Leap of Faith program

This strikes me as a great strategy for helping congregations who have growth potential meet that potential. Read about it here: http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/172771.shtml

Unitarian Universalist You Tube

Here's a link to a bunch of different videos related to Unitarian Universalism.

UU YouTube

This Is an Important Message

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax96cghOnY4&feature=player_embedded

religion and bullying

Later in the year, we are going to devote more time to the topic of bullying and how it interacts with religion. However, those of you who would like to read more about a religious response to episodes of bullying directed specifically at gay, lesbian, bisexual and gay youth can investigate the Washington Post's "On Faith" site, where a variety of religious leaders respond to current events from the vantage point of their faith. Here's the link: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/

Sunday's Sermon

You Loved Me Before You Knew Me

October 4, 2010—Foxborough Universalist Church

Katie A. Lawson, Minister

READING 1

1 Corinthians 12:13-26 (NRSV)

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing where would the sense of smell be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

READING 2

From Releasing the Imagination (p.3-4)

Maxine Greene

One of the reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through which we can assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called “other” over the years. If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears. That is because, of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions.

Recall that for generations people were unable to conceive of little children constructing meaningful worlds for themselves or, in fact, making meaning at all, even as they learned to speak. At best, children were thought of as incomplete adults foraging in a world that did not “make sense” to them. Today, we read children’s poems and journals; we listen to their stories; we find ourselves actually entering into their realities by means not solely of our reasoning power but of our imagination…One of the advances of our time is a (sometimes grudging) recognition on the part of many that those we have long categorized as other for whatever reason (ethnicity, gender, religion, education, culture, mores, geographic location, physical condition) share in the human condition…Aware then, on some level of the integrity and the coherence of what may seem to us to be a totally alien world in the person of another, we are called upon to use our imaginations to enter into that world, to discover how it looks and feels from the vantage point of the person whose world it is. That does not mean we approve it or even necessarily appreciate it. It does mean that we extend our experience sufficiently to grasp it as a human possibility

SERMON

Somewhere it is written that at the heart of the Universalist tradition is the faith that underneath it all are “everlasting arms.” This is the comfort of our faith, that at the root of everything is not the sinful nature of humanity or an angry and condemning God, but instead these arms that hold all and that, if we were to try to describe what they feel like, are loving, and no one is excluded from their embrace. We believe as Paul says in Romans, that the holiest of all law is written on ALL of our hearts. We need not look to authorities or follow particular rules to know how to be good. We all were given the keys.

However, it needs to be said that to many people this reads as a sort of namby-pamby theology… a theology of the privileged who don’t know deeply enough the nature of suffering and evil. It is easy to believe in the goodness of people when YOU are not hungry, when YOU have power, when YOU feel belonging and connection to your society. When you are on the outside though or when you have been the victim of human cruelty, believing in human goodness and love as the answer may feel a little hollow at times. Rosemary Bray McNatt, a Unitarian Universalist minister, describes having the opportunity some years ago of having a long conversation with Coretta Scott King. When McNatt told Ms. King that she was about to begin her preparation to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, Ms. King surprised her with her delighted response: "Oh, I went to Unitarian churches for years, even before I met Martin," she said, "And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches when we were in Boston."[1]

What is hard to hear is what she said next. The gist of which was, "We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian.” Despite having indicated from early on in his training as a minister his affinity for “liberal theologies” like ours, Martin Luther King took a decidedly different turn. In his essay, "Pilgrimage to Non-Violence" published in 1960, King writes:

The more I observed the tragedies of history, and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. . . . I came to feel that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. . . . Reason, devoid of purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

We could argue that Unitarian Universalism is a different religion than it was in 1960. It is. We could further argue that Universalism added a dimension to our theology after the merger in 1961 that didn’t exist in the Unitarianism of Martin Luther King’s experience. However, the apparent optimism about humanity stands. Is this naïve? Probably, especially when it is devoid of the “purifying power of faith.” Faith in what though? Surely, King was talking about a faith in God, but to him and for many of us, God, as John says is love.

Love is what describes the actuality of our commonality, the fact and the feeling that we are not so separate from each other and from it all as the world may tell us we are. Love is our underlying knowledge that we are all bound to one another and to the earth. Love is how we experience and describe our understanding that we are a part of a larger weave, be that weave ecological or mystical. Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth lays it out pretty clearly. “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” When we say, “I love you,” we are saying I FEEL that connection between us. Through you, I remember that I am connected.

This world is relentless in its preaching the gospel of separation, and it is no wonder we come to believe in it more than the coherence, beauty, and goodness that is the greater worth and truth of life. We are more likely to focus on the places where there are rifts—“Aunt Trudie is so annoying”, etc.—and when we speak of evil, of racism, of poverty, of corrupt power and oppression, we really are speaking about those things that distort our ability to know and remember where real truth lies—those things that keep us watchful, worried and isolated. We often believe in these things more than we really believe in love. A belief in the core goodness of people that is pasteurized by a real belief in love—that they are not separate from us—will not only not impede an urgent movement towards justice that characterized King’s work, but will drive it. King himself said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech said, “Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.” Believing in love is the first step to not being blindly obedient to the pressure exerted by those things that deny the simple truth that we are bound to one another.

