailed instructions
about the ritual practices the people are supposed to follow.
It tells the Israelites how to make offerings,
and what kind of food is off-limits to them.
It’s got rules about farming and crop rotation.
It also talks a lot about sexuality.
So here’s Leviticus 18:22:

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman;
it is an abomination.”

And Leviticus 20:13:

“If a man lies with a male as with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination;
they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.”

Now at first this sounds straightforward, right?
We’re used to hearing this as a blanket condemnation of gay sex, right?
But let’s stop and analyze what’s really going on in these texts.
There are two points I want to make here.
One has to do with that famous word abomination.
The other has to do with
the kind of sexual practices they’re talking about.

So, first of all, I used to think abomination
meant something really horrible,
something any sane person would judge as wrong.
But, actually, that’s not what it means at all in the Hebrew Bible.
Actually, abomination in the Bible almost always means,
contrary to proper religious practice.
That isn’t the same thing as horrible or always wrong,
not by a long shot.

For example, Leviticus also says eating the meat of so-called “unclean” animals (what today we would call non-kosher”) is an abomination.[4]
That means it’s against Israelite ritual practice,
not that it’s evil or inherently wrong.
It’s just something the Israelites aren’t supposed to do.
Another example: the historical books of the Bible
label some of the religious practices of other peoples as abominations, like building idols.
Again, this isn’t evil;
it’s just something the Israelites aren’t supposed to do.
So, OK, abomination doesn’t necessarily mean morally wrong or evil.

Second, and this is even more important,
most liberal Biblical scholars today
believe that the sexual practices Leviticus is talking about
are very specific kinds of homosexual behavior
that have almost nothing to do with gay relationships today.
The book of Leviticus is all about keeping the Israelites
from acting like their old neighbors in Egypt
and their new neighbors in Canaan.
And what was going on in Egypt and Canaan
was ritual prostitution in the temples.
Some men, as well as women, served as temple prostitutes
in rituals that were supposed to support fertility
and personal immortality.
As far as we know, that is the kind of sex Leviticus is talking about.

And, as I said, that really has nothing to do
with the kind of sexual relationships we have today.
When we look at the cultural context, as best we understand it,
Leviticus says only that it’s against the Israelite religion
for an Israelite man to have sex with a temple prostitute.
It does not say all sex between two men is bad.

In the Christian Scriptures,
one of the letters of Paul mentions male homosexuality
in a negative light,
but again we’re pretty sure it has to do with temple prostitution
rather than homosexuality in general.[5]

And that is pretty much it for the whole Bible.
There’s hardly any mention in the Bible
of sex or romantic relationships between women,
with the possible exception of Ruth and Naomi,
whose story we heard a taste of in the Call to Worship.
Aside from the passages we’ve already dealt with,
there’s really no place else in the Bible
that criticizes or judges male homosexual behavior at all.
So what we’ve got so far is—nothing.
And that’s the good news!

Part 2: Affirming Images

The next big question is, does the Bible have anything positive to say about gay people?
And here the answer is, yes—it absolutely does!
There are at least two stories about men who love men in the Bible.
The first one is very famous.
Do you remember David?
David was the shepherd boy in the Hebrew Bible who killed Goliath
He was also deeply in love with Jonathan, the son of King Saul.
They love each other at first sight;
they are heartbroken when politics force them to separate.
When Jonathan is killed in battle,
David weeps and sings to him,

“greatly beloved were you to me;
your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women.”[6]

David, who went on to become
the most famous of all the kings of Israel,
was in love with a man,
openly in love,
openly grieving at his death.
It’s right there in the text.
Somehow we conspire not to see it,
but it’s right there.

The second story is not quite so obvious,
but when you take a look it’s quite wonderful.
This is the story from the Gospel of Matthew
of Jesus healing the servant of the centurion.
It begins with a Roman centurion, a military officer,
approaching Jesus and saying,
⁶‘Lord, my servant is lying at home paralysed,
in terrible distress.’
The key word here is servant.
The word in the original Greek is pais.
This is a word that can mean a few different things.
It could mean “son” or “boy,” or it could also mean “servant.”
We can be pretty sure the centurion is talking about his servant,
not his son, because this story is told in the Gospel of Luke as well,
and Luke’s version has the centurion using a Greek phrase that means
“honored slave.”
So the person who’s sick is the servant or the slave of the centurion,
and an honored servant at that.

