Sermons
November 1st, 2009 - "Calling All Souls"
Calling all souls and all saints; all dead and all alive - we are calling all souls and all saints to come forward. Yesterday, all souls came forth to show their faces on Halloween. Halloween is a day when everything seems possible and no one is limited. A fearful child can dress up to be the most powerful superhero imaginable. A homely one can be, for one dark night, a handsome prince or princess. A goody two shoes can be a fearsome and powerful witch, and anyone can try out being the walking dead.
At least that is how Halloween, or All Hallows Eve or Samhein [Sow-en] gets played out in America. Halloween springs out of many sources; pagan and Christian, ancient and modern, commercial and home -grown – all fueling a human need to grapple with the reality that we are all saints and sinners, are all living on the edge of life and death, and are all haunted by our past and uncertain of our future. And, as Gordon McKeeman says “we are all haunted houses, inhabited by spirits, by loved ones and unloved ones as well…. [and we too are] ghostly shades called up when our name echoes down the halls of another’s unconscious.”
Yesterday many of us celebrated Halloween. Today, especially in Catholic homes, families celebrate All Saints Day. And tomorrow, across the world, All Souls Day reigns. All Saints Day is a day that in my youth, and maybe also today, was called a holy day of obligation. It was one of those days that we Catholics were obliged to go to church and pray to the great saints of the past, to help us to be prepared for our own death so that we might die in a state a grace, pure of heart and mind. We prayed to Mary the mother of Jesus, to Joseph, his earthly father, to all the saints who we were told were in heaven, looking out for us, and working still on our behalf. My father, who died last year, was a great advocate of All Saints Day and was absolutely sure that not only the saints but the angels, his dear mother and father and sister and all the rest of the family were calling for him on that last day.
The Puritans, back in the 1600’s believed in another kind of saint. They believed in a saint that was called out not just on one day of the year, but every day, and everywhere. These Puritans are our religious ancestors, our ghosts perhaps, because in later years the Puritans became the Congregationalists and some of the liberal thinking Congregationalists became called Unitarians. Puritans and Unitarians believed, and we modern day Unitarian Universalist still believe, in the living saints of the congregation. It is up to us, the congregation, to do the work of the church and the community. It is us, the living body of saints that take one blundering step at a time, and make heaven and hell on earth.
I am sure that the ghosts of First Parish, from the first gathering in the 1600’s to those members and friends who died in the last few years of the 21st Century all had different kinds of ideas about life after death. Why not? I am sure that we, sitting here in this sanctuary also have all kinds of wonderings about what happens after we die. Some of us are certain that when the last breath has left the body that all life, physical and spiritual, is over and that is it. Other’s acknowledge the death of the physical body and at the same time are confident that we return to the same source that we came from and in some mysterious way we will continue to be a part of the great cosmic energy. From dust we come, to dust we return, yet still, that dust is star dust, and contains the matter from which new life is born.
My mother is a pragmatist. She follows her own grandmother’s home grown wisdom that either when we die everything is gone and there is no return so why worry about it, or heaven awaits everyone. Somehow, the idea of hell, or eternal suffering, does not come into play. In this way, she has a Universalist theology – all of us will end up in the same place. No wonder so many of our Universalist churches are called All Souls.
What we all know is that the saints are the people walking in the streets. And the saints, whether dead or alive, are imperfect, struggling people, trying to do our best, in between birth and death. Even the people, who might end up being honored as Catholic saints, are imperfect human beings living their lives as best they can. The most celebrated recently of the people in this category is Mother Teresa. You might remember how this Catholic nun, who gave her life to caring for the destitute and forgotten in Calcutta India, questioned everyday, her own her spiritual connection to God. She died in 1997 and after her death her letters to her spiritual counselors, showed that she suffered what might be called a dark night of the soul, her whole life. She constantly questioned whether what she was doing was what she was called to do. She knew as we all know, that our works do not always match up to our desires. She knew as we all know, that she was a human being, struggling to get through the day.
And still it behooves us to pay attention everyday to the saint in us and in our neighbors. But that I mean we need to pay attention to the good and bad parts of us. Pay attention to the part that is the monster and the part that is the prince or princess; the part that is wild and furious and the part that is calm and peaceful. We must pay attention because that is who we are; the good, the bad and the ugly.
In our reading, McKeeman has us consider the idea that while we are bound, by the realities of life and death, to be a haunting figure to the next generations, that we do have some choices. He says “why not be a friendly ghost?” Why not do whatever we can, in this life, to tip the balance toward goodness and mercy and justice so that we are remembered chiefly for bringing more life and less destruction into the world?
I have been thinking about this idea of how much we can affect how we are remembered by the living because I am also aware that tomorrow is All Souls Day. Tomorrow is the day that people all over the world remember, as we remember today, the dead. Whether by going to church and praying for the souls that are now in purgatory, that stepping stone between hell and heaven or by making altars with pictures of our loved ones, or by decorating graves with flowers and foods and special treats… All Souls Day is a day to connect with our own dear ones who have died and who we miss. And so I think about how we will all be remembered some day and how much, if any, influence we will have on that memorial.
