Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

“Our Mission: Service”

Rev. Rod Debs

March 14, 2010

Story for All Ages: “Patrick, the Dreamer” by Randy Hammer (Everyone a Butterfly, 2004)

A long time ago—in fact, sixteen hundred years ago—a 16-year-old boy named Patrick was walking when he was captured by raiders from another country.  The raiders tied him up and put him on their ship to sell as a slave in Ireland.

For year after year, Patrick was mistreated by his master, a cruel chieftain who made him live in the hills of Ireland herding sheep.  Patrick was a Catholic and prayed all those long days and months and years, alone on the green Irish grasslands, day after day, night after night.

Then one day Patrick walked away travelling many miles to the ship docks where he escaped by ship, first to France, and then back to his home in Britain.  He had been a slave for six years!

Once he returned home, Patrick dreamed of Ireland.  In one of his dreams, Patrick felt that he must return to Ireland, but not as a slave.  Patrick studied for the priesthood and was ordained a Catholic priest.  He even became a bishop.

In ten years, Patrick returned to Ireland where he spent the rest of his life as a priest teaching that God is a good God who loves human beings.  In Ireland, he baptized 100,000 people and started 100 Catholic churches.

Today, all over the world, people celebrate being Irish or pretending to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day (March 17).  And many people dress in green like the Irish hillsides covered in sweet, green clover.

Sermon This morning I would like to begin with a quiz.  There are two questions, and I will give you one minute for each.  You may consult your neighbor.

OK, here’s the first question:  Each of us had our private motivations for first attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation.  What was one of your personal motivations for coming in the door?…

Here’s the second question:  As a group, what are we doing here?  Why do we exist?…

Six years ago, the Board of Trustees sent a team led by Shar Farley to a conference in Atlanta, featuring the Alban Institute trainer, Alice Mann, author of the book Raising the Roof. Thirty-five or so UU congregations sent teams to the conference, and we all returned with a plan to propose to our church boards.

This Fellowship’s Board liked Alice Mann’s plan, so they named a Discovery Team to study who we are and what we think we are doing here.  The Discovery Team studied our demographics—who we are.  Then, in 2005, they convened working groups to reflect upon what we’re doing here.  A draft Mission Statement was posted for congregant responses.  With the Board of Trustees tweaking the wording a little bit, the congregation voted to adopt this Mission Statement:

“The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast is a religious community united by UU Principles and committed to service, spiritual growth and caring fellowship.”

Beginning this morning and for the next two Sundays, I will offer my perspective on the three stated purposes for the existence of this congregation:  Service, Spiritual Growth, and Caring Fellowship.

We begin with our stated commitment to Service.

In a market economy where everything costs money, it is seductive to think of church as a distribution center for various marketable goods:  We pay our pledge, and in return we get: intellectual stimulation, theological insights, ethical instruction for our children, weekly psychological “uplift,” inspirational music, poetry and ritual, social support network, leadership opportunities, and other such church “products.”  We shop for groceries; we do laundry; and we do church once a week.  We do our religious duty and hopefully get something out of it in return.  This perspective reduces religious community to private market transactions, like the transfer of energy when one billiard ball strikes another separate billiard ball.  It assumes that we are whole, separate individuals.

I was digging in my garden a few years back, and I found this little plastic piece.  It resembles a medieval king.  Has a green felt bottom.  Is it a miniature plastic replica of a medieval king?  No!  This is a part of a chess set.  This single piece has no real identity apart from the game of chess.  It has no meaning, no utility except in relation to pawns and knights, bishops, rooks and queen on a chess board and moved according to the rules of chess.  We too find ourselves in our relationships.

In her book Our Passion for Justice (1984), the Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward writes:

“(W)e are in relation to others—quite literally… knowing ourselves… only in relation.  We may live alone.  We may need and crave solitude.  But it is in relation that we live, and need, and desire; relation to the ground on which we stand, the fruits of the earth that we enjoy, she or he whom we embrace, our friends and our enemies; in relation to rich and poor, to peoples of same and different colors and beliefs and ways of constructing reality.” (p.127)

Holding this single chess piece separated from the entire lost set, I understand a bit of what Mother Teresa meant when she said, “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” This may have been a king at one time, but it is nothing alone.  Mother Teresa said, “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.”

Service is fundamental to who we are and to our becoming more whole.  Our Social Justice project to support Opportunity Place homeless shelter for women and families, is our second congregational Service project.  We are trying to help the homeless shelter get the homeless “pieces” back in the game.  Get them back in the flow of social and economic relationships.

Remember the boxes of clothes, shoes and blankets we sent to Afghan refugees last year?  Remember the pictures of barefoot children in the snow and mud?  Refugee camps resemble so many chess and monopoly pieces, wiped off of their playing boards and dumped into vacant lots of winter mud and canvass tarps.  The clothes, shoes, blankets and bags of coal that Blake and other military personnel distributed on their days off, were meant to help Afghan refugees get back in the flow of community.

You and I know what it is like to be this lost chess piece, to lose a job and to be a worker removed from our workplace.  Some of us know what it’s like to have lost a home to bankruptcy or fire, to have lost family to divorce or to death or to job mobility.  We feel lost.  We feel that we are not ourselves except in relation to our loved ones and co-workers, and to our familiar life game-boards.

Through social justice Service projects we seek to help the disenfranchised, the excluded, those discriminated against—to help get them back into the flow of healthy relationships again.  Get them back in the game and without discriminatory disadvantages that tie their hands.

In the game of chess, like in life, there are pawns with little power, and there is the queen with all the power the game can bestow.  One could say with the poet William Blake, “Every night and every morn some to misery are born, every morn and every night some are born to sweet delight,” and conclude as does the poet, “it is right it should be so.” After all, the game of chess could not function with multiple queens!  Or could it?  When pawns reach the opponents base line, the player may trade the pawn for any other piece including multiple queens!  Then we see the game’s full potential!

Our nation’s founders designed into the United States tax codes an inheritance tax in order to prevent creating in the United States, a permanent aristocracy as existed in Europe.  It is possible that we who are privileged by the accident of birth or due to the blessings of social supports—that we might spread around some of our privileges that others too may rise to their greater potential as more than pawns of the game.

The Rev. William Ellery Channing who is considered the father of American Unitarianism, wrote of privilege and slavery in his sermon “Self-Culture”:

“The… All-wise Father, who has given to every human being reason and conscience and affection, intended that these should be unfolded; and it is hard to believe that He who, by conferring this nature on all men,… has destined the great majority to wear out a life of drudgery and unimproving toil, for the benefit of a few.  God cannot have made spiritual beings to be dwarfed….

“Were I, on visiting a strange country, to see the vast majority of the people maimed, crippled, and bereft of sight, and were I told that social order required this mutilation, I should say, Perish this order.  Who would not think his understanding as well as best feelings insulted, by hearing this spoken of as the intention of God?…

“Go then, to the Southern plantation.  There the slave is brought up to be a mere drudge.  He is robbed of the rights of a (human), his whole spiritual nature is starved, that he may work, and do nothing but work; and in that slovenly agriculture, in that worn-out soil, in the rude state…, you may find a comment on your doctrine, that by degrading (people), you make them more productive….” (32)

Like Dr. Channing, each member who sees some aspect of the social order that “dwarfs” our fellows and limits the unfolding of their divine-human nature, can call us to action.  For the sake of our community wholeness, we join our hearts, hands and minds to remedy the mutilation of our fellow beings.  Mother Teresa said:

“Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.”

“Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.”

“Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.”

“I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?”

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”

Our passion for healthy relationships, leaving no one as pawns or slaves or out, is our passion for wholeness.  Everyone does better when everyone does better.  The Rev. Drs. Edward Everett Hale and Forrest Church offer common-sense advice:

I

am only one

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything.

But still I can do something.

And because I cannot do everything

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

by Edward Everett Hale

 

“Do what you can.” Forrest Church

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
Heart Strings
Rev. Rod Debs
February 14, 2010

Lyrics: ”The String”
by Peter Mayer, Bountiful CD

I have found a hole in the center of the heart
Through which a thread goes, enters and departs
It’s fastened in the middle to inside of me
From where it then continues through the heart of everything

So when I get a feeling like a pulling on the chest
I have to ask if that was me or one of the rest
Sometimes it’s painful, sometimes just a tap
Sometimes it happens violently and knocks me on my back

When pain is not just mine alone, that’s when I know
Somebody’s tugging on the string

And when I start shaking, like a tremor in the ground
Or and organ pipe in rank when it’s resonating sound
Such a fine emotion of such intensity
Takes a hold, and I know that it can’t be only me

Then I guess that someone, maybe far away
Has grown a little tired of the instrument they play
And somehow has discovered that universal thread
And reached out a courageous hand and plucked that chord instead

When life seems like it’s only music, then I know
Somebody’s playing the string

And sometimes when I stand beneath the sky at night
I take up the slack till the string is tight
And staring at the stars, I take a step or two
And I see them move
I think I see them move

Everything’s connected like peas are in a pod
Or beads upon a necklace, decorating God
Going around the rosy, we’re all in the ring
Hand in hand, like a strand through the heart of everything

Valentine’s Day is perhaps the most appropriate time to address `love,’ arguably one of the two most poorly defined words, concepts, realities in human experience. (The other ill-defined term is `God.’)  `Love’ has been used to speak of paternal or maternal possessiveness, kinship, sibling affection, compassion, infatuation, lust, loneliness, neediness, commitment, and myriad combinations of such sentiments.

My childhood notions of love were shaped by the cultural clichés that God is love, that Jesus loves everyone, and by the Beatles’ truism that “All you need is Love…, Love is all you need, Love is all you need, Love is all you need.”  Without a clear definition, I found it really hard to say that I loved my parents because, you see, I didn’t feel romantic affection for them.  And I knew that the infatuation I felt for potential partners was more lust than love.  `Love’ meant anything and nothing.