Now, that word pais also has a third meaning.
In the Greco-Roman cultural context,
if you were a man who wanted a love relationship with another man,
it was accepted that you could buy a servant or slave to be your lover.
And the word for that person was pais—
“a servant who is his master’s male lover.”
Put this together with the fact that this is the only story in the Gospels
of someone asking for healing for a servant, a social inferior,
and it begins to seem very likely that the centurion’s servant
was not an ordinary household servant, but his lover,[7]
someone he cared for deeply enough
to run out into the street in front of everybody
and beg Jesus to heal him—
a Roman military commander,
one of the most powerful people in the town,
begging this poor Jewish guy, not even a Roman citizen,
to heal his lover.

And what does Jesus say?
He says simply⁷, ‘I will come and cure him.’
No hesitation, no need to think about it—simply, ‘I will cure him.’
In fact he praises the centurion for having so much faith in him.
He says,

‘Truly I tell you, in no one^* in Israel have I found such faith.
¹¹I tell you, many will come from east and west
and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
in the kingdom of heaven….’

Jesus is saying there is a place in the kingdom of heaven,
in the company of the children of Israel,
for this Roman military officer,
this man who trusted him to heal his lover.
¹³And [Matthew tells us] to the centurion Jesus said,
‘Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.’
And the servant was healed in that hour.
And again I ask you:
If Jesus chose to heal a gay man’s lover
and to hold that man up as an example of faith,
who are we to say otherwise?

Now we here don’t need to be told
that every person’s love is precious.
This is something we know very deeply.
But I hope we can leave here with a deeper respect for the Bible,
this text that has been sacred to so many for so long.
If we come to it with an open mind and heart,
it can be for us an ally and a teacher.
It can connect us to our brothers and sisters
in other religious traditions—
it can help us talk to them and share our light with them.
And that is just what we can do—
that’s what our world is calling us to do in our time.
I’ll give the last word to the Gospel of Matthew:

You are the light of the world….
No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket,
but on the lampstand,
and it gives light to all in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine….

May it be so.
Amen and blessed be.

Peace,

Rev. Laura

***

Some of you know I moved here from northern California
about a year ago.
People often ask me, what do you miss about California?
I think they expect me to say, the weather, the food,
the whole California scene,
and that’s true to some extent.
But what I miss more than all that
is a little group that met once a month.
It was four of us ministers who showed up for each other
almost without fail for the five years I served out there.
We called ourselves the Central California Unitarian Universalist Cluster,
or CCUUCs for short. (That’s pronounced “kooks” for the uninitiated!)

Every month, we got together
to sit on squishy congregational couches,
nibble on scones and tangerines,
and talk about the currents of our lives and our ministries.
And over five years of ups and downs,
health crises and congregational crises,
many moments of joy
and long stretches when nothing much felt like it was happening,
and we weren’t sure whether to be worried or grateful,
we were there for each other.
We knew we cared about each other,
we had each other’s backs,
and that made it safe for us to tell it like it really was.
We could be honest together about the things that scared us
and the things that made us deeply hopeful.
There were moments when things got really tough for one of us
and we walked through fire together.
The people in that group are forever my blood-sisters and brothers.

John O’Donohue says in today’s reading that “to be human is to belong.”[1]
There’s no such thing as a person in isolation,
unconnected to anything else.
We are social creatures—we all know this.
We all need other people to care for us.
We need to connect, to exchange ideas, to love and be loved.
We need to feel we belong.
We need places where we are known and appreciated and needed,
places where we matter.
This is a big part of what we affirm here:
we are part of an interdependent web;
we’re all connected and we all belong.

And we hope that our connections, our belonging brings us joy—
but we all know we can’t take that for granted!
When we talk about how good it is to be connected,
we’re talking about a certain kind of connection—
a way of being with people
where we all feel respected, affirmed, appreciated, loved.
But we all know we can’t take that for granted.
At one time or another,
we’ve probably all been a part of groups that weren’t safe,
groups where we have felt hurt, vulnerable,
where in order to belong we felt we had to hide who we were,
maybe even do things we didn’t want to do.