This year the international community has been excited, shocked, dismayed and generally turned about by the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to President Barak Obama. We hear comments like “What a great thing – he is bringing so much more hope for peace into the world.” And “Why the Noble Peace prize, he has hardly made a dent in bringing peace into the world?” Or, “Is this a prize for Obama or a prize against his predecessors?” And on and on. All good questions and it will be interesting as time goes on to see how the bestowing of this prize effects who President Obama will become and what he will do. But what was even more interesting to me, is what I learned about Alfred Nobel himself and how he started offering the prizes. It is this story, and this legacy, that got me wondering how we might be able to in this lifetime; affect the future life on earth if not in heaven.
The story goes that Alfred Nobel, who was born in the year 1833, was an engineer and industrialist. His greatest claim to fame for most of his life was his invention of dynamite. His biographers acknowledge that dynamite was not intended to be a war machine but that in fact Nobel did have a fascination with and a concern about weapons of destruction. They quote him as saying near the end of his life about his dynamite factories, "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” The biographers believe that by the end of his life Nobel believed in this idea of a balance of terror to achieve peace. He did not live to see what happened in the First World War or any war since.
But I have heard another, equally compelling story about Nobel and the peace prize. Alfred’s older brother Ludvid had died and a French newspaper had mistakenly thought that it was Alfred who had died and so printed his obituary. The obituary was scathing, and was focused on condemning Alfred’s lifetime work of manufacturing dynamite. The obituary hailed “the merchant of death is dead. Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Alfred was so enraged about the obituary that he decided to rewrite his will to establish prizes celebrating the human achievements including a prize “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
The question of how Barak Obama will live up to, or into, this prize, is for the future. What we are left with here is the idea that each of us can change our obituary and in that way, change the future of the world. While we are all saints and sinners, and we are all living now between birth and death, we do have some input into who will be remembered as. Imagine now, for just a moment, how, if you died today, your obituary would read. Imagine that the obituary is not being written by someone who wants to just gloss over your full life. Imagine instead that your obituary is being written by someone who really knew you inside and out. What would they put in this last public statement about you? The good, the bad, the ugly, the monster and the princess, the wild and the peaceful. What would be said about you?
Now imagine that you got to hold the presses and re-write the obituary with another you, not exactly a “friendly ghost” but a person who you want to be remembered as, a human being, with failures and faults, but even more so, a person who lived fully, joyfully, creatively, and with integrity. A person who, when people read the obituary would say, “What you saw is what you got.” A person, who, when you come back to haunt another, will be welcomed.
We have this chance. Now, today, this moment. We have this chance. We cannot rewrite the past, but we can have a say in our present and our future. We are all saints. We all have a soul – an essential part of our selves that defines who we are and how we live. Today, look to your soul and see if what looks back is who and what you want to be remembered for. This is your chance. Take it.
Sources
“Ghosts” by Gordon B. McKeeman in Out of the Ordinary
Quotes about Alfred Nobel from nobelprize.org
September 6th, 2009 - "A People of Promise"
Welcome home everyone! Welcome home whether you are a member of this church or are a visitor and have stepped in our doors for the first time today. Welcome home! We have been waiting for you and are so happy that you have arrived.
Because you are here today, we are more complete. Our sanctuary that has been empty all summer, gathering up dust and sitting in silence is now bursting again with life because you are here. The waters that you have brought from your summery lives now bless and reinvigorate our church and the life of our congregation.
Yes, we have been waiting for you to show up; to dare to enter the sometimes imposing door of our church and to call us to attention and to task. This is the work of a church; to call us all of us to attention and to task. Attention to ourselves, to each other, to our community and attention to what some of us call our God.
Our responsive reading this morning reminds us that “this is a house for the ingathering of nature and human nature.” (Patton) We in this house are trying our best to rise to the best parts of our human nature knowing all the while that human beings often sink to our lowest level unless we are supported by a loving and committed community of care. Alone, it is too easy to sink into complacency or despair. Alone it is too easy to endlessly repeat our mistakes and to be blind to our own prejudices. Alone it is too easy to close the door, turn off the telephone, climb into bed and pull up the covers. And so, bravely and joyfully and freely we challenge this tendency of our human nature and instead come together to make community.
That is what we in First Parish try to be; a house of friendships, a haven in times of trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggle. So welcome home everyone. We are so happy that you have entered the doors of this house.
Did you notice that our responsive reading is a longer version of our own First Parish “Circle of Friendship Gathering Statement?” Kenneth Patton was the Universalist minister who wrote the original responsive reading. Patton wrote that the church promises to be both a haven in times of trouble and an open room for the encouragement of our struggle. Not the sharing of our struggles, as we at First Parish usually say but “the encouragement of our struggle.” Somewhere back in time, this line got tweaked and twisted a bit at our church and we now say “for the sharing of our struggles.”
I have been wondering for a while about this change in language and so I ask you today for your thoughts. Do we promise to be a place for the sharing of our struggles, or for the encouragement of our struggle? Do we promise to be a place for both of these different needs?