As I hinted before, we express our faith in love as a faith in each other. If we have a job here it is to love one another deeply and to cradle each other in those everlasting arms. However, it is much easier to generally agree to love our neighbor and much harder to love him in his specificity. It’s hard to believe that we are all connected and to believe in each of our inherent goodness when so many of us are just so irritating…or mean…or destructive. AND it’s even harder to love in specificity people and beings we may never encounter, but loving people sort of generically will not bring justice the way that loving them specifically.

This is where imagination is key. In fact, as I told the kids, I think this is imagination’s primary purpose. As I have been carrying this baby around with me everywhere I go, I have been more and more convinced elemental to our loving well is imagination. Imagination is perhaps the biggest tool we humans have to combat all the evil that we bring upon the world. Exercising imagination, we can love people we have never met and try to imagine what it is they need to feel the everlasting arms wrapped around them.

Maxine Greene the great educator says, “…we are called upon to use our imaginations to enter into [another’s] world, to discover how it looks and feels from the vantage point of the person whose world it is. That does not mean we approve it or even necessarily appreciate it. It does mean that we extend our experience sufficiently to grasp it as a human possibility.” I’ve been carrying this baby around, this person whose gender, personality, specific needs or talents, dreams, and fears are all unknown to me. Still I find myself loving it in the most mundane of ways. I hung a mobile above its changing area and put my head down where its head will be to see if the animals hanging above looked threatening in any way (they actually did look a little scary, like the looming Macy’s Day parade balloons that used to freak me out when I was a kid). I found instead that one of the overhead spotlights, meant to illuminate art work would be shining in the baby’s eyes and so I dragged out a stool and got up there to swivel light in a different direction. I am reading about the harmful chemicals that are leached from certain plastic baby bottles and making sure that I buy glass ones. I am trying to play more music in the house and less news. All these things out of real love for this person I have yet to meet. Granted this is my BABY, but I think with discipline and imagination, we can love all sorts of people, BEINGS, we haven’t met.

This summer at the General Assembly of UU Congregations, Rebecca Parker, a Unitarian Universalist theologian described returning to a congregation that she had led over twenty years before. She had been instrumental in that congregation’s effort to be what the Methodists call a “reconciling congregation”—that is a congregation who stands firmly in the belief that supporting gay, lesbian and transgender folks is a part of living out Jesus’ message of universal love. That standing with these and other marginalized communities is a part of their job as Christians. Anyway, this church, which had declined to fifty some members and seemed to have lost its way when my colleague assumed the pulpit there was now thriving and was holding a celebration of their landmark decision to open their hearts, their minds, and their doors to all. They had invited Rebecca to come up for the celebration.

After the service and the reception that followed, a young woman who was maybe 20 caught Rebecca by the arm and said, “I just wanted to thank you for helping to create this place that saved my life.” The young woman described the depression and desperation that had been a part of her realization that she was gay and how finding this church had given her different eyes with which to look at herself. She was no longer condemned, no longer less than everyone else, but a child of God held in “everlasting arms.”

She said to Rebecca, “Before I even existed, you imagined me. Before you even knew me, you loved me.” Like me with my head down on the changing table, Rebecca straight and married at the time and her church, was able to imagine being gay and scared and vulnerable in a society that was just at the threshold of being able to more commonly accept homosexuality. They imagined they might need a church, she imagined the language that might make that person feel safe, she imagined what they might need to feel held. They loved a whole parade of people they had never even met.

Martin Luther King, again in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said:

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all [people]. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of [humanity]. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response which is little more than emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

This is our job. To love well not just those those around us, but those who are strangers to us. To imagine them, to wonder about them, to reach out our arms to hold them. Those who live across the ocean, those from different species, those who may live very near but whose lives will never directly intersect ours. The poet John Donne wrote:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Here the bell of love ringing, calling for your arms and also signaling to you that they are there for you. That sound that you hear when your dog rests his chin on your leg, when you sit with an old friend in quiet, when you hold your child, when the wind pushes through falling leaves and into your loneliness, when someone holds your hand at the right moment…that sound is the bell of love and do not ever doubt that it tolls for thee. Hear it, believe in it, answer its call. This is the work that will save us.

---

[1] McNatt, Rosemary Bray. “To Pray Without Apology” UU World, Nov/Dec 2002. Accessed on-line on September 28, 2010 http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/2527.shtml

Last Sunday's Sermon

Divinity in the Details

September 26, 2010—Foxborough Universalist Church

Katie A. Lawson, Minister

READING 1

From “Meditation on Love”

Thich Nhat Hanh

The meditation on love is not just sitting still and visualizing that our love will spread out into space like waves of sound or light. Sound and light have the ability to penetrate everywhere, and love and compassion can do the same. But if our love is only a kind of imagination, then it is not likely to have any real effect. It is in the midst of our daily life and in our actual contact with others that we can know whether our mind of love is really present and how stable it is. If love is real, it will be evident in our daily life, in the way we relate with people and the world.

The source of love is deep in us, and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, or one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring him joy. One word can give comfort and confidence, destroy doubt, help someone avoid a mistake, reconcile a conflict, or open the door to liberation. One action can save a person’s life or help him take advantage of a rare opportunity. One thought can do the same, because thoughts always lead to words and actions. If love is in our heart, every thought, word, and deed can bring about a miracle. Because understanding is the very foundation of love, words and actions that emerge from our love are always helpful.