Last week our high school students talked about this
when they watched a clip from The Breakfast Club.
Maybe you’ve seen it.
It’s the story of five high school kids who end up in a day-long detention:
a wrestler, a popular girl,
a geeky brainy kid,
a bad-boy rebel type,
and an offbeat girl who wears all black and doesn’t talk.
At first they can barely stand each other.
They hurt each other with their judgments and stereotypes.

But they keep talking,
and slowly they find out they are so much more than their stereotypes.
John O’Donohue says we label ourselves and each other
based on our possessions, our roles, our status—
we all do it—but that’s not really who we are.
These kids in the movie start to listen to each other, really listen,
and they start to see through all the stereotypical junk,
the labels they put on each other,
and they start to connect with each other as human beings.

They find out the offbeat girl who barely says a word
actually sees everything—she’s the one who calls the others out
on their half-truths and defenses.
They learn that the wrestler guy is struggling with shame and guilt
because he beat up another kid
to prove to his tough-guy dad that he was a real man.
The popular girl wants to reach out to other kids
but she’s so afraid of what her so-called friends will say.
The brainy kid who’s never broken a rule in his life
has come close to killing himself
because of one bad grade.
And the bad-boy rebel who rages and threatens and shouts—
it’s just a shield
because he’s been physically abused all his life.

At the end of the day, these kids are friends, or maybe something deeper.
They understand each other.
They’ve seen each other face to face
and they have heard each other speak the truth of their lives.
Maybe for the first time,
they have dared to say the truth of their lives out loud.
And so they have come to belong to each other—and to their own selves.

O’Donohue says, yes, of course we belong to other people, places and things.
But more deeply belonging is about our relationship to our own soul.
True belonging happens on the inside,
when we accept our own self,
our gifts, our failures, our dreams and longings—everything that is truly us.
O’Donohue says, what we are, each one of us, is a gift.
We didn’t invent ourselves, our gifts and our personalities,
everything we can do and everything we wish we could—
all that is gift,
and true belonging happens on the inside when we accept that gift.

It happens on the inside; no one can do it for us;
and yet other people can help or hinder us so much.
When others make fun of us or judge us or condemn us,
it is so much harder for us to accept ourselves.
It can be done, but it is so much harder.
But when even just a few people around us
help us feel safe and accepted and loved,
we can take that in and use it to strengthen our own heart.

I think back to a time many years ago now
when a dear friend of mine sat me down
and told me he had something to tell me.
I remember we were at a café, white table;
I can picture the book I’d been reading lying on the table between us.
He sounded serious and I know both of us felt the electricity in the air.
“I’m gay,” he said—he was coming out to me for the first time;
this was years ago, a different time,
when it was possible to be very close friends
without knowing such a thing about each other—
and here we were in this moment,
and there was no question, it was fine, of course,
and he was my friend and I did and do love him very much.
But I look back on that crystal moment between us,
the shimmering electricity in that moment
when the words were finally said,
and I to this day I am awed at the courage it took
for him to voice the truth of his soul.
There’s a power in such a moment,
when one human being dares to speak the truth of their life to another
and our heart is pierced through with the wonder and the terror
and the grace of what it means to be alive.
In such a moment hope and gratitude flood us.
Lives may be saved in just one such moment of true connection,
true belonging self to self.
And we know this life is a holy thing.

Friends, if you ever wonder why we talk so much about small groups
here in our congregation—
if you ever wonder why over and over again we encourage you
to find a place to connect, a small group to join,
this is why.
This is why.
It’s because we are hoping so much
that you too will find a safe space to belong here.
Our hope and our aspiration is that in small, intentional groups,
we can create safe space for each other to belong—
to one another and to our own selves.
Space for our soul to emerge and thrive in its own beauty,
nobody else’s but its own.

And when that happens—you’ve seen it, haven’t you?
I can think of so many people right here,
people who truly know themselves and their gifts,
and you see what happens in their lives—
they blossom into service, sharing their gifts with the world
in a way that is so authentic and beautiful and powerful.
We talk a lot here about our mission—grow, connect, serve—
and when people connect to each other
in deeply positive, life-giving ways—we see it again and again—
when people feel affirmed by their neighbors,
when they feel seen and appreciated and encouraged,
it’s like their energy is liberated, the core of their self is liberated
and it manifests in a million different kinds of service—
serving other people in ways that come naturally and simply to us
because they come from our own precious nature.
We connect and we grow into the service we are born for.