Buddhist use of the phrase “loving kindness” makes a lot of sense to me.  Kind, compassionate behavior rooted in a sense of personal affection— loving kindness seems to be something worthy of commitment.  Stories of Jesus’ loving kindness were planted in my earliest childhood memories, coupled with the teaching that Christianity is at its core, imitation of Christ, being like Jesus.  The Great Commandment defined “loving God” and “loving my neighbor” as two sides of the same coin: to love God was to love my neighbor.  “Love” meant the kind compassion Jesus showed to the poor and marginalized, outcasts, “the least of these, our brothers and sisters.”  Loving kindness.

Love was tough for me growing up.  I couldn’t love everybody.  I didn’t even like everybody!  It was not until I was in my thirties and in seminary that I learned a key element of love: mutual relation.  Power and control and submission are not qualities of love.  Since then I have come to feel that the mutuality I can offer is respect, to take each one seriously whether I like them or not.  On reflection, it is not sentimental affection that I long for myself.  The love I want is to be taken seriously, as in our UUA covenant we affirm “the inherent worth and dignity of every person”.  Mutual relation.

In his song “The String,” Peter Mayer sings:  “Everything’s connected like peas are in a pod / Or beads upon a necklace, decorating God / Going around the rosy, we’re all in the ring / Hand in hand, like a strand through the heart of everything”.

To experience this “string,” this sense of being connected to everything and everyone, seems to me to be the defining goal of religion, from the Latin, religio, to bind together.

Albert Einstein explained the fact of interconnectedness that we find so hard to feel, when he said:  “A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness.  This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”

To be whole, to experience the reality of interconnectedness, is that elusive “meaning of life.” To achieve wholeness is to realize that each person is literally a part of me, my own flesh.

Our natural proclivity to seek union, wholeness through religious practices of loving kindness is regularly challenged by another natural proclivity to see ourselves as separate and to fear and fight the other, each against all.  In recent years, functional MRI brain scans localize in different lobes of the brain, perceptions of separateness and perceptions of interconnectedness.  The question is:  Which will prevail in shaping our relationships?

The story is told (and deserves retelling) of a Cherokee elder teaching a young boy that we all have two wolves inside us.  “One is a wolf of honesty, kindness, justice, moderation, selflessness, compassion and love.  The other is a wolf of greed, lust, selfishness, calculation for his own benefit and wickedness.  And these two wolves are forever opposed to one another.”   “Which wolf wins?” the boy asked excitedly.   And the answer?  “It depends upon which one you feed.”

Aikido master Mitsumi Saotome writes:  “If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.”

To realize life’s purpose, we must feed the good wolf of honesty, kindness, justice, moderation, selflessness, compassion and love.

In his metaphor of the Charioteer, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato also presented a psychological model of human motivation. In The Republic Plato described the individual (and the state) as consisting of three distinct human competencies, our Appetites, Passions and Reason.  Plato painted us a picture of a Charioteer with two powerful steeds: one represented the Appetites which drive us to material consumption, and the second, our Passions that drive us to psychological pleasures, good feelings.  Although these two steeds might easily drag the Chariot to excess from one appetite to another, or chasing after myriad, fleeting feelings, it is our human capacity to Reason, the charioteer within this metaphor, which by harnessing and directing the steeds of Appetites and Passions towards wise goals, that Good and Just ends can be attained.

Both metaphors, the wolves and the Charioteer with two steeds, both affirm that we humans have powerful motivations, passions, feelings, appetites, which wisdom would instruct require both respect and direction.

Religious and secular society often moralize and condemn the individual Charioteers for not whipping our steeds under absolute control.  On the other hand, at our best, both secular and religious culture help direct our steeds and feed our better wolves.  How often we take for granted the support we receive and owe to one another.  How often we miss opportunities to guide, support and encourage one another’s better efforts and forgive so that another might stand and try again.  George Odell wrote:

“We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted.
We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.
We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation,

and need to be recalled to our best selves again.
We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose,

and cannot do it alone.
We need one another in the hour of success,

when we look for someone to share our triumphs.
We need one another in the hour of defeat,

when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.
We need one another when we come to die,

and would  have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.
All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.”

My hope and prayer for this congregation, is that we will feel the strings that attach us to one another and to our neighbors close and distant.  May we feel tugging on our heart strings.  May we make it our mission to find what we can do to make our interconnections healthy and joyful and effective for those who need our collective support.  We are part of one another.  May our passion be compassion.

Everything’s connected like peas are in a pod
Or beads upon a necklace, decorating God
Going around the rosy, we’re all in the ring
Hand in hand, like a strand through the heart of everything

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

“Homes Along Life’s Journey”

Rev. Rod Debs

February 7, 2010

Listen to the podcast at “Voices of Liberal Religion” (mp3)

When our daughter was little, just learning to dress herself in the morning, we would set out on the bed several outfits for her to choose among.  She was free to decide.  But when it came to getting up, brushing her teeth, washing, going to school—these were not options for deliberation.  Some things were determined—that’s just how we live.  In our family culture, we never considered whether or not to get up, to brush her teeth, to get dressed and to go to school to be matters of individual choice.

My whole life, I have thought of myself as an individual.  I have always felt free to choose among options.  But a new idea has been sinking slowly into my understanding of the world:  Perhaps culture chooses for me by accident of birth, determines who I will be by limiting my range of options.  I think I am a free individual in my choices even though culture “sets out” limited options for me each day.  Our culture promotes thinking in terms of individual choice.  As one famous Unitarian penned it:  “We are and ought to be free and independent.”

From a little book by Jack Weatherford entitled, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (1988), I learned that many of our American founders were influenced by Indians, among them Benjamin Franklin, an Indian agent, and Thomas Paine.  Their sense of freedom, personal freedom, individualism was different from that of citizen-subjects in Europe’s nation-states.  But in the wilds of America, personal freedom, individualism became a core of American identity.

Unitarian Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated this American individualism in his essay, “Self-Reliance”:   “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But then he went on to speak of what was given, what was determined. “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.” Emerson’s words have shaped our culture and our sense of individual freedom:  “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

The democratic corollary to “Trust  thyself,” is that we also allow others to trust their own personal genius as well.  In our nation, government is established to protect our own AND OTHERS’ individual rights, our own AND OTHERS’ individual freedom to trust themselves.  Democracy provides, not just for ourselves, but also for others to “Trust thyself” and govern in mutual trust and support.

This American way of individual freedom, freedom of conscience seems to run counter to the culture we brought from Europe.  Statecraft in Europe was authoritarian not free; statecraft was the endless struggle for power to make the rules to force on everyone.  Hierarchical religion was also authoritarian rather than free, declaring the authority of revealed Scripture and orthodox teachings.   We’re told that the Bible, doctrines and creeds are absolute Truth, changeless, eternal.  Truth does not allow individual freedom to choose.  We see both democratic and authoritarian models in our national struggle between liberal and conservative camps.  Both perspectives compete within the American psyche.

Dr. Lynn Brandt, a biology professor from the University of Northern Iowa—also a Unitarian Universalist—once said of science:  “The truth exists until the next journal is published.”

We have within ourselves both of these competing cultural perspectives.  Truth is very important.  It’s changeless.  Yet we need to be free to reject whatever we determine to be false truths in our own thinking as well as in others’.

When a neighbor asks you what you believe or says, “Don’t you believe in God?” or “Do you believe the Bible?” they are assuming that there are changeless, true beliefs. Truth according to their definition of it, is established for all time.  Here’s a Unitarian Universalist response:  “Tell me about your faith journey.”

It is not an accident that at every Unitarian Universalist Orientation for newcomers, we invite everyone, including presenters, to share our religious journeys.  Some were evangelical Christians or Catholic or Methodist or nonreligious.  Some grew up Unitarian Universalist.   All of us have been on a journey, sometimes we felt at home where we were, often unsatisfied and looking for something more.  Newcomers often say, “I feel at home here.”

You and I have had many homes along life’s journey.  Our family by blood.  Peer groups.  Families of choice.  Groups of shared interest.  Workplace families, changing from job to job.  We have felt relatively at home in various clubs and civic groups.  Our media choices offer us an ideological virtual community within which we feel at home, though sometimes alienated from all the others who are not us.  Are you visualizing the homes you have found on your life’s journey?

The difference between mere “beliefs” to which we give intellectual assent, and “faith” —a word that suggests to some of us non-scientific, even irrational truth claims—the difference I think, is this.  “Faith” is that which we really act upon.  Lived faith changes along life’s journey.  We learn from our experiences, from others’, and we commit ourselves actively to our changed realizations of what is worthy of our commitment.  Our life journey is a faith journey, a journey of life commitments.

It’s easy to have lofty beliefs.  We say:  “I believe in love!” or “I believe all are created equal and worthy of respect.” Lofty beliefs certainly merit intellectual assent.  Faith, on the other hand, is lived.  You can see faith by looking at behavior:   Where do we invest our time, our talents, our treasures.  We can identify lived faith by studying our check books, our time schedules.

I find it really humbling.  There is a pretty big gap between the beliefs to which I give intellectual assent and my faith as evidenced in my commitment of time, talents and treasures.  That’s one reason I feel at home here.  On my faith journey, Unitarian Universalists who “covenant our mutual trust and support” affirm and promote our covenant Principles as our aspiration, a collective aspiration, not just an individual aspiration, but a “covenant of mutual trust and support,” supporting one another on our journey of living out our values in this precious global community.

We need something more than our individual efforts and our individual perspectives on how things ought to be.  We are better together than alone.  Buddhism recognizes and meets this need through the Sangha.  In Judaism, there was no private salvation, only God’s mighty works with The People.  For Christians, it is the faith community, the koinonia church that is identified as Christ in the flesh (Christ incarnate).  In Islam, the practice of faith is within the Umma, the community.

Martin Luther declared, “Here I stand.  I can do no other.” But look at his journey of faith:  “Here I stand—now here—now here—now here.” I could have used the example of our sixteenth century forebear Francis David, whose journey led him from Catholic priest to Lutheran to Calvinist to Unitarian to martyrdom for further religious “innovations.”   Faith is not about absolute truth claims, “Here I stand.” Faith is a journey of commitment, of action supported by a community of mutual trust.