READING 2

#594 Singing the Living Tradition

SERMON

My mom tells a parenting story that maybe some of you will relate to. First, it’s important to the story that you know that my mom is a non-violent type—a gentle type in fact—and also pacifist-leaning politically. She has strong feelings about things like guns and pro-wrestling. As for many people the terrible acts of violence in the sixties shattered her 1950’s world view and activated an adamant “violence is not the answer” stance in her that prevails to this day. However, as an energetic and physical three, four, and five year old, my little brother did not get the memo. Every now and then, Wells’ frustration got the best of him, and he expressed it as efficiently as he could, that is physically. My mother witnessed one such incident between my brother and a playmate, and found herself unhinged. She pulled Wells aside furious at his violation of one of the most important things she hoped to teach him. She took him my the wrist and said, fiercely, “We DO NOT hit!” punctuating her proclamation with a slap on the top of his hand. She tells this story to this day. It still bothers her that she stepped so far outside the boundaries of her values, ironically in order to enforce her values. She betrayed her values even as she, in the very same moment, was articulating them. I’m pretty sure she is not alone in having committed a “do as I say, not as I do.” Defining and articulating the values that are central to our beliefs is not easy, but it’s a whole lot easier than living them out in the face of our daily lives, so that our very lives are statements faith.

Unitarian Universalists like to say that we express our faith in “deeds not creeds.” That is, what we do is much more important than what we profess to believe. If you look in the back of your hymnal you’ll find readings like the one from James 1 that says:

Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.

Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget by doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.

This is a theological pillar of our tradition: one cannot just profess belief and be done. We all play an active part as builders of the Kingdom of Heaven. It reminds of the old rule for good writing that, as much as you can, you should show not tell. That is, you can use all kinds of words to describe a character, but nothing will describe them better than having them react to something like a rowdy three year old. Most of the time this is understood as a religious imperative to be active in fighting for social and environmental justice. This is true, but it is not nearly the crux of it. If we look more closely at the theology, it’s just as much about HOW we are going to BE as we do it as what we do.

This is central to being organized around a covenant instead of a creed. We come together not around an agreement of exact belief or even a mandate that we will carry certain signs at protest rallies, but around an agreement about how we are going to BE with each other and out in the world.

The seven principles described in the front of your hymnal are meant to give some shape to our agreement, and the comment I hear most often about these principles is, “Yeah, yeah…what’s not to agree with in those?” We agree to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Not very controversial. In fact, these principles are so uncontroversial that some argue that they aren’t enough to hold us together, that they are fluffy, there isn’t enough mass to hold us in a central orbit. While I agree that these words aren’t perfect and that they could be boiled down like a reduction sauce so that they are denser with flavor, I disagree that they aren’t enough. If you take these principles seriously, if you pledge yourself not just to declare them but to live them out, moment to moment, there is a lot there to hold you, to be accountable to. Imagine adding prepositional clauses to the end of every principle. “We agree to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person…at this meeting” or “We agree to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations…at the grocery store.”

I’ve told here before about the rocket scientist from Stanford University. As the story goes, and I think it must be true, a man who was studying rocket science – seriously, rocket science – at Stanford took a break to travel in India. Somehow in his traveling, he ended up spending time working with Mother Teresa’s order. He was very moved by what he saw and the immediacy of the suffering and also by the work that he was able to participate in. He announced that he was going to give up his career as a rocket scientist and stay to serve the poor in Calcutta. At this, the story goes, Mother Teresa shook her wise and wrinkled face at him and told him no, he was not going to stay in India. He was going to go back to wherever it was he was from and do whatever it was he was doing, and he was going to do it with love. If he was a teacher he would teach with love, if he was a banker, he would bank with love, if he was a rocket scientist, he should rocket science with love. Not only is it not about what we SAY, it’s not even about what we DO necessarily. It’s HOW we do it…how we ARE when we do it. Focusing on that will lead towards good works probably, but in the meantime we won’t have missed the many moments offered to us to build a better world. Dorothy Day who gave her life over to working for the poor, said, “…we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.” We spend our days casting pebbles into the water around us just by how our words, actions, expressions on our faces respond to what is in our heart. Each pebble is important, each brick.

It needs to be said that what Mother Teresa asked of our rocket scientist was hard. He most likely returned to a highly competitive work place where a premium was placed on his intelligence and work ethic more than his loving heart. Often our work seems at cross- purposes with having a loving heart.

This is true even in ministry. I often hear colleagues complain that instead of taking classes in pastoral counseling or theravadic Buddhism, we all should have had to take courses in business administration, accounting, and computers, given what ends up being really useful. Somehow, you think if you are going into the ministry, you think it’s all going to be all preachin’, prayin’, and protestin’, and that somehow all the rest of it—the phone calls, the finance committee meeting, the board meeting, updating your page on the website interferes with the real work of bringing more holy into people’s lives. To the contrary, so much of ministry--mine AND yours—happens in between our sermons (don’t tell me you don’t give little sermons) and our good works.

In the Hebrew scripture, in the Old Testament, the word for “work” is avodah. This comes from the Hebrew root “avad” and is sometimes used to talk about work in the fields or about toiling. Other times, however, it is used as “to serve” or “to worship.” To worship means to show devotion to that which is most sovereign, most divine. In the new testament of the Bible, Paul describes the various gifts God has given members of the church to embody Jesus’ message in the world. He talks about teachers and healers and those who are able to help others. He’s trying to tell this struggling congregation that while they may think that being able to speak in tongues is the end all beat all for being in touch with God, that really there are many ways to contribute to the building of the Kingdom of Heaven. My favorite is at the end when he includes the gift of administration. Administration is perhaps one of the hardest places to keep it holy, especially if you include facilitating meetings as a part of administration. But think about all the ways the world would be a little better, a little closer to heaven, if people administrated with loving hearts.