This is why I think our small groups matter.
This is why we hope everyone
will find a small group to belong to.
Our tradition has taught for a very long time
that faith is all about discovering your truth together in community.
This is where our faith comes alive,
this wonderful bringing forth of each person’s truth, each person’s gifts,
this shared work to liberate the human spirit inside each one of us.
Through belonging to each other we come to belong to our own self.

So I hope you’ll take a chance on some new connections.
I hope with all my heart
that you will find a wonderful place to belong—
for yourself,
for everyone else who needs your presence too,
and for this world which needs all our gifts.
May it be so.

Peace,
Rev. Laura

***

I know I’m not the only one struggling to make sense
of the violence we’ve seen around the country this summer.
You remember three weeks ago
a man involved with white-supremacist, neo-Nazi groups
killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
He didn’t even know them, but he had made up his mind
that they were—what?—somehow a threat to him
because they looked different from him,
because they came from a different culture
and followed a different religious path?
How is it that we are so threatened by difference?

And just a few days ago, almost in our own back yard,
an activist who claimed to be defending LGBT rights shot a security guard
at the conservative Family Research Council in downtown DC
because, as he said, “I don’t like your politics.”
Thank goodness the guard survived and it looks like he’ll be OK.
I want to lift up the sorrow and confusion and frustration
that I think many of us are feeling about this.
I don’t like the Family Research Council’s politics either,
but I know this is not the way.
Mercifully this guy, this kind of violent behavior,
is the extreme exception, not the norm.
But we have to wonder, how is it that even one person makes the leap
from political disagreement to violent assault?

There are always a million explanations for why such tragedies happen.
We may never fully understand what goes on in the minds of such people.
But I do wonder, I wonder a lot,
about the extreme polarization in our society,
in matters of politics,
in matters of faith.
We are, many of us, so entrenched in our positions
that we see anyone who disagrees with us as the enemy,
rather than the fellow human being they are,
precious just as we are.

This is what’s been on my mind
as I wrestle with the preaching challenge one of our congregants gave me this week.
This was the winning bidder on the right to choose one of my sermon topics at this past year’s Auction.
He has been curious about the so-called “New Atheists,”
a group of writers including, most famously, Christopher Hitchens,
Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris.
They all argue rather forcefully
that religion is irrational and harmful,
bad for humanity, bad for the world.
Their tone is aggressive and snarky;
they believe they are right
and they will skewer anyone who disagrees with them—
at least verbally.

Our congregant knows that a lot of Unitarian Universalists
who identify as atheists or humanists
have been reading these New Atheists (capital N, capital A).
There’s a lot of buzz around them;
these books show up on a lot of best-seller lists.
But he is wondering, and I think rightfully so,
whether there is room in a liberal religious community like ours
for this particular way of being atheist,
which so aggressively rejects any and all kinds of religion.
I confess, I have not been a fan of Hitchens and his colleagues.
I find it hard to relate to their style, which I experience as
strident, snooty, and judgmental.
I also get irritated by their lumping all religions together,
all sorts of beliefs and practices and expressions,
and labeling it all as bad and foolish.

So I was prepared to be displeased when I picked up Hitchens’ book
with the aggressive title God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(in case you’re wondering how he really feels!).
I’m afraid he lost me almost immediately with the statement on p. 13
that “people of faith are in their different ways
planning your and my destruction,
and the destruction of all [our] hard-won human attainments….
Religion poisons everything.”[1]
I don’t think he knows us very well!

So this was a tough read for me.
However: I have a personal rule that when someone drives me that nuts,
it’s time to do some inner work.
I need to work at getting back in touch with my better self,
the part of me that doesn’t want to waste time
being outraged by other people’s deliberate provocations;
the part of me that really wants to get past all that silliness
and connect and understand.