Our faith journeys have taken us to many tables of sharing, sharing gifts of religious community.  It is the same for those in our greater community.  I was once an Evangelical Christian, once an anti-Christian with no religious beliefs, and once a dogmatic Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist.  I needed respect for the various tables I shared on my faith journey.  Our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers and the strangers we meet day after day are on their own religious journeys as well and long for respect as  do we.  The challenge I embrace and invite you to embrace, is not to strive to disprove others’ truths, not to despoil the tables of others’ religious homes, but rather, to celebrate whatever good and healthy gifts we can find in the religious faiths of others on their religious journeys.

Our Unitarian Universalist covenant Principles of “mutual trust and support” are worthy of living, not just at our own Unitarian Universalist “tables”—at the various large and small groups that gather here at this Fellowship, committees, special events, one-on-one conversations.  These Principles of mutual trust and support are worthy of being extended beyond our walls as our Principles declare: “Grateful for the religious pluralism that enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision.”

I feel that it is our Unitarian Universalist mission to celebrate the faith journeys of all our neighbors, to look and listen carefully and seek out the best in our neighbors’ faiths.  It is our privilege to set a welcome table of mutual trust and support for our Evangelical parents, for our Methodist brother, our Hindu doctor, our Muslim or African Episcopal coworker, our non-religious motorcycle club or book group.

The covenant Principles are our UU “table manners”:  Here we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth— wherever folks are on their faith journey; celebrating others’ “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” their “right of conscience,” committing ourselves to democratic processes in society whether our perspectives prevail or not.

Today, our religious journeys have brought us to this table of sharing, this UU Fellowship.  The choice I see before us is whether we entertain ourselves with beliefs, self-absorbed with intellectual debate and competing perspectives.  Or whether we live our UU values, practicing the table manners of our Principles.

As we plan our fellowship’s finances for the budget year ahead, Shar, Judy, Brenda, Don, Karen, Denny and each of us here—we celebrate and welcome one another’s generous commitment of time and talents and treasures.  In sharing this rich table hospitality, we are grateful for one another’s generosity, a generosity that bought down the mortgage during the economic free-fall, and dared to replace our facility air conditioning system, a generosity that began small groups Second Hour, Friendship Circles and now new covenant groups, building bonds of intimacy and ultimacy with one another , a generosity that cares so strongly that we are learning to collaborate and consult with one another better each year, a generosity that reaches out to those who are hungry and homeless and battered and afraid, a generosity of volunteers and paid staff that provides Children’s Religious Exploration that has blossomed with kids who beg their parents to bring them every Sunday.  I do not exaggerate!  This is a committed and generous congregation, committed to our shared mission of “service, spiritual growth and caring fellowship.”

May our commitment of mutual trust and support brighten and enrich our relationships here and spread beyond these doors to countless others who, like us, are on their own religious journeys.  For this fleeting time we share together, it is our pleasure to set a healthy and delightful table of diverse spiritual and relational cuisines.   In a society that is spiritually hungry and religiously homeless, may we embody, a warm “Welcome home!”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

“Taking the World for Granted”

Rev. Rod Debs

January 31, 2010

Listen to the podcast at “Voices of Liberal Religion” (mp3)

Story: When I was young, if you asked me “Who provides for you?  Who takes care of you?”, I would have said, “My parents.”  Is that who takes care of you?  Your parents or step-parents?  Or maybe your grandparents or adopted parents?

Well, this morning I want to show you some pictures of a lot more people who help provide for you and for me.  Lots of people!  In fact the strangers you see all around—walking or driving their cars, even all the people here in the fellowship, they help in many different ways to care for you and me.

Who provides the food that we eat?  Farmer.  Baker.  Grocer.  Salesperson. And who takes away the waste that we throw away?  Garbage Collector.

Who makes the things we use?  Basket Weaver.  Potter who shapes a bowl, bakes it in a kiln, and then paints it.  Glass Blower.  Carpenter.  Electrician wires our house so we have light and electricity.  Watch Maker (jeweler).

Other people take care of us.  Barber—Hair Dresser.  Teachers care for us all so very much.  School Administrators.  Librarian.  Music Teacher like Cecile Lindegren.  Museum Guide teaches us.  Medical Professor.

Scientists study so that we can learn about the world from them.  Botanist.  Oceanographer.  Archaeologist.  Arctic Scientist and explorers.  Miners.

Many people provide us information:  Photographers—Reporters.  Photo-Journalists.  Newscasters.  Writers, Artists.  Mail-Carriers bring mail to us.

Mechanics take great care for us that our cars are safe to take us and our families wherever we want to go.  Who provided us with cars?  Design engineers.  Assembly Line Workers.  Remote Control Painters.  Assemblers.  Bus Drivers, Taxi Drivers, Truck Drivers provide transportation for us too.

The roads we drive on are provided by people we may never know:  Road Worker. Workers who Build Bridges and Build Roads.

Airplane Pilots also provide us transportation with the help of a lot of other people:  Air Traffic Controller.  Ground engineers.  Flight Engineer.  Stewardess.  Ground Stewardess.  Baggage Handler.

When I ask, “Who takes care of you?  Who provides for you?”, you might say:  Fire Fighters.  Air Rescue, Sea Rescue teams.  Are there other people we have left out?  Who else don’t we have pictures of?  Nurses, Doctors, Hospital Workers, Police Officers, Air Force,  Social Workers including volunteers for Shelter House, Sharing and Caring, Opportunity Place homeless shelter.  There are so many people who care for us and provide for us.

Other people help out too.  Visiting Nurse.  Minister.  Neighbor.  Friend. It’s good to be provided for and cared for by so many people in our world.

Message: In September, 2003, National Geographic Magazine carried an article by Kevin Bales exposing that there are 27 million slaves in the world.  Slavery is now illegal in every nation of the world, and the percentage of slaves to world population is smaller than ever in history.  Even so, there are more slaves alive today than at any time in history—more than the total seized from Africa in four centuries of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  What does this say about human nature?

On NPR this week, I heard an interview with Jeremy Rifkin.  In his book, The Empathic Civilization, he argues that we humans are by nature empathic.  The reason that history books and magazines write about slavery and war, he says, is that these are exceptions to the rule in which we experience empathy in our everyday lives.  We take for granted daily kindness and cooperation in our communities across human cultures.

So which is true of human nature?  Are we by nature empathic or are we each against all in the battle for survival?

The story is told of a Cherokee elder teaching a young boy that we all have two wolves inside us.  “One is a wolf of honesty, kindness, justice, moderation, selflessness, compassion and love.  The other is a wolf of greed, lust, selfishness, calculation for his own benefit and wickedness.  And these two wolves are forever opposed to one another.”   “Which wolf wins?” the boy asked excitedly.   And the answer?  “It depends upon which one you feed.”

It seems to me that I take for granted, I don’t “feed”—I don’t celebrate with gratitude the countless experiences of civil social engagement which I experience daily, hourly.

Ayn Rand would argue against feeding empathy with gratitude.  She argues against Jeremy Rifkin that human nature is essentially selfish, merely held in check by laws and by enlightened self interest.  We love our children, she would say, only because they are our possessions and because we find our own immortality in their survival.  We love them most when they make us proud.  Ayn Rand would explain love for our mates as simply a combination of selfish lust and enlightened self-interest.  Which wolf does she feed?

It seems to me that human nature has both capacities:  to behave selfishly and to behave empathically.  As the perceived competition of each against all grasps and monopolizes my attention, too often I take for granted the bedrock of human empathy in community that births, nurtures, heals and serves our countless needs and wants.

We often take for granted familial providence and caring.  When we receive it from strangers who have made it their job, we recognize empathy even less.  But the moment we get grouchy or imperfect service, then we notice the lack and take offense!  We feel entitled!

When members of our community provide food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, entertainment, healthcare and comfort during crises, economists might discount such care as merely economic exchange of values.  “They’re getting paid!  No empathy involved!”  I’ve heard it said:  “You don’t thank someone for doing their duty.”  When you’ve paid for it, they owe you their service.   In this view, rather than gratitude and appreciation, we are taught to demand quality service, we are taught to take it for granted.

My hairdresser Kim makes appointments by phone.  She has no other employees at Cut N Curl, so when I’m in the chair getting a haircut, she’ll pause and say, “Hello, Cut N Curl.  May I help you?”  At my last haircut, she apologized that one of her customers likes to talk, and it’s hard to get off the phone respectfully with her.  Kim said that another client once got really miffed at her for answering her phone.  The client said, “When I’m in the chair, I’m paying for your time, and I expect your undivided attention.”  When she’s paying for a haircut, she feels that she “owns” Kim for that period of time.

Is this “wage slavery”?  Clearly, a slave is owned 24-hours a day and does not have any choice in complying with orders.  From my dozen years of factory work, I learned that, to be a good employee, my time on the clock was not mine.  Within legal limits, if I wanted to get paid, I did not have any choice but to comply with my boss’s orders.  Truth be told, I was proud of my work—as most workers are.  Call it slave mentality if you wish, but we workers internalized company goals and took pride in our productivity.  As long as our work relationships and our pay afforded us a degree of dignity and respect, we chose to make our work into a calling.  By exercising choice, we felt more than wage slaves.

On the other hand, when we do not make a living wage, when we don’t make enough to be able to make choices in our lives even on our own time, when we can’t afford to quit, when we have to put up with whatever unkindness and even abuse in the workplace for fear of destitution, then workers’ lives can be compared to slavery, wage slavery.  Economic enslavement as opposed to legal slavery.

One of our Share-the-Plate agencies we support, Shelter House assists survivors of domestic violence.  Marital isolation and control is typical of family violence.  Abusive spouses seek to exercise control through threat or violence.  This is marital slavery.