When we say that we gather as an open room for the sharing of our struggles we are saying that we want to know who you are. We want to know the joys and also the troubles that you encounter in your life; when someone you love is sick or dying, when your marriage is in a rocky phase or your children are struggling in school or with their friendships. We want to know when your heart is heavy with questions about the meaning in life and when you are no longer sure that you have the strength to get up out of bed yet somehow you did and here you are, lighting a candle of hope. Can you remember a struggle that you have shared at church?
These and so much more are the struggles that we, the people of the congregation want to know about. We promise to hold you in love as you share your struggles with us. When we say that this house is also an open room for the encouragement of our struggle we are saying something different and equally important. We are saying that we encourage each other to not only voice what is happening in our lives, but to actually encourage our struggles; our struggles to overcome our habits, to face our weaknesses and our complicity with injustice - what some churches might call our sick and sorry, sinful selves.
In our church and in our association we don’t usually use those terms “sick and sorry, sinful selves.” In fact our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors did struggle in their day with questions of sin, character, and whether it was true that anyone could be dammed to eternal suffering just because of their human nature. These questions have been translated in our times as our First Unitarian Universalist Principle and action statement. “We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of everyone.” Yet our ancestors and we also know that one of the gifts of a church is to be “an open room for the encouragement for our struggle” to face our full selves; our hopeful and our despairing selves, our risking and our fearful selves, our tolerant and our blaming selves, all that makes us who we are; the good, the bad, the ugly and the glorious parts of our individual and communal selves. And so we gather in church to encourage each other to face it all and to promise each other that we will stand together, walk together to do what is required of us. How do you think our church does at encouraging each other to struggle?
Many people who hear about Unitarian Universalism think that we are not required to do or to be anything special. They believe that we are a group of people who come together if we feel like it, to think our own thoughts, to do our own thing, to walk out when we are tired of each other and to stand in opposition to everything we heard about religion when we were children. Many people think that Unitarian Universalists are just no sayers.
I believe that nothing could be farther from the truth. We are religious descendents of the Hebrew Prophets, those loud mouthed preachers who challenged the people of their time to turn over complacency, turn over systems of oppression, and to turn over harmful ways of living. Because of their teachings, we modern day Unitarian Universalists are a people of promises. We are a people united in what we promise to be and to do in the world.
The prophet Micah asked the question “What does God require of us?” Today we might ask “what are we required to do in our lives to be our best and most committed selves?”
Micah asked it this way:
“With what shall I come before the LORD… ? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O mortal, what is good and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Notice how the prophets tend to talk in superlatives “ten thousand rivers of oil” as a sacrifice! What might this prayer sound like for us 21st Century people?
“With what shall I come before the Spirit of Life and Love? Shall I come with burning incense, with my most precious one year old pedigree dog? Will this Spirit of Life and Love be pleased with a gift of thousands of our gas guzzling cars or with our pledge to use ten thousand low watt light bulbs? Shall I give my firstborn child in exchange for my self centered life style, or my own body for how I sell my soul when I shop at Big Box stores? Wake up people! You know what is good. What does the Spirit of Life and Love require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
In the end, the answer is the same, no matter the generation. We are required, by our very wiring as human beings, to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly together. It is up to us to promise to walk with each other, asking “what is just or unjust in this situation and how can we do justice?” It is up to us to ask “what does it mean to love kindness; does it mean we need to practice kindness for everyone, even for those who get under our skin?” It is up to us to promise to follow what might be the hardest of all the requirements of our faith – to walk humbly, with the awareness that we do not know everything and to admit that we are often wrong and that we are always in need of help.
I say that this is often the hardest requirement of our faith because frequently we are pretty adept at recognizing injustice. Most of us recognize the need for kindness. But walking humbly comes hard for many of us. Many of us left the religions of our youth because we thought we knew better. Some of us think that because we have broken away from a more traditional religious home that we are better than people who have chosen to stay in that home. And when we think that way our open minds shut down. At that moment we are not open rooms for the sharing of struggles or the encouragement of struggle.
And so I believe that we in this house are required to practice all three of the prophetic requirements for living. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly, asking constantly for help. These are the promises that we make with ourselves, each other, and with our God – whatever is our own Source of Light and Life and Strength and Compassion.
We are a people of promise. As we might say about a child who is showing her gifts at an early age “That girl has a lot of promise. She’ll go far in life!” We say the same about each other “These people, that church has a lot of promise. They will do much for each other and in their community!”
We are a people of promise. We do not all sign a creed of belief. Our promises is what hold us together – our promise to love this church and its people, to give from our hearts, our hands, our wallets, and our minds to make this church a place where any one who enters the door will feel love and respect and support to grow spiritually.
We are a people of promise. Our religious ancestors believed in us, believed in their future, believed that we would do what was required of us – that we do justice, love mercy, and walk together in a humble and grateful awareness that we need each other. May we live into these promises day by day. Welcome home everyone!
Sources: Kenneth Patton – “This House” and Micah 6:
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