I try to go back to a way of thinking I learned from Karen Armstrong,
the historian of religion who wrote A History of God.
She says, and I think she’s right,
when you talk about a religious idea or belief that seems foreign to you,
or a person whose beliefs are very different from your own,
you can’t just dismiss that person and their ideas
because they don’t fit with your own perspective,
the culture and the beliefs you’ve absorbed from your own time and place.
You have to temporarily put aside your own perspective
and try to understand the perspective of the other person.
You have to keep on asking why they think as they do—
study and learn about their culture and context
until you can imagine yourself in their shoes, believing the same.[2]
And I do feel an obligation to try, because if I can’t do that,
if I can’t find any common ground or any sympathy with that person,
if I let myself dismiss anyone as stupid or bad or incomprehensible
just because I haven’t put in the time it takes to understand them,
I am just reinforcing the epidemic of polarization and hate
that is devastating our country daily.
I don’t want to do that.
I want to model a different way,
a way of relating to other people based on compassion,
trying to understand them,
and I think you do too.

So here I am looking for common ground with this guy
who thinks pretty much all religious people are brainwashed
and out to destroy him.
I have to keep saying to myself, let the style go, look behind the snarkiness
and look for what I can connect with.
And, truly, it’s not so hard once I get going.
I read in Hitchens’ book about the young Christopher,
starting to ask questions about the doctrines he was learning,
discovering it didn’t make sense to him;
it didn’t feel true inside him—
finding he just couldn’t believe what he was being taught.[3]
I could empathize with that.
I wanted to say to that child, “I hear you!
Hang in there! That’s not the way all religion is!”

And I read about the grown-up Christopher Hitchens, the journalist
who had interviewed victims of horrific religious violence
all over the world—in Ireland, Lebanon, Israel, Serbia, Iraq,
to name only a few.
I felt his anger and outrage and sorrow
that people should be killing each other over matters of faith.
I agree with him, it’s tragic and it’s wrong.
And so I want say to him,
Mr. Hitchens, maybe we’re not so utterly far apart after all.
I want to say to him,
I’m grateful for your blazing clarity
about the evil of religious violence.
I’m grateful for your reminders to us—
and this is the biggie I want you all to hear—
I am grateful, Mr. Hitchens, for your biting reminders
that religious people fall into error
and can become complicit in violence
whenever they make the mistake of conflating their ideas about reality
with reality itself.

Let me say that again,
because I think this is the core message of his that we can learn from:
religious people fall into error
and can become complicit in violence
whenever they make the mistake of conflating their ideas about reality
with reality itself.

Stay with me while I explicate that a little, OK?
It’s a bit tricky and very important.
Mr. Hitchens is pointing out, as many others have,
that every religious group makes different claims
about the nature of reality—
and when I say reality in this case I’m talking about
the force that many of us feel and believe and think
must be operating in the universe,
whatever it is that creates and sustains and destroys and creates anew—
the force we often call the Spirit of Life,
what many people of faith call God or Goddess;
Allah, nirvana, Brahman, the unconditioned;
the energy of the universe.
All these different ways of naming and talking about
this Really Big Thing.
Every religion finds different names, different language
to try to talk about it.
We know this;
Unitarian Universalists are so used to holding all these names lightly,
recognizing they’re all just different ways
of talking about something we’re never going to understand completely.

But Hitchens is exactly right to warn us
that too many religious people in every tradition
believe that they have it all figured out,
too many people think they know all there is to know.
Too many people have made the mistake of thinking
their favorite language about reality is the same thing as reality itself.
And the moment we decide that our favorite name,
our favorite language for talking about the big mystery—
the moment we decide our favorite way of talking about reality
is not just our favorite but also the best one or the right one for everyone,
that is the moment we are in grave danger of becoming complicit
in religious violence.
the moment we decide our limited understanding is absolute truth,
that’s the moment it starts to seem OK to force everyone to agree with us.
From that moment, it’s a very slippery slope to the drawing of weapons,
the beginning of wars.