In addition to supporting Shelter House for survivors of domestic violence, a second challenge is to provide a Hot Line of counsel and support for those who feel little choice but to stay in various degrees of abusive marital slavery.  Our  current UUFEC Congregational Social Justice Project is to support Opportunity Place shelter for those “economic slaves” whose jobs have “run-away” leaving them homeless and with little dignity and respect.

I am speaking about taking for granted, not just our loved ones—our parents, our spouse, and our loyal friends who bless our lives with their kindness and loyal support.  In the economic rat race, a further challenge is that we not take for granted the neighbors and strangers who have made a calling of their employment, and who serve our countless needs in this interdependent world.  We drink from wells we did not dig.  We eat from fields we did not plant.

May we be able to graciously receive the daily gifts of service provided in our community, and receive them with gratitude and respect.  May we no longer feel that the strangers in cars passing by are competitors in a battle for survival, each against all, but rather a social network of empathy serving our every need.  May we feed a heart of gratitude and hospitality, that the interdependent web of our life together might become a little more healthy and more whole.

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

“To Do and To Be”

Rev. Rod Debs

January 10, 2010

Listen to the podcast at “Voices of Liberal Religion” (mp3)

Story: “Frederick” by Leo Lionni

2.  All along the meadow where the cows grazed and the horses ran, there was an old stone wall.

3.  In that wall, not far from the barn and the granary, a chatty family of field mice had their home.

4.  Since winter was not far off, the little mice began to gather nuts and wheat and straw.

5.  They gathered heavy ears of corn too.  They all worked day and night.  All—except Frederick.

6.  “Frederick, why don’t you work?” they asked.  “I do work,” said Frederick.  “I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days.”

7.  And when they saw Frederick sitting there, staring at the meadow, they said, “And now, Frederick?”  “I gather colors,” answered Frederick simply.  “For winter is gray.”

8.  And once Frederick seemed half asleep.  “Are you dreaming, Frederick?” they asked reproachfully.  But Frederick said, “Oh no, I am gathering words.  For the winter days are long and many, and we’ll run out of things to say.”

9.  The winter days came, and when the first snow fell, the five little field mice took to their hideout in the stones.

10.  In the beginning there was lots to eat, and the mice told stories of foolish foxes and silly cats.  They were a happy family.

11.  But, little by little, they nibbled up most of the nuts and berries, the straw was gone, and the corn was only a memory.  It was cold in the wall, and no one felt like like chatting.

12.  Then they remembered what Frederick had said about sun rays and colors and words.  “What about your supplies, Frederick?”  they asked.

13.  “Close your eyes,” said Frederick, as he climbed on a big stone.  “Now I send you the rays of the sun.  Do you feel how their golden glow…”  And as Frederick spoke of the sun, the four little mice began to feel warmer.  Was it Frederick’s voice?  Was it magic?

14.  “And how about the colors Frederick?” they asked anxiously.  “Close your eyes again,” Frederick said.  And when he told them of the blue periwinkles, the red poppies in the yellow wheat, and the green leaves of the berry bush, they saw the colors as clearly as if they had painted in their minds.

15.  “And the words, Frederick?”  —  Frederick cleared his throat, waited a moment, and then, as if from a stage, he said:

“Who scatters snowflakes?  Who melts the ice?

Who spoils the weather?  Who makes it nice?

Who grows the four-leaf clovers in June?

Who dims the daylight?  Who lights the moon?

Four little field mice who live in the sky.

Four little field mice… like you and I.

One is the Springmouse who turns on the showers.

Then comes the Summer who paints in the flowers.

The Fallmouse is next with walnuts and wheat.

And Winter is last… with little cold feet.

Aren’t we lucky the seasons are four?

Think of a year with one less… or one more!”

When Frederick finished, they all applauded for his poem, and for bringing sunny warmth and color and words to get them through the lonely winter.

16.  Frederick blushed, and he bowed.  He was happy to have something to offer.

Message: Do you remember Whoopi Goldberg in “Sister Act II”?  With her choir of street kids from the inner city, she sang:  “O happy day!  When Jesus washed my sins away.  He taught me how to watch and pray, and live rejoicing every day.  Happy day!  Happy day!  When Jesus washed my sins away.”

I really don’t know who decided to change “watch and pray,” a Biblical reference, to “wash, fight and pray.” As if city street kids learned that from Jesus’ example!  I don’t know, maybe parochial schools do require kids to wash and pray!  But the fight-idea seems a bit foreign to what I learned about Jesus who taught, rather than to fight back, if a person strikes you on one cheek, to turn the other cheek.  It’s a bit of movie cuteness, I guess.  Yet they sang: “Happy day!  When Jesus washed my sins away.”

You’ve heard the story about the little boy on his first day in kindergarten.  The teacher asked the children to say their names.  All the children gave their first and last names, but one little boy just gave the name Johnny.  The teacher asked, “Is that your whole name?” Johnny said, “Yes.”  “But is there another name your parents always call you?” Tentatively, he replied, “Johnny Don’t?”

There are so many things children have to learn.  In my day, I felt that there were thousands of “don’ts” to remember.  It was only this year that I heard from two sources, a parent here (Jennifer) and a psychologist, that to build a healthy sense of self, children need to hear six words of praise or expressions of love for every one criticism.

Kids notice details even if they only hear them in passing, like the King James version of Matthew 5.48:  “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” It was many years after being tormented by childhood guilt that I heard from a colleague that the text might better be translated, “Be ye therefore whole….” Jesus’ teachings as a whole rejected perfectionism of Temple Judaism and its onerous purity laws.  Jesus taught grace, universal acceptance toward all kinds of outcasts:  the diseased, half-Jewish Samaritans, the woman with “the issue of blood,” the pagan Roman Centurian, the adulterous woman at the well, all manner of imperfect people…, Jesus lived that teaching of universal acceptance, of grace, not flawless perfection.

Wholeness.  I represented Unitarian Universalism a number of years ago, at a Religious Vocations Fair held at The University of Northern Iowa when I was Minister of the congregation in Cedar Falls.  I remember being stumped by a girl who asked me:  “What do UUs consider to be salvation?” I didn’t have an answer.  But later I learned that the term `salvation’ comes from the root “to salve,” to heal.”  One might say that for Unitarian Universalists, our Mission is to attain “wholeness.” To heal the brokenness of the human spirit.  To heal the brokenness of community—which is really two sides of the same coin, the self in community.  Our UU mission is to save souls, to save the world–or rather, to heal brokenness, to bind us together in greater wholeness.

Our Unitarian Universalist Statement of covenant includes these final words:  “Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and to expand our vision.  As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.” (UUA Bylaws)

We seek wholeness, unity in diversity, not in conformity.  Rather than condemning all our imperfect human thoughts and understandings, we celebrate one another’s religious and intellectual integrity.

And our covenant of mutual trust and support does not give license for anyone to lord it over anyone else.  Our UU Principle of affirming and promoting “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” “the right of conscience and the democratic process”-–these are behavioral aspirations, high behavioral aspirations worthy of our faithful efforts.  We work really hard to take each person seriously which is, I think, at the heart of what we call “the democratic process.” Not just winning a vote, not gaining power of the majority to ignore the minorities’ opinions.  The spirit of democracy is to take each individual’s opinion seriously.  To celebrate the wisdom brought by diverse views.  To broaden our understanding.  To attain greater wholeness with each added voice, each perspective integrated in the community of understanding.  Aspiring to wholeness.

My wife, Jeannette’s graduate work was in Human Development.  She pointed out to me that before a certain age, toddlers are not able to play together.  They tend to grab toys away from one another and say, “Mine.” Adults learn to use Distraction as a technique when children are struggling over a single toy:  We point out another plaything for one of the toddlers.  Parallel Play         is the age-appropriate expectation.  It’s not that children are bad.  They have not yet developed to where they are able to share their toys.

We adults have our intellectual toys:  Ideas, ideologies, analyses, models, world views, beliefs.  Our Unitarian forebear, Francis David, who died in a dungeon in Transylvania in 1579, for his religious “innovations,” offered his wisdom calling us to stop fighting over our intellectual toys, calling us to—well, I’d call it “intellectual parallel play” when he said, “We need not think alike to love alike.” Those were the days when you could be put to death if your ideas were labeled heresy.

Wholeness.  Salvation for us Unitarian Universalists, it seems to me, will involve us moving beyond tolerance, “live and let live”—an adult version of Parallel Play—each with our own precious intellectual toy.  Healing of our brokenness, our private perspectives will require us to even go beyond acceptance of diverse perspectives, to joyful celebration of how each one “enriches and ennobles” our collective understanding.

Some of you have heard me speak of my childhood experience of religious fear—terror.  Raised within the Evangelical Friends Church to believe in the literal truth of Bible stories—stories of rapture, heaven and hell —I remember coming home from school to an empty house.  I was about seven years old.  I thought that the Rapture might have taken my parents to heaven, that I might have been left behind with all the evil people to suffer the thousand year reign of the beast.  I ran from window to window, crying, praying to see someone on the streets outside.  Then mom came in the door with my baby sister and the groceries.

Many of our relatives and neighbors suffer terrible fear and guilt for sinful imperfection within their literalist religious world-view.  Others suffer the cultural guilt and blame as “losers” within our consumer society or condemned for breaking the rules in this economic world war of each against all.  In this context, Jesus life and teachings offer the grace of acceptance, no matter our imperfections, missing the mark.  “O happy day!  When Jesus washed my sins away.”

I want to close with some reflections on “watching and praying,” as the song goes:  “He taught me how to watch and pray, and live rejoicing every day.”

The work ethic is rooted in our Puritan religious heritage.  The difference between being productive or being lazy is a judgment I internalized as a child.  I was graded every day at school as to whether I did good work or was a failure.  Our educational system, I understand, was developed at the time of British industrialization when grades of performance in school were used to determine whether workers would be on a manager track, technical track or unskilled labor.  School grading scales were reflected in employee pay scales within a class society—-except for Europe’s permanent aristocracy who passed their inheritance of land and wealth down to heirs, generation after generation, above and outside of the class grading system.