I think about this a lot at church: how to better conduct our business here lovingly. It’s so often very easy, and yet we can neglect it. We will be organizing a small group this year to review the by-laws, which is on the face of it a pretty soul-less enteprise. What we are looking for though is language that is exclusively heterosexual or ignores the presence of our transgender members. This is an example of loving policy, loving leadership, loving administration. It springs straight from a pledge to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of EVERY person. And that is just the beginning, because then it is to us to be alert in our use of language in coffee hour, in meetings, while we’re working on the flower beds, and the ways in which it might be defining those who are inside a circle and those who are outside when what we say, as Universalists, say we believe is that NO one is outside the circle.

When we talk about clarity about how to participate in the life of the church and who can serve on the board and how those people get elected, we aren’t just keeping ourselves off the streets; we are affirming and promoting the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregation AND making sure that no one is drawn outside the circle. I’d love to hang a sign out on the door that says, “Open for loving business.”

When I was back in Minnesota over the summer, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother who has always had a strong ethic of community service. Lately, she’s mostly housebound, physically uncomfortable and cranky with her God. She is having trouble remembering things, and so there are little post-its around the house. One on the bathroom mirror says, “Turn off the stove.” Our phone numbers are stuck to coffee tables and counters on yellow tabs of paper. This last time I was home, I was getting some cereal and noticed a post-it on the cupboard door that said, “Be nice on the phone.” I asked Granny about this and she said she put it there after a string of phone solicitations that she felt had caused her to get too curt and impolite on the phone. I’ve been thinking about the various post-its I could put up. One in my windshield that says, “Go ahead let them in.” One on my computer that says, “Can they tell you respect them from this email?” One on my wallet that says, “Did you meet the cashier’s eyes?” Because at the root of all of this is bringing ourselves to awareness. Is your love present in this moment? Who or what are you serving in this moment? Your anger, commercialism, your need to appear in control, your need to control? How ARE you BEING to that politician, to that insurance agent, to yourself. Can we say to our children: Don’t do as I say, or even as I do, necessarily. Do as I AM. Our reading this morning from says: “If love is in our heart, every thought, word, and deed can bring about a miracle.” Find some way to return yourself to love. Set an alarm on your blackberry, do as the Muslims do and stop at certain times to day to turn yourself back towards the holy, leave yourself post-its that say, “Just do it—with love.”

Back in the Saddle

Well, after a summer hiatus, I am glad to be settling back into the routine of church life and contemplation. We had a jubilant celebration of common waters to begin our church year and followed that with a Sunday devoted to atonement.

Here's an article that I wrote for the September 9 edition of the Foxboro Reporter on the topic of atonement. The one published in the paper was quite altered from what I wrote for them, but here's my copy:

Broken Beauty

By Katie Lawson, Minister of Foxborough Universalist Church

Once I was told that being in relationship is much like sitting in an old log cabin in the midst of a tremendous winter storm. We light a fire in the fireplace and sit down on the couch in front of it with our beloved and try to keep warm. Pretty soon, because we are human, we feel a draft and get up to find where the cold wind is blowing in under the door and roll up a towel and jam it in there. In having got up, we got cold and so we hustle back to the couch to a warm embrace and the glow of the fire. Soon enough we feel another draft—another assault on our perfect warmth—and set out to find the gap between the logs through which the wind has found its way in. Now we are cold again, maybe even colder not having fully warmed up after the last time. This goes on, us getting up to find and fill the cracks meanwhile getting colder and colder when really all along we could have been throwing more logs on the fire and being warmed by the heat of our beloved.

This wisdom applies just as readily to the rest of life—that we have a tendency to hustle around trying to repair the places where the wind blows in or at least hang pictures over them, especially if people are coming over. We are afraid the cold wind of loneliness, of life without love and joy, and, so we try to stop up the places where it might seep in, when all the time we could be sitting on the couch with our beloved and stoking the fire. This is not to say we should live in denial that there are cracks or that we don’t get up to close the front door when in blows open, only that we understand that charming old log cabins like us are going to leak just a bit and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean we have to freeze.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “There is a crack in everything God has made.” He wasn’t filing this as a complaint—critiquing God’s handy work. He was trying to say that everything that is REAL in this world is imperfect. Everything whose origin is love is imperfect. We are all imperfect, and those imperfections don’t keep us separate from love and joy; often, in fact, it is our compulsion to fix them or hide them that will. We are entering the Jewish Days of Awe, which began with the Jewish New Year and will culminate with Yom Kippur, a Day of Atonement. Let’s begin again. Let’s find a nice big log to throw on the fire and for as long as we can stand it let our cracks be and feel the warmth of forgiveness next to our Beloved. May you each be forgiven, may you forgive.

A Message from the Dalai Lama

I'm sorry about the long hiatus from the blog that I've taken, but I'm now ready to get back on the stick, especially as we move into summer. My hope is to post regularly throughout the summer.

As I prepare for this Sunday and am reading about pacifism and just war theory in the context of modern day terrorism, these words from the Dalai Lama printed in the New York Times today struck me as yet another eloquent guidepost towards a peaceful world. Enjoy.

