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.”