Last week I broke in a new computer.  Instead of waiting forty-five minutes for it to boot up, instead of waiting an occasional twenty seconds for a single keystroke, I was able to spend five minutes on responding to one email, and then whip through twenty more email that require no response in another three minutes!  I felt so good about myself.  The more I accomplished, the better I felt.

From rewards for doing my homework back in grade school, rewards of A’s for doing excellent work and the humiliation of F’s for failure, we hard-working Americans have become some of the most driven, productive “human doings” as opposed to human beings.  There are real penalties for anything less than competitive excellence:  companies go out of business.  Employees lose our jobs to someone more productive.

We live to do and find our being, who we are, defined by our doing.  And what choice do we have?   Mediocrity?  Hobbies and entertainment and family in our spare time?  We are rewarded with the consumer privileges of highly-paid careers.  The prestige.  The rat race to luxurious leisure of vacation and retirement—if you are one of the winners in the great economic competition, each against all.  This, I think, is who we are.  There’s no outside to our economic lives.

But there is an inside.  Learning to “watch and pray” and “rejoicing every day.” I think the paths of healing and wholeness are rather natural.  We stare out the window.  We do what the boss (and we ourselves) call “wasting time.”  We escape to outdoors, to animal companions, to exploring cultures through story-telling technologies, to various shapes of community relationships that enrich our lives.

When we stop our productive doing, our striving—including our striving to relax and recreate—when we suspend our doing and simply watch what life presents to us, we are practicing the ancient religious arts of meditation, paying attention, watching.  Buddhism simply involves the practice of paying attention to our breathing and noticing what presents itself to our minds.

It is this silent openness, along with prayer— our heart’s longing, not doing, but just being watchful and being that longing that we feel so deeply, that is a practice toward healing and wholeness.  And, the practice of gratitude.

I see great opportunity for healing and wholeness in Forrest Church’s three-part aspiration:  “Do what you can.” Grace means you don’t have to be perfect.  And doing is not all.  So pay attention, watch and pray, or as Forrest says, “Be who you are.” Finally, practice gratitude rather than attention to insufficiency or dissatisfaction.  Forrest said:  “Want what you have.” Practice being grateful.

Podcasts of our sermons from October 2005 through the present day are available at:

Voices of Liberal Religion

These include sermons for which we do not yet have transcripts available here.

The Paradox of Liberal Religious Institutions

Hymns
#354 We Laugh, We Cry
#318 We Would Be One
#123 Spirit of Life

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast Valparaiso, FL

December 27, 2009

Thank you for inviting me to come speak with you today.

As Shar mentioned, I am in seminary studying in the hope of becoming a UU minister someday soon.  This past semester, I took a class on Unitarian Universalist history.  It was a wonderful class, and I learned much.  I was also able to explore in detail something about our faith that has been nagging me for a few years now, namely, Unitarian Universalist relationships to institutions, both in theory and in practice, in the past and the present.  And so today, I would like to share with you some of what I learned…for as the song says…we believe that sharing is an answer.  And…we come together here, to make sense of what we find. (Reference to #354 We Laugh, We Cry).

–

A few years back the latest Pew Forum Study on Religion was released.   (http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations)  From the data, it was clear that there were quite a few more people in the United States who self-identified as Unitarian Universalist than those we were actual members of Unitarian Universalist congregations.

This topic came up in my class this past semester, and my colleague Eric Banner did a more in depth analysis of the data, in that he compared it to data from other denominations, to see if any insights could be gained.  What he found was significant.

So according to the latest Pew Study on Religion, roughly 0.3% of the population of the United States identified as Unitarian Universalists.  (Basically we amount to a rounding error)!  0.3% of a total USA population of 308 million people equates to 924,000 Americans. (Slide 2

However, the UUA reports that only 160,000 on the membership rolls of our UU congregations.  (http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/142420.shtml)

This equates to a membership rate of 17%.  Only 17% of self-proclaimed Unitarian Universalists are members of a UU congregation.

INTERPRETATION: What does that tell you? It tells you the vast majority, 83%, of Unitarian Universalists in the USA feel reasonable in claiming their Unitarian Universalist identity while NOT being associated with any congregation.

Now before we jump to any conclusions, let’s see what the story is for other denominations.  Perhaps this is a common thing in a secular society.

(Summarize the data below)

Do UU’s self-identify at a rate significantly higher or lower than their congregational participation when compared to similar religious organizations?

UCC=1.14M/1.54M = 74% membership rate

Episcopal= 2.1M/3.08M = 68% membership rate

Methodists= 7.9M/15.7M = 50% membership rate

Southern Baptist= 16.2M/20.6M = 79% membership rate

ELCA= 4.7M/6.1M = 77% membership rate

(http://www.ncccusa.org/news/090130yearbook1.html)

UU=160,000/924,000 = 17% membership rate  (Slide 3)

My colleague Eric Banner concludes “we have a much higher rate of self-identification relative to our reported membership that these other denominations.”

A few important footnotes to the data:

Membership is determined differently in the different denominations.

Some denominations are notorious for fudging their numbers upwards.  Other denominations update their membership rolls quite infrequently. My understanding is that UUA congregations have an incentive to keep their reported membership numbers as small as possible, because more members = higher dues, dues are per member. (The largest UU congregations pay a percentage of their budget as their dues). So these comparison are more quick and dirty than apples to apples.  However, the differences are so distinct, I strongly believe they tell a valid story.

So what is going on here?  What are these Unitarian Universalists thinking? Who do they think they are? I have a few ideas, but before I share them, I want to share some more data.

In the 1956, the UUA Board of Trustees put together a Committee on Goals to study, among other things, the typical ‘Unitarian Universalist.’ The chair of the committee was Robert B. Tapp (Slide 4).  The data collected was from 1965, the final report was published in 1973, but I would argue much of the analysis is still accurate today.

The study showed Unitarian Universalists to be overwhelmingly converts, or ‘come-outers’, from other faiths.  Only 12.1% grew up Unitarian or Universalist. (That number is similar today).  Robert Tapp’s analysis argued that the central element in the UU experience is the conversion experience, or as we shall see, the de-conversion experience.  (Even this word, conversion, is problematic for UUs, as it seems to allude to the born-again conversion of Evangelical Protestantism.  Rest assured, this is not was Tapp is talking about).  Tapp explained it thus:  The typical UU conversion experience is very slow, stretching often from childhood to adulthood, often based on the experience of a university education, he claimed.

Tapp said there were three stages,

1) De-conversion; dropping out of the older religious identification of childhood

2) Assimilation of new values, often due to education

3) “When, and if, for some reasons, these new identification-values become institutionally grounded,” that is, if they decide to join a UU congregation.

(Robinson, p.176)

Furthermore, many Unitarians Universalists came into the denomination to escape churches where power and authority seemed to be way too centralized.

Well, this process of de-conversion and conversion describes the experience of my father exactly. My father  (Slide 5)found the Unitarian Society of Germantown in the early 1970’s, after graduating from college and growing up in a dogmatic faith tradition.  And I am sure that describes the process that brought many, if not most, of you to this sacred space this winter morning.

So what does that mean? I view this as a symptom of the larger issue of institutionalism vs. anti-institutionalism in Unitarian Universalism.  I propose that this 83% of self-identified Unitarian Universalists who are not members of congregations are ‘stuck’ or vacillating in between Tapp’s step two and step three.  They got the values, but they are NOT institutionally grounded.

=====

Let me give a real live example of a famous Unitarian who is proud of being Unitarian, espouses Unitarian ideals at the highest levels of the public discourse, and still is not a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Ted Sorensen (Slide 6, the guy on right) was John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter. He grew up in a humanistic Unitarian church in Kansas, pre-merger. In the fall of 2008, he and his sister, Ruth Sorensen Singer, were interviewed by UU World magazine, at his apartment in Manhattan overlooking Central Park.

Interviewer: What are some of the Unitarian principles in Kennedy’s speeches?

My favorite of all of Kennedy’s speeches—and usually I try to minimize my role, but in this I did have a major role—was his commencement address at American University [in 1963]. In that speech, one of the lines is, “Our problems are man-made—therefore they can be solved by man.” Sounds like good Unitarianism to me.

In the inaugural address, he concludes saying, “With history the final judge of our deeds . . .” That’s not what other churches would say. That’s Unitarianism.

Interviewer: Why are you not a current member of a church?

Before I lost effective use of my eyes, every Sunday morning I would play tennis. And I justify this when people ask me by saying, “It’s OK because tennis goes back to the Bible.” When they challenge that, I say, “Of course. There’s a passage in the Bible: ‘Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.’”

I thought that it was one of the basic tenets of Unitarianism that “the whole world is my church.” Look at the view out this window. What church could possibly be as beautiful as that?

[Ruth Sorensen Singer:] We didn’t have church over the summer because it was a small church, and the minister got time off. But when I was around 10 years old, someone asked me, “How come you don’t go to church in the summer?” And I said, “The minister needs time off.” And they asked, “Don’t you need God during the summer?” And I said, “I guess we don’t need God in the winter, either.”

Interviewer: Why do you not refer to yourself as a Unitarian Universalist?

I grew up a Unitarian, and I still am a Unitarian. I’m sure Universalists are equally wonderful.

(http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/121068.shtml)

…And the interview continues.

So here we have a person who talks at length as to the importance of his Unitarian faith to him but he doesn’t feel the need to be an active member of a UU congregation.

So we have the pew survey, the come-outer experience of most Unitarian Universalists, and the real world example of Ted Sorensen all pointing to the fact that Religious Liberals seem to have a perpetual dissatisfaction of institutional congregational life.

At one level this makes perfect sense, right? After all, what is a liberal?  To be a liberal is to believe things have to change.  Wasn’t it institutions that got us into this mess in the first place?  Institutions have power and power corrupts, right?

Of course, it is not fair to characterize Ted Sorensen as an anti-institutionalist… although he was playing tennis on Sunday, Sorensen was living out his Unitarian values Monday-Friday in his life’s work, doing all he could to transform the world through the workings of a powerful government. Most assuredly, he took to heart what Liberal Religious preachers have been arguing for centuries, namely that what we do in the world, in terms of our life’s work, matters, and matters deeply.