Many Faiths, One Truth

Easter Sunday Sermon

Some of you asked that I post the Easter Sunday sermon here:

Probable Improbabilities

Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010—Foxborough Universalist Church

I love being in a Unitarian Universalist church on Easter. There’s always just a hint of tension in the room. Some of you, I’m sure, are sitting there thinking: she can’t possibly preach on the resurrection, can she? I mean do we even believe that? Some are thinking: if she goes all rites of spring on me and totally ignores Jesus, I might lose it. Many of us are remembering Easters from our childhoods and maybe are a little grateful we aren’t sitting there in a white dress or a clip on bow-tie. And there are some of you, I know, for whom our Seder meal last week was at the heart of this season’s religious focus. This day, more than most throughout the year, confronts us with the fact that we are not a creedal religion—that we have covenanted to sit beside each other knowing that for each of us this holiday bears different significance. This is what I love.

Truthfully, Easter is just kind of a confusing holiday, period. The celebration of a primary Christian doctrine got all mixed up with the pagan fertility celebrations that accompanied spring in pre-Christian days. It is supposed to be a celebration, but it comes only days after the Savior’s execution, which is confoundingly called “Good Friday” (a sermon for another day). Then there are the bunnies and brunch and miracles we’re not even sure we believe in. I love David Sedaris’ description of trying to explain Easter to a Muslim woman in his French class. Sedaris was in Paris taking beginning French with a motley assortment of exchange students, nannies, and other adults from all over the world who, for whatever reason, found themselves living in France and therefore needed to learn the language. In the middle of a basic conversational exercise about holidays the teacher asked, “And what does one do on Easter?” in French of course. A Moroccan student interrupted to ask, “Excuse me, what’s an Easter?”

Sedaris describes what happened when the teacher called upon the rest of the class to explain.

“[Two Polish students] rushed in with their best beginning French, ‘It is,’ said one, ‘a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus…’ She faltered and her fellow countryman came to her aid.

‘He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two…morsels of…lumber.’

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the Pope an aneurysm.

‘He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father.’

‘He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.’

‘He nice, the Jesus,’”

Which is often the most that many people can agree on on Easter.

This awkward explanation of the crux of modern Christianity is only made worse when people eagerly begin to explain to the Moroccan, who by now has to be so confused, what we do now for Easter. Sedaris continues describe the student’s eager attempts to have the Moroccan understand their tradition:

“’Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb,’ the Italian nanny explained. ‘One too may eat of the chocolate.’

‘And who brings the chocolate?’ the teacher asked.

I knew the word, so I raised myt hand saying, ‘The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.’

‘A rabbit?’ The teacher said, assuming that I’d had used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wriggling them as though they were ears. ‘You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?’

‘Well sure,’ I said, ‘He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have a basket and foods.’

The teacher sighed and shook her head. As far as she was concerned, I had just explained everything that was wrong with my country. ‘No, no,” she said. ‘Here in France the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome.’

I called for a time out, ‘But how do the bell know where you live?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘how does a rabbit?’”

This goes on and on without doing anything to enlighten the Moroccan. Later in the story Sedaris reflects, “I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity…In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith, a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the grammar lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn’t believe that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? If I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses... So why stop there? If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?”[1]

Why not, indeed? This to me is the spirit of Easter, no matter where you are coming from, that we should have faith in improbability of new life, that we should be ready maybe not to believe that a bell flying into Rome will deliver chocolate (that’s just silly), but perhaps that something else we think might never happen will happen, and often just when we thought it couldn’t possibly happen anymore.

The Christian writer Barbara Johnson has said that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world, which I think is mostly true.[2] We live amongst tremendous loss and suffering and yet somehow manage to resurrect ourselves every morning and go out into the world to do the things we need to do. Again, I am remembering John Cobb’s description of God as “the call forward.” However, sometimes I think we are actually Good Friday people living in an Easter world. That is, sometimes the labors or losses or frustrations in our lives can be so overwhelming that we stop believing that out of all that rubble new life can still emerge, that we WILL finally learn what we have trying to learn for years, that love WILL return, or that the relationship that seems to have trapped to good people in a bad dynamic will change.

One day in Boston, a man was walking across the Common to the T station that’s there for the green line. His full intention was to buy a token, walk down the stairs and throw himself onto the third rail. This one winter of his life had gone on too long. He could no longer see the possibility of new life emerging in his spirit. I don’t know what was happening in his life or in his body at this time, but each of us, I’m sure can imagine any mixture of circumstances that might have brought him to that point.

Just as he was heading down the stairs someone called “Welcome!” to him. It was Sunday morning and the entrance for the T is not five feet from the entrance of Arlington Street Church where the morning greeters were outside the old Unitarian church even in the cold shaking hands and welcoming people as they entered church. One of them had mistaken him for a parishioner. This moment of confusion interrupted the man’s momentum and postpone his suicide attempt long enough to go inside and pray. He stayed for services, and something that was said that morning was enough to make him believe not necessarily that spring had arrived, but that it was coming. Something gave him enough strength to begin looking for new life. He remains a deeply committed member of the Arlington Street Church and perhaps knows better than any of us how life saving a group of people coming together each week to look for signs of spring can be.[3]

This season, the season of Easter, reminds us that life always contains the possibility that it will surprise us…with life! More importantly though, it reminds us that often we are co-creators of those surprises, of grace. As difficult as it may be at times, it is ours to find a way to believe in what seems totally improbable: a healed heart, a sense of belonging, a reconciled relationship, a recovery from addiction…That’s what we come here for, whether we are agnostic, pagan, Christian-leaning, Buddhist-leaning, or whatever. We come to shore up our faith so that we can give improbabilities the benefit of the doubt.