Now, I want you to hear something else,
and now I’m extrapolating from Mr. Hitchens’ work;
this is me talking,
but I don’t think he would disagree with me:
Unitarian Universalists need to hear this too!
Each one of us, myself included,
needs to be very, very careful to remember
that our favorite ways of understanding the world,
our favorite words and symbols and ideas
are the ones that work for us; they’re not the truth for all time and all people.
I love our faith, and I know it’s not the best one for everyone.
It’s where I need to be;
I am deeply, deeply grateful for it;
but I also know we do not have a monopoly on the truth.
Yet how many times do we find ourselves slipping into careless ways of talking
that make it sound like our faith is the best, the most truthful?
How often have we found ourselves saying
about anyone we think of as an open-minded person,
“They’re really a UU; they just don’t know it yet?”
As if we had a monopoly on open-mindedness
and appreciation of difference?
Thank goodness we don’t!
Thank goodness our faith is one of many
filled with people who are truly trying to live a good and peaceful life.
Thank goodness it’s not just us!

OK, end of rant.
Obviously toward the end there I’m parting ways with Mr. Hitchens
in terms of our ideas.
But I find his “tell it like it is!” style is actually feeling quite liberating today!
So thank you for that too, Mr. Hitchens.
Maybe by now he’ll let me call him Christopher?
So, Christopher, I bow to your anger and clarity,
even when I don’t agree with it.
Which still is rather often.
And to explain why—
why in the end I really do need to say to him,
“You do not have the whole story!”—
I have to invite our colleague Karen Armstrong
back into this imaginary conversation,
Karen Armstrong who taught me to try to hang in there
with people and ideas I don’t understand right away.

Because Karen has done this wonderful cross-cultural study
of mysticism worldwide,
and she tells us, in every major world religion,
there’s a tradition of mysticism reminding us
that all our language about God or spirit or not-God
or however we name whatever it is that’s going on—
all our religious language is completely incapable of truly naming or describing or speaking about reality,
completely incapable of describing the truth
about this Really Big Thing—and of course those words are wrong too;
there’s just no way of speaking about it.
She has this wonderful trippy passage in one of her books
where she says—check this out—
“We cannot even say that God ‘exists’
because our experience is based solely on individual, finite beings
whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself.”[4]

The way I think of it is like this:
There’s something going on in this world,
something big and important, actually the most important thing of all,
but our human brains are limited
and it’s not possible for us to fully understand it;
we physically can’t understand it,
but each of us can grasp little pieces of it;
we make up these ways of talking about it
so we can try to communicate with each other about it,
but all our language is just words, sometimes more helpful, sometimes less,
but not at all the same thing as the thing itself,
which these human brains in human bodies simply cannot grasp.
Do you understand?

And because of this,
I think Karen Armstrong needs to say to our friend Mr. Hitchens,
Christopher, do you understand?
Do you see how you’re making the very same mistake
you are so right to point out in other people?
Do you see how you think you have it all figured out?
Do you see how you’re insisting that your view is the correct one?
Do you see how you can’t really know that,
how it makes no sense to assume
that you are uniquely right out of all the people in the world?
Do you see how the violence in your words is possible
only because of the false certainty of your thoughts?
Do you see how the violent words and actions
you condemn so rightly in other people
have their root in the false belief that we are the only ones with the truth,
and that this is a danger we all have to watch for in ourselves?

I’m not sure Mr. Hitchens was able to hear that.
I don’t think he was before his death;
he died quite young, at 62, just this past December.
I hear he was cantankerous till the end, and that’s OK.
But I’ve spent enough time hanging out with his words
to feel, if not exactly hopeful, still, longing for a reconciliation.

To that end I want to invite in our friend Rumi,
the mystic from the great Sufi tradition of Islam,
to offer us a blessing from his wonderful poem
about Moses and the shepherd.
Do you remember: Moses, the irascible, cranky,
so sure of his rightness,
a cousin to our New Atheist friends in his certainty if not in his belief;
Moses, so ready to condemn the shepherd for praying the wrong way;
Moses who finally learns that each person has

a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else….

Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another….
It’s all praise, and it’s all right….[5]

Ways of worshipping, or not worshipping, are not to be ranked
as better or worse than one another.
Because in the end it’s just our human words,
it’s just our language that can’t really touch what truly is.
And I find I do have faith in the poet’s words,
just words though they may be:

When you eventually see through the veils to
how things really are, you will keep saying
again and again, “This is certainly not like
we thought it was!”[6]

Thank goodness!
Blessings to all.
So may it be.