(As a side note, I recognize I am using the word ‘Liberal’ a lot today.  I know that in some circles today, Liberal is a dirty word.  Often, the word progressive is used in its stead.  Well, I don’t buy into that. I reclaim the word Liberal with gusto.  But, after reading the local paper, and seeing the billboards, I recognize that is one area where ‘liberal’ probably is a dirty word!  You must remember; I just flew in from Berkeley, CA, where liberal is also a dirty word, but for the opposite reason.  Being liberal means you are not a radical! This liberal label is relative to the location you find yourself in.  For example, James Luther Adams talks about ‘Liberal’ being a dirty word in his writings from the 1930s as well, so time and place matter, and it seems to cycle around).

I looked up Liberal in the dictionary; it had multiple definitions and usages, but for our purposes here today, the most relevant are: (Slide 7)

1.         favorable to progress or reform,

2.         favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible.

3.         of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.

4.         open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.

But why, then, do the other denominations not have this identity-to-membership problem?

The UU Historian and my professor the Rev. Dr. Susan Ritchie (Slide 8), states it thus:

“Contemporary Unitarian Universalists are notorious for NOT have a strong theology of church–in other words, a strong sense of why it is important to gather in both worship and institution, that sense being defined by an understanding of the holy.”

To answer the question of why many UUs don’t find it important to gather in both worship and institution, as our examples have shown, I will turn our focus from the contemporary world to the past; to our liberal religious history.

Deep within our history, anti-institutionalism is at the core.

UU historian David Robinson writes “ the commitment to spiritual freedom, [a] hallmark of Liberalism, in one sense demands a certain skepticism towards organization and an ultimate reliance on the self.” (p160).

Enter Ralph Waldo Emerson (Slide 9).

Emerson, a Unitarian minister from 1826 to 1832, left the ministry, saying “The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.”   Of course he is known today for his formulation of the philosophy of transcendentalism in his essay “Nature” (1836).  As his philosophy grew, he came to believe that the only source of religious knowledge comes from the intuition of one’s soul.

My favorite anecdotal story of Ralph Waldo Emerson is after he left the ministry and became the Concord Sage, a well-known lecturer and essayist living and working in Concord, MA, the young students from the Harvard Divinity school would come out and visit him.  He would walk and talk with them, frequently around Walden Pond.  A legend has it that one day he picked up a leaf and said to the students, “See this leaf?  You can learn more from this leaf than anything they can teach you at Harvard.”

Let me share a few pithy quotes by Emerson, to see where he stands in regards to individualism and institutions.

Emerson writes:

“Every man alone is sincere.  At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.” from Friendship

He further argues:

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.” from Self-Reliance

And, further, he caused quite a stir and was accused of being an atheist and poisoning young minds in his Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838. (This puts Emerson in good company (Slide 10); with Socrates, at the very least!) In that address, Emerson discounted Biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God.  Furthermore, he called for a fresh religious inspiration: “Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”

So he was just speaking what I think of as good Unitarian theology.  What’s the big deal, right?

Dan McKanan is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity at Harvard Divinity School  (Slide 11). He speaks much about the importance of liberal institutions.

He was interviewed last spring and talked about the irony in the name of his faculty title.

Dan states: “One of my spiritual disciplines has become an examination of the paradox embedded into my title, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity. The Unitarian Universalist Association is a religious institution with long roots. It is very connected with Harvard University, another institution. Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps more famously dismissive of institutions than any other person in the history of the United States. So what does it mean to have a chair that is accountable to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the Unitarian Universalist Association, and to Harvard?”

Dan McKanan asks the question, How can we be deeply inspired by Emerson’s vision of free religion and by his critique of institutions, but also be committed to creating new and better institutions

‘Cultivating Liberal Institutions’: An Interview With Dan McKanan”

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty/mckanan.cfm

Henry Whitney Bellows (Slide 12) and the Free Religious Association

If Emerson rocked the denomination in his Harvard Divinity School Address in 1838 with a call for radical individualism, another Unitarian shook things up 21 years later.

That Unitarian leader was Henry Whitney Bellows.  He gave an address to Harvard Alumni in 1859.  In it, he called for a renewal of commitment to institutionalism; a renewal to the church in a traditional sense; traditional, but not in a confining or conservative sense.

Henry Whitney Bellows was reacting to the Emersonian view of institutions. Bellows argued for the centrality of the church to the religious life. He called for a renewal of commitment to institutionalism, almost 180 degrees from Emerson, (Robinson, p.88).

Bellows felt that the religious crisis of his time could be discerned as part of a dialectical movement in history and thus a necessary stage in religious development.   He saw the self-asserting and self-development and self-culture of Emerson and the transcendentalists as important and necessary, but what follows such a time must be an era of institutions, a period where the emphasis on self-development can translate into more permanent realities, such as the church.

Bellows powerfully argues, “[Institutions are] the only instruments, except literature and the blood, by which the riches of the ages, the experience and wisdom of humanity, are handed down.” (Robinson, p.89).  I am not sure it is true, but I certainly find the statement striking.

Free Religious Association

At the Unitarian National Conference of 1866, in Syracuse, NY there were strong debates over creeds and non-creedalism, and sectarianism and non-sectarianism, as well as choosing a name that opened the door to being explicitly outside of the Christian fold.  The dissidents in this debate lost, which led directly to the formation of the Free Religious Association.  The direction of their thinking, away from supernaturalism toward science, away from theism towards Humanism, showed them to be ahead of their time, ahead of the religious thinking of mainstream Unitarianism. (Robinson, p.107-8).  They were lead by the wonderfully named Octavius Brooks Frothingham (Slide 13).  Frothingham rejected what he believed was the inherently conservative nature of institutions, which always carried with them the weight of the past. (Robinson, p.112). As is obvious, the shadow of Emerson is all over this.  And Emerson, by this time, an old sage, addressed the first meeting of the Free Religious Association in 1867. In the end, institutionally, the Free Religious Association amounted to little.  It sputtered out after a decade or two.  But intellectually, it pointed the way in which the entire denomination eventually moved.

What we see here is a clear pattern.  A pattern of leaving/breaking away/bad mouthing the institution à and then by the next generation, the institution embracing the ideals of those that had previously broken  away, and it begins again, and again.

James Luther Adams (Slide 14), the great Unitarian ethicist of the 20^th century states it much more eloquently that I.

“As liberals, we assume that liberalism like any other movement, can remain alive only through ‘coming to itself,’ through repentance and return.  Only where there is a sincere recognition of incompleteness and failure, only where there is a recovery of depth, breadth, and length, only there is the authentic spirit of religious liberalism to be found.  Hence, the liberal expects to hear over and over again: liberalism is dead; long live liberalism.” (Robinson, p.162).

Adams is arguing for a return to ultimate foundations to find renewed vigor.

Once the pattern is recognized and named, then there is choice about whether to repeat it; or possibly, transform it or rise above it.  I believe this was accomplished with the institutional leadership of Frederick May Eliot in the 20^th century.

Policies and Arguments of Frederick May Eliot (Slide 15)  President of the American Unitarian Association 1937-1958 (Slide 16)

1936 saw the American Unitarian Association (AUA) at a low point; some said it was on the verge of collapse.  The country was in the depths of the depression, and a general malaise was palpable throughout the denomination.  A Commission on Appraisal was instigated by, among others, the aforementioned James Luther Adams. It was titled Unitarians Face a New Age. The chair of the commission was Frederick May Eliot, the minister of Unity Church, in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Out of this, he was elected President of the AUA

Eliot was a genius for pragmatic organization, though, interestingly enough, known to be shy and introverted.  The Association experienced great growth in membership and congregations under his leadership.  Under his watch, religious education was reemphasized.  The Unitarian Service Committee was formed (1940) to respond to the rise of fascism.  The fellowship movement started in 1948 under his presidency, which is absolutely critical to our health as an Association today.  But there are three aspects of his presidency I want to highlight for you here today.

The first is that early in his presidency, Eliot named our strengths. He argued that the Unitarians ability to unite those of very different views its “chief glory….One of the most interesting aspects of our history is the process by which the radicals of one generation have come to be regarded as ‘100% Unitarians’ by succeeding generations.  The truth of the matter is that we are a church in which growth is not only permitted but encouraged-growth in thought, growth in sensitiveness to moral values, growth in courage to put religion to work in the world.”  (Robinson, p.164).

Welcome Theological Diversity

The second was how he handed an issue which had the potential to tear the denomination apart.  His election was contested by some for his perceived sympathy for Humanists! (Robinson, p.164).  He not only sympathized with the Humanists, he welcomed and celebrated them!  He wrote a series of sermons on Humanists and stressed their contribution to the ‘inner life’.  He saw how sustaining Humanistic belief was to people by being an honest faith.

His hospitality to the Humanist movement was critical in the acceptance of their position in the denomination.  He wrote, “The really important thing about [the Humanists] is that they care, and care tremendously, for human values.  It is moral passion that provides the dynamic for their intellectual efforts and their homiletical endeavors.”  Furthermore, he believed only a solid faith can provide the ground for human action and inner growth, which constitute the religious life.  Therefore, it is better to have a more limited, yet sounder faith than one that reaches beyond its capacity to support itself honestly.  (Robinson, p. 150).  And yet Eliot was firm in his personal theistic convictions and argued for the continued use of the word ‘God.’  This equanimity is inspiring to me.  I can’t even imagine the horror of the situation if the denomination split over the question of Humanism, it would have been pointless, because by the end of his Presidency, a majority of Unitarians identified as Humanist anyway, just as the pattern would predict!  This is what is most striking to me about Frederick May Eliot.  I believe that Eliot recognized the pattern and was able to transcend the old pattern of leaving/breaking away from the institution à and then by the next generation, the institution embracing the ideals of radicals.