Look at what has been happening these last two weeks. One day it was icy and barren and the next day a bit of sun landed against the house for a couple of hours and a crocus—a FLOWER—busted out of the gravel-ridden dirt next to our driveway. This happens every year and it always catches me a little off-guard. I almost always think the crocuses have jumped the gun a little (the daffodils seems a little more prudent but still pretty gutsy). Still I get sucked in by it. Last week when we got those first truly warm days of the season, it was so great to see people out in their flip-flops and shorts, fussing around in their gardens all goose-pimply and determined. My poor neighbor caught a cold, having spent the whole day outside cleaning her car in a tank top and shorts. This is a beautiful thing about human beings, that we are ready to BELIEVE the crocus when it says spring is coming, despite the forecast for the next week. It’s strange because in the midst of the icy cold of winter, I think it is hard to believe that it will ever happen, but as soon as we get the first hint of it sometimes our whole beings rise up to meet the possibility, especially if we are out looking for the signs.

In Luke when the women from Galilee go to the tomb to properly prepare Jesus’ body, they are met by two men in dazzling clothes who are standing by the tomb. Here I can’t help but think of the tomb as flanked by Elton John and Lady Gaga. And then they ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” What a great question. Why do any of us? I don’t think these women actually thought this is what they were doing—looking for the living among the dead. They were following their love for their teacher and their friend, wanting to honor him by caring for his body. But when we are following the breadcrumbs left by our love, we ARE looking for the living among the dead. Why do we do this? Why are we out there pulling out brown leaves and cutting back dry branches looking for the green? Because we are following love to faith, we want to believe that it will come back despite the mess. In our gardens, we believe it because we’ve seen it year after year. I wish we could see how that works in other parts of our lives as clearly…that we are surrounded by the possibility of rebirth. Unfortunately, the cycles of the rest of lives tend to not be so regularly timed and it’s hard to remember that things can (and usually do) get better.

Here's an example I always lean on when my faith wanes: when I was twenty, if you had told me that I would have a relationship with my father that was mostly relaxed, affectionate, and playful, I would have laughed at you. I would not believed you, yet would have hoped that you were right. I’m not sure when it happened, but it may have been a summer when I was living at home and my mom was away and it was just the two of us, my dad and I. Something shifted. I know I was different that summer, that I was looking for openings more than usual. I think he was too. Something I thought would never-ever change just shifted. I give us both credit for sticking with each other, but then there’s this mystery piece that I can't explain and can only be grateful for that finally allowed the ice to break.

Things can change. Things do change. This is life. Whatever keeps sending you late season snow storms in your life, whatever it is you cannot believe will ever change, could change tomorrow. Today we celebrate probable improbabilities. We embrace the grace by which our lives are constantly renewed. May it be so for you.

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[1] Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. Boston: Little, Brown and Company; 2000.

[2] Quoted in Lamott, Anne. Plan B—Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. p. 140.

[3] As told in a sermon, "Telling Stories of Hope" delivered March 31, 2002 by Rev. Rob Hardies at All Soul’s Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C.

My Pet Peeve and More Access to UU History

I thought I'd take this time and space to acknowledge a ministerial pet-peeve of mine. This is the misconception by many that Unitarian Universalism doesn't have its own theology. The truth is that it has, I think, a rich and life-giving theology, with which our own personal theologies experience varying degrees of synchronicity. So, I'm on a mission to have folks begin to understand that this wasn't a denomination that suddenly appeared in the 1960's and that throws up it's hands saying, "Whatever...it's all good." To that end, I've been trying to introduce resources for exploring the richness of our tradition both historically and theologically.

My colleague, Rev. Thom Belote, has generously posted lectures from a UU History seminar he put together for lay leaders as a part of the Midewest leadership school. I invite you to read a couple and let me know if they bring up questions for you.

Rev. Belote's lectures can be found via his blog: www.revthom.blogspot.com.

Obama Seder

It was such a joy to gather together for our annual Passover Seder. I regretted that I didn't catch this article in the New York Times until after we had celebrated together. I find it soothing to know that the President sits down for a Seder meal and spends an evening focusing on imprisonment and liberation. I like to imagine the message of Seder affecting how he thinks about everything from incarceration rates in the country to human trafficking to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. Enjoy the picture painted in this article: Next Year in the White House: A Seder Tradition.

Back from Vacation and Profiles of Unitarian Universalists

Back from a delightful vacation during which we mostly unplugged ourselves while camping out on an island.

Last Sunday in church we reflected on the legacy of Rev. James Reeb who was killed in Selma after participating in a march with Martin Luther King and the meaning of heroism. Some of you expressed gratitude for the short lesson in Unitarian Universalism that came from hearing about Reeb's journey and how it fit with Unitarian Univesalist theology. I thought you might appreciate knowing about these short narrative biographies of Unitarian Universalist heroes that come to us thanks to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Queens and their minister, Rev. Ian White Maher. They can be found by searching "UU Minute" on YouTube (www.youtube.com). You can start with this one about Reeb: James Reeb Video.