Redefined Liberal

Frederick May Eliot redefined the liberal as one who (using the pronouns reflective of the time) “is resolved that in the realms of the mind and of the soul there shall be no compulsion, so far as he can prevent it; and he believes that the best way to promote this end is to create and maintain such institutions as can be made to serve human purposes in a wholly free spirit.” (Robinson, p. 165)

So we have Ralph Waldo Emerson à viewing institutions as a threat to liberty

& then we have Frederick May Eliot à viewing  institutions as a protection of liberty

This is a serious re-conceptualization.

Eliot saw the Unitarian Church as a “company of seekers, and the bond which holds them closely together is their common confession that what they seek is still beyond them.”  (Robinson, p. 165-6).

Or, as the songs says…We search for truth, equality, and blessed peace of mind.  And then, we come together here, to make sense of what we find.

Eliot broadened our view of this free faith…which brings us back to the present day.

Have we learned what history has gifted to us

The President of Starr King School for the Ministry is Rebecca Parker(Slide 17).  Dr. Parker often speaks for the need in UUism to support institutions, and to overcome our historical anti-institutional bias.  There are two UU affiliated seminaries, Meadville Lombard and Starr King. Recently, Meadville has announced they are in talks to merge with Andover Newton Theological school to stay an ongoing entity; furthermore, they are exploring selling their campus. My school, Starr King, must explore funding outside of the UU fold simply because the funding is not there.  Dr. Parker talks about this as a systemic lack of support for liberal religious theological education, which has been the case for well over a century.

To put it simply, if you aspire to be a conservative religious leader, you are taken care of.  Your education is more often than not well supported.  If you want to be a liberal religious leader, more often than not you are on your own, and you will be taking on a lot of debt.  Of course, there is more complexity to it, but in general, this is true.

Is it important for religious liberals to support the institutions that educate liberal religious leaders?

Well, friends, we are not going to solve the riddle of liberal religious institutions here today.  But may we remember these issues are not unique only to us today; our ancestors have struggled with the same concerns for hundreds of years.  May we remember Emerson and Henry Bellows and Frederick May Eliot.

In conclusion,

I Applaud those of you who are the builders and the doers, the shapers and the makers of this institution, the UU fellowship of the Emerald Coast.  I applaud you who align yourselves with this living faith community that affirms rather than despairs, that thinks and acts rather than simply adjusting and succumbing. (adapted from Jack Mendelsohn).

I urge you to be mindful; mindful when you find yourself avoiding or badmouthing institutions. Is it a legitimate concern about the institution at hand, or are you just being reactive, just following ‘the pattern’?  Can the issues be resolved within the institution?  Is leaving truly necessary?

I urge you to recognize that institutions are important.  This institution, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast is important.

In Reinventing the Church, David and Beverly Bumbaugh (1997) write:

The church exists to proclaim the [good news] gospel that each human being is infinitely precious, that the meaning of our lives lies hidden in our interactions with each other. The challenge we confront is to be a church that does not bury that great truth beneath all our business, but which enables us to encounter each other with wonder, appreciation, and expectation, to call out of each other strength and wisdom and compassion we never knew we had.

Professor Dan MacKanan asks, “How can we tend to our institutions in a way that recognizes that the institutions themselves are not the ultimate value? How can we put our institutions to the service of our ideals?

I urge you to listen to the words of Ella Baker (Slide 18):

“I was never working for an organization: I have always tried to work for a cause.  And the cause to me is bigger than any organization, bigger than any group of people.  It is the cause of humanity…The drive of the human spirit for freedom.”

Ella Baker was an African American woman who worked tirelessly for civil and human rights.  Over a long career she worked with the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  She was not a UU, but she has something worth hearing.

I urge you to listen to the words of songs we sang here together this morning.

The author of the song we sang together this morning #354 We Laugh, We Cry is Shelley Jackson Denham. (Slide 19) I know Shelley; I worked with her as part of the UU affiliated INSTITUTION the Mountain Retreat and Learning Center, in Western North Carolina.  I worked at the Mountain one summer as a spiritual coordinator for the youth camp.  How wonderful to have UU institutions working for liberal religious values!

We have our hearts to give, we have our thoughts to receive, and we believe that sharing is an answer.

May we come to respect, and work to strengthen, our institutions, not for their own sake, but in the service of our highest ideals.

May it be so. (Slide 20)

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Peace on Earth, to All Good Will”
Rev. Rod Debs
December 20, 2009

Story for All Ages: Since it’s almost Christmas, I would like to know whether you know the stories of Jesus’ birth.  What are some of those stories?

Mary and Joseph—parents
Mary had a dream like the voice of an angel telling her she would have a baby
Joseph had a dream that an angel told him Mary would have a baby too
Jesus was born in a stable or a cave because there was no room in Bethlehem inn
shepherds watching their sheep saw a whole bunch of angels declaring Jesus’ birth
“Peace on Earth, to all goodwill!”
three wisemen with presents followed a star that shone above the stable

(set the stage for the story)  The angels said:  “Peace on Earth, to all Goodwill!”

Why do people want to talk about Jesus’ birth?  Many people think that what Jesus taught and lived when he was an adult brought peace to whoever followed him, whoever lived like Jesus did.

Jesus taught that everyone should be respected, especially children, poor people, sick people, rich people too, and even bad people should be respected.  He said to visit people in jail, to give clothes to people who need clothes, food to the hungry, whatever people need, to give it to them.  He even said to love your enemies!

So one of the stories they told was that angels said that Jesus would bring “Peace on Earth, to all goodwill!”  Do you think if we all practiced loving-kindness to everybody, especially to those who are worst off, that maybe there would be “Peace on Earth” and goodwill to all?

This is the real story behind Christmas!  Let’s sing “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

Message: This morning I am mindful that there are many winter holidays celebrated around the world. In Kyrgyzstan, children go to school on December 25; they celebrate New Years with feasting and presents and Orthodox Christmas in January.  There are people who celebrate secular Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, and Santa Lucia.  Truth be told, I think we celebrate a mix of many holiday traditions.  Holiday traditions teach something, they transmit values from one generation to another.

What values taught by winter holiday traditions around the world?

The Winter Solstice has been celebrated in many ways since ancient days, always a celebration of hope as for the return of the sun’s life-giving warmth.  Those traditions that light candles, burn the yule log, roll flaming hoops down a hill, hang lights on evergreens, frame buildings with shining ice-cicles, fill public places with strings of multi-colored twinkling light—all these celebrations of light are celebrations of hope as for the sun’s return of life-giving light.

First century Roman soldiers celebrated Mithra’s birth on December 25th, centuries before Christians adopted the same date as Jesus’ birthday.  Mithra was said to be born of the Sun-god with a human mother.  Mithra’s birth was witnessed by shepherds and by Magi who brought gifts to his sacred birth-cave in the Rock—long before Jesus’ birth stories were written.  Mithra performed miracles: raised the dead, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, made the lame to walk, and he cast out devils—typical stories written to prove ancient heroes were worthy of worship.  Mithra’s ascension to heaven was celebrated at the Spring Equinox—now celebrated as Christian Easter—when the sun rises to its greatest height.  Well before Christianity, Mithraism’s “Birth of the Unconquerable Sun,” Winter Solstice, was a celebration of the rebirth of hope.

Hanukkah is also known as the Festival of Lights.  The story goes that when the Jews re-conquered Jerusalem from Syria’s Seleucid Empire in 165 BCE, priests needed eight days of olive oil for the rededication of the Temple, but only one days-worth of consecrated oil could be found.  Miraculously, that oil burned for eight days.  The eight candles of the Menorah are lighted, one for each of the eight days of Hanukkah.  Hanukkah is a celebration of hope for liberation despite brutal oppression.  The Festival of Lights is the silent celebration of that hope no matter how dark the circumstances.

Saint Lucy’s Day is celebrated among Scandinavian peoples on December 13.  The candle-light services we are familiar with reflect Santa Lucia celebration—when a young girl with lighted candles crowning her head leads a procession of singing children, each with a candle, celebrating the victory of light over darkness.

Kwanzaa, a modern African American celebration involves the lighting of seven days of candles.  But Kwanazaa’s focus is not on light conquering darkness.  Rather, seven values of community are celebrated with the lighting of each day’s candle.  The first candle is lit for the collective Purpose of building community; the next six candles are lit for Creativity, Faith, Unity, Self-Determination, Collective Work and Responsilty, and the final candle is lit for Cooperative Economics.  A focus on the values of community.

Not all winter holidays are celebrations of light.  Two weeks ago we celebrated Hanging of the Greenery, the evergreen, with life-force that retains its color despite winter’s darkness and cold.  The evergreen is a symbol of hope for human survival at a time when many living things recede into winter dormancy or death.  Kwanzaa goes so far as to name values of community-building as very concrete practices that give hands to our hope.

“The lights of Kwanzaa now proclaim that when we share our inner flame, and nurture root and branch with pride, we’ll harvest peace both far and wide.” (Singing the Living Tradition, #147)

When I reflect on the function of holy days, of holidays, both ancient and present-day, they seem almost always to be feasts.  Animal sacrifices were actually big barbecues: lambs, fowl, bullocks, pig-roasts.  Priests and the entire population feasted on what they brought to sacrifice.

The Jesus tradition of “the common table” was in one key sense different from the established holy day feasts, and at the same time, more traditional:  Jesus excluded noone.  The followers of Jesus were taught to bring their goods to “the common table” where everyone was welcome without discrimination.

During the Roman occupation of Palestine, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem, its burning, the enslavement and killing of much of the Jewish population around the year 70CE, the Jesus tradition of inviting everyone, without distinction, to share “the common table,” abandoned the purity exclusions of Temple Judaism.  Jesus welcomed the poor and diseased, women and slaves, tax-collectors and prostitutes, children and half-Jews and even Roman pagans to share “the common table.”