Poem from Sunday

This last week, a friend and I dropped into the poetry bookstore near Harvard Square, and I spent some time talking with the proprietor about his recommendations (Galway Kinnell and Franz Wright amongst others). I explained to him that I am constantly on the prowl for new poets, especially as they might be useful in my work. I told him that I look especially for a poem from which people can take some meaning even if they only hear it read once. This brought us to talking about different ways to approach the problem of having to understand a poem that is offered in a service without getting to hear it twice or getting to read it on your own. I wondered out loud if it would be good to print the poems in the order of service. My friend suggested that I could post them here on my blog the Friday before the service, so that you would have a chance to look at them and wonder about them in advance. I figured the very least I could do is put them here after the fact, so that you get another pass at them. Below is the reading from last Sunday's service. It's from Katha Pollitt's newest book of poems "The Mind-Body Problem." I picked up at the poetry book store.

What I Understood--Katha Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything

about, for example, futility. Standing for hours

on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls

I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform

this pointless task, and all the other? I knew

about snobbery, too, and cruelty--for children

are snobbish and cruel--and loneliness: in restaurants

the dignity and shame of solitary diners

disabled me, and when my grandmother

screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"

I knew she was right, the way I knew

about the single rooms my teachers went home to,

the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,

and that there was no God, and that I would die.

All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.

the only thing I didn't understand

was how in the world whose predominant characteristics

are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment

people are saved every day

by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.

This year I'll be

thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

What is Marriage For--Sermon February 14, 2010

A couple of you asked me to post this sermon on my blog. Here it is:

Picking Up the Oars

Foxborough Universalist Church—February 14, 2010

Katie Lawson, Minister

READING 1

From Poetry and Marriage—Wendell Berry

The meaning of human relationship begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown…we are never given two known results to choose between, but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is.

Because every relationship is worldly and its meaning communal, 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. It is going where the two of you—and also time, and life and history—will take it. You do not know the road. You have committed yourself to a way.

READING 2

West Wind 2—Mary Oliver

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt. I talk directly to your soul Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and streaming—then row, row for your life toward it.

SERMON

So it’s Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if you’re a fan or not or what this day means for you in the midst of a twenty-year marriage or a break-up or a real disdain for commercialism or after an all-nighter making enough Valentines for everyone in the second grade class or, lucky you, at the threshold of a brand new exciting love. Some of you might remember last year my telling the children the story of St. Valentine, the patron saint of lovers and of prisoners (go figure). I want to tell it again, not because I’m certain its true, but because it puts this day that can be fraught in so many ways with expectation and red hearted hoo-ha in a slightly nobler context. While not much is known about St. Valentine, the most common legend associated with him paints him as the Gavin Newsom of his time, fearlessly marrying couples who wanted to be married despite the laws that forbade it. As the story goes, the Roman Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, and so he outlawed marriage for young men. Outraged at the injustice of being denied so basic a right, a priest named Valentine continued marrying couples in secret and eventually was imprisoned and executed. So whatever your associations with Valentine’s Day, maybe it is an appropriate thing to use this occasion to consider marriage, this right for which St. Valentine died and that is the topic of so much heated conversation lately.

Whenever a couple, no matter their age or whether or not they’ve been married before, comes to me with this idea that they want to get married, the first question I always ask, in so many words, is “What for?” I don’t ask because 50% of people get divorce or because so many more people are cohabitating or because marriage is a silly idea. It isn’t a cynical question or flip or even confrontational. Really, at root, it’s practical, because these days we can’t assume why people decide to get married. People’s reasons are as varied as the couples themselves and likewise their marriages will be. Eventually, in that initial conversation, sometimes after some muddling around in the post-modern morass, a piece of the truth comes out, “It just seems like what happens next” they’ll say or “We are ready to have children” or “We have children and we want them to be able to explain our family in short hand” or “We just want to have our families—everyone—know what this is to us” or sweetly, “We have run out of ways to say I love you.” I say a piece of the truth, because there is always something there that they can’t quite get at with words and that’s all right too.

In amongst all these answers, never has any couple, gay or straight, said to me: “We are looking forward to 1,800 legal privileges awarded us by the state when we sign this agreement.” Some of them ARE looking forward to those, but that doesn’t get to the heart of why they have come with tender hearts to ask if I will be there to bless their marriage.

Because I am a free-wheeling Unitarian Universalist minister, many couples begin by telling me either explicitly or implicitly that for them the wedding itself is a formality, a piece of theatrics for grandma, and a party. As ministers, we have to acknowledge that, more often than not, we fall well below D.J. on the list of important players. However, even the most cavalier couple, with the exception of one that I can remember, all have said by the end, that the wedding…the marriage had come to have unexpected significance to them. That for those who had been living together for ten years something shifted and for those with domestic partner status and reams of other legal documents securing their household, something was different. E.J. Graff describes her commitment ceremony with her partner, Madeline, this way:

It was nearly a delirium: by accident we’d spilled into something sacred. To our utter surprise, the ceremony did bring us closer, pulling an invisible cloak around us that has warmed us during difficult times. We’d thought ourselves as committed as any couple could be: how else could we have exposed ourselves to the world’s ridicule? But now even the most subtle traces of doubt dissolve instantly, chased away by the memory of that day when we made our declarations so publicly, placing our love in the hands of God and everyone we knew.

For the couples that I have counseled and married and known so far—and for most of us—it seems there is something to marriage—the ones that begin in churches, the ones that begin in backyards, the ones that begin in city hall, the ones that are de facto, the ones that end—beyond the many legal and financial privileges a civil marriage affords. This must be true or we wouldn’t have a 32% approval rate for same-sex marriage in this country but a 57% approval rate for civil unions.

So if marriage isn’t exclusively about access to a list of legal privileges and other practical advantages like being able to have a second driver on your rental contract for free, what IS it about, what is it really for? E. J. Graff spends over 250 pages answering this question in her book What Is Marriage For? and I feel like we don’t have that kind of time here, it being Valentine’s Day and all. But if I may summarize her findings in her own words that appear near page 250: “Today’s marriage—from whatever angle you look—is justified by the happiness of the pair.” This isn’t to say that you can’t be happy without it or that there aren’t unhappy marriages. It is only to say that the basic driver for marriage these days has to do with individual happiness and, to the extent that love and happiness are related, love. It wasn’t always thus. As one historian puts it, “Marriage for love has traditionally assumed to be the dubious privilege of those without property.” This would be when both Martin Luther and John Calvin, for example, both thought the church shouldn’t have anything to do with marriage—that marriage had no more to do with religion than, in Calvin’s words, “agriculture, architecture, shoemaking and many other things.” But sometime, in the midst of the rise of industrialism and individualism and democratic ideals and reformed Protestantism, what had been traditional marriage became more than just a contract and became imbued with the sacredness that our culture prescribes to notions of freedom, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Even the state has said that marriage is more than just a notarized civic event and is closer to one of those inalienable rights with which we are endowed by our Creator. Consider the 1987 Supreme Court decision that inmates, who are stripped of so many other basic rights like to free speech, to earn money, and some cases to vote, should be allowed to marry because, in the words of the majority opinion, “inmate marriages, like others, are expressions of emotional support and public commitment… having spiritual significance.”

It was the premise that marriage in a democratic age is principally about the happiness of the individual parties that led to all sorts of reforms since the mid-19^th century, the most controversial of which, by the way, was to give women the right to own property within the marriage. THESE were such controversial pieces of legislation, inspiring far more controversy than the discussions we are having right now, that even once they were passed, judges all over Britain and the United States refused to enforce them. In the words of one Maryland judge: “What incentive would there be for such a wife ever to reconcile differences with her husband, to act in submission to his wishes, and perform the many onerous duties pertaining to her sphere? Would not every wife…abandon her husband and her home?” One New York legislator pleaded with his fellows to remember “the complexity and fragility of marriage as a social institution…If any single thing should remain untouched by the hand of the reformer, it was the sacred institution of marriage…[which] was about to be destroyed in one thoughtless blow that might produce change in all phases of domestic life.”[1] Apparently the reports of marriage’s death were greatly exaggerated because here we are.

I have always loved the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” because you can easily picture happiness skipping lightly away while we doggedly pursue it like baying hounds. And that pursuit is so much of what being human is about and, by all reports, what being married—or promised to another person in any way—is about. It is a sacred act when we promise ourselves—dedicate our lives—not just to pursuing our own happiness but also to join with someone else’s pursuit. We sense that the joining, and the promises we make and that are made to us in the process, are elemental to the pursuit AND to what we are here to do. Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams says, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitments, by making promises.” The moment that you decide to make promises on behalf of love—to give your word—is the moment, I think, you begin to row.

Mary Oliver, was with her partner Molly Malone Cooke for 50 years before Ms. Cooke’s death a couple of years ago, and she writes:

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing…When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and streaming—then row, row for your life toward it.[2]

Of course, Oliver doesn’t tell us what happens after we’ve rowed for our lives when we fall over that edge and into the great roiling waters. She doesn’t tell us this because she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if our little boats will pop back up to the surface and meander around a couple of bends before we to make the choice to row all over again OR whether we are still disoriented and turning in the mighty pounding OR whether our boat has been pushed out damaged and leaky and maybe too far from us to ever reach again. Wendell Berry reminds us, “We can join one another only by joining the unknown… You do not know the road. You have committed yourself to a way.”…the way of the current and of rowing.

And the rowing is hard work. Remember the old joke that marriage is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, suffering…This may be why Disney’s movies always END with the wedding, as if this is when the rest of us discretely leave the room, because from here on out it can get a little complicated and messy. It is true that our intimate relationships are deeply private. Robert Bly talks about a third body: one that the rest of us “know of, but have never seen.” However, it is also true that no marriage, no relationship, is born or survives in a vacuum. Wendell Berry says, “without a community to exert a shaping pressure around it, [a marriage or any kind of household] may explode because of the pressure inside it.”[3] This gentle hold is provided by our families, our congregations, our friends and our laws, all of which in so many ways bless and re-bless our churning oars. So, more often than not, we begin by asking someone—the state, our religion, our family, a minister standing in a rainy park, God—to tell us that this relationship belongs to a broader weave of love and will be held by it…that this relationship, born of love and sustained by love—this pursuit—also belongs to the larger love of which we are all a part. We ask for the people around us, dearest to us, to promise to hold us when the rowing is hard. Those who joined the church this Sunday made a similar promise and then asked for promises to be made to them—that their journeys, there struggles would be held in this community of love and respect. We ask for and make these promises—inspired by love, nurturing love—over and over again, because, really, this is what we are here to do.

---

[1] Graff, E.J. What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution. Beacon Press, Boston: 1999.

[2] Oliver, Mary. “West Wind—2” West Wind. Mariner Books, Boston: 1997.

[3] Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace. Counterpoint, Washington D.C.: 2002.