In the bleak midwinter, when harvest stores of food or fuel might seem insufficient, the community brings what they have to the feast.  They eat and drink, sing and dance.  They listen to the wisdom of elders and praise the innocent exuberance of youth.  They sing and tell stories, exaggerate the tales so that they will be memorable.  They break the rules of everyday frugality—and yes, some populations freely violated patriarchal mating privileges during the feasting and wild celebration.  The people share feasts.  The so-called “Followers of the Way” of Jesus, shared with whoever wished to partake at “the common table.”  Many found hope in Jesus’ radical generosity

In the Gospel of Luke, the writer spins a story of Jesus declaring his mission on an early visit to his home town of Nazareth.  According to the story, Jesus reads these words from the prophet Isaiah:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4.18-19, RSV)

People wrote birth stories about Jesus, the teacher of radical generosity, the one who taught “sell all you have and give to the poor.” “Insofar as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” They wrote stories about the one who preached radical solidarity, “Love your enemies.  Bless and do not curse.”

First Jesus taught and lived his vision of the Beloved Community, then stories were told and songs written:  “… from angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold:  `Peace on the earth, to all goodwill, from heaven the news we bring.’  The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.” (It Came Upon a Midnight Clear)

Hearing the Sermon on the Mount, then actually experiencing loving-kindness in Jesus, radical generosity of Jesus, and universal acceptance (grace) of Jesus, Jesus’ followers knew his teaching of “goodwill to all” to be the divine message that would bring “Peace on Earth.”   So they wrote stories celebrating him as the Prince of Peace.

We could see this holiday season as teaching our children competitive gift-giving, and selfish consumerism.  Yet behind it all, whether from secular or religious feast day tradition, there is one teaching that children of all ages need to hear:  universal kindness and generosity.

“`Peace on the earth, to all goodwill, from heaven the news we bring’  The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

“The Good King Wenceslas”

Rev. Rod Debs

December 13, 2009

Story: Once upon a time there was a Good King.  He was a king because he had a castle.  He had a whole pine forest to supply wood for his fireplace and meat for his table.  The king had beautiful clothes and warm fur coats so that he could walk outside in the coldest weather.

Other people had warm castles and plenty of food to eat too.  Others had beautiful clothes and winter coats, but he was a King because he also had a page.  A page was someone else’s child who lived at your castle and would go for whatever you wanted.

Not everybody had a page.  Not everybody had a warm place to live or food to eat.  Some people had to gather branches that fell in the road for fire to stay warm.  Sometimes they lived outside along the fences that kept them out of other people’s property.

The Good King was good because of his kindness. One cold winter night, the King was looking out of his castle window with his blazing fireplace behind him keeping him warm.  He called to his page and asked, “Who is that peasant, picking up sticks?  Where does he live?”

The king’s page new the poor peasant because he hadn’t always lived in the castle serving the king.  The page told his king that the peasant lived near the mountain and against the fence next to the king’s forest.

There was one thing bad about this king.  His name was hard to say:  King Wenceslas.  But we remember King Wenceslas as Good King Wenceslas because he asked his page to go for some meat, some wine and some pine logs.  The Good King said that they would take dinner to the peasant and see that he had a real feast!

Most peasants didn’t get to eat much meat or have fancy wine.  They did everything they could just to stay warm and to eat whatever they could find to throw into a pot to make a watery stew.

We remember King Wenceslas as Good King Wenceslas because, the Good King went out in the bitter, blowing cold of winter, trudged for about an hour—three miles, through snow and freezing cold, to take meat, wine and pine logs, so a poor peasant could have a feast.

That’s what our winter holidays are all about—giving loving-kindness to others, like the good king.  Now let’s sing the carol “Good King Wenceslas.”

Good King Wenceslas

Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night, tho’ the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, gath’ring winter fuel.

“Hither, page, and stand by me, if thou know’st it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he? Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence, underneath the mountain;
Right against the forest fence, by Saint Agnes‘ fountain.”

“Bring me flesh, and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither:
Thou and I will see him dine, when we bear them thither.”
Page and monarch, forth they went, forth they went together;
Through the rude wind’s wild lament and the bitter weather.

“Sire, the night is darker now, and the wind blows stronger;
Fails my heart, I know not how; I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, good my page. Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage freeze thy blood less coldly.”

In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

Message: The Native American proverb from the Dakota Indians, that, “We will be known forever by the tracks we leave”, got me thinking about tracks of generosity and kindness that we leave in the world.

The holiday carol, “Good King Wenceslas” originally from Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, celebrates the generosity of the privileged and powerful toward the poor and needy.  The Good King and his page trudge through the snow to personally deliver meat, wine and pine logs so that a peasant can feast.  The last verse of the carol has the page faltering in the bitter cold and wind, walking a league—the distance one might go in one hour, about three miles.  The song celebrates the Good King’s footprints, his tracks in the snow, as warm and encouraging for the page who followed.  We sing:

“In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.”

Is it true?  Is it true that “Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing”?

Albert Schweitzer went to mighty effort and suffered great hardship to “bless the poor” in Africa, the diseased and suffering.  He said:  “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.” In other words, “Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.”

In early 2001, Katrina and Jeannette accompanied me on sabbatical to explore living Buddhism in Thailand.  During those nine weeks visiting temples (wats) and monasteries, we observed thousands of golden Buddhas, usually in sitting posture.  I remember several huge reclining Buddhas.  I also recall a couple huge black Buddha footprints; I’ll bet there’s a story there!

Among the four postures of The Buddha:  sitting, standing, walking and reclining, I was especially interested in the walking Buddha.  The story goes that The Buddha had attained heaven—which I take to be a qualitative state of earthly life.  However, he chose to walk back to earth in order to save his mother.  I obtained this three-inch silver amulet encasing a walking Buddha from a street vender.  I also took lots of pictures of walking Buddhas.

Consider the value of postures:  We speak of “taking a stand” or of “standing up for what we believe in,” and we speak of “sit-ins” as expressions of moral and political commitment.  “Here I stand” (or sit) expresses unmovable nonviolent resistance.  Sitting suggests calm restraint.  There is no kneeling Buddha; Buddhism does not teach submission to power.  It does celebrate standing—patiently.  It celebrates sitting in calm reflection.  It even celebrates the self-care of rest and repose in reclining.  I like that I can practice breathing meditation waiting in line or sitting in a waiting room.  I especially like that I can practice Buddhist breathing meditation even in bed, whether sick or insomniac.

Of the four postures:  sitting, standing, reclining and walking, it is the walking Buddha that expresses calm, steady, active commitment, “to walk the talk.”  Not running.  Not backing away.  Not even staying put.  Walking is active commitment—going somewhere!  Walking, you are able to change your direction.  Walking, you can respond to learning along the way and change.  Even turn around.  Walking, you can move yourself into a place where you can learn, where you can make a difference.

John Keith, a member of UUFEC who moved to North Carolina—when he lived here he was sometimes asked to offer a public prayer at various civic gatherings.  John offered a simple model which we have taught to our children in RE (Religious Exploration) as well as from this pulpit.  It’s a simple prayer:  “May we have eyes that see, hearts that care, and hands that are ready to serve.”

Evidence is that our hearts respond to what our eyes see.  Scotty tells me it’s called “mirroring”; we see ourselves mirrored in the suffering of others.  If we have not been aggressively desensitized to others, our hearts naturally respond with caring:  “There but for the accident of birth go I.” Our hearts and hands are responsive to what we see.

I’m not suggesting that social justice work is determined by our nature.  Though religions everywhere and our U.S. Constitution express commitment to “the general welfare” for the good of all—without mention of any right to unlimited private accumulation, we privileged persons have made up all kinds of arguments to justify withholding assistance from others.  What I am suggesting is that it is our human nature to lend a hand of compassion when our eyes see and our hearts have not been hardened from suffering.

Before we can see more than our stereotype judgments of others, we need to put ourselves in the place we can see their situation.  Really see. It involves walking—driving, flying, sitting, listening, and researching hidden stories and contexts—walking into a new place.  The heart and hand stuff—caring and serving all depend on walking to the place we can really see.

“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.” Walking.  One step at a time.  Where will we go?  Will we stay home and pass judgment?  Or walk… and leave tracks of compassion?

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Easter Courage”
Rev. Rod Debs
April 12, 2009

Listen to the podcast at “Voices of Liberal Religion” (mp3)

Story for All Ages: “What do you say about Jesus?”

When I was little, I heard a lot of stories about Jesus. I heard several different stories about his birth at Christmas: the story about angels and shepherds, the story about wise men following a star, stories about an angel speaking to Mary in a dream and an angel speaking to Joseph in a dream.

The Bible has 65 or 70 little books in it and four are about Jesus. Each book tells stories about Jesus differently. There were other stories in other books about Jesus. The original little books about Jesus were lost. Today we have different copies of them, each telling stories about Jesus a little bit differently.

There are stories about Jesus doing impossible things, miracles: like walking on water, changing water into grape juice, healing people who were sick or blind or couldn’t walk. One story says that Jesus raised people from the dead.

Some people say that Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers on a cross, and we think that probably really happened because the Roman soldiers killed a lot of people on crosses. Some stories say that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning. There are stories that say he floated away into the sky, into heaven.

The stories I like best are the stories about how Jesus was kind and loving to everyone. He even said to love our enemies and to give to the poor. Those are my favorite stories about Jesus.

Some of your friends at school might ask if you believe in Jesus. Some people believe that Jesus did miracles and rose from the dead on Easter morning. That’s what they believe about Jesus. Other people believe that Jesus taught loving kindness to everyone, especially the poor and outcasts. That’s what I believe about Jesus.

Long before Jesus was born and anybody saying he rose from the dead, Easter was celebrated in springtime when flowers came back to life, and baby animals were born. Easter rabbits and Easter eggs are a sign of new life. Today, I have a treat for you. Here’s a young dwarf lop rabbit who is seven weeks old and just left his mother. Here are two tiny rabbit kits that were born last Sunday. I’ll keep them snuggly until I can return them to their mother.

Easter is the time we celebrate rebirth of life all around us. It’s about new hope for the future. Happy Easter.

Message: Henri Nouwen writes: “Have you ever seen a tree actually grow? Can you see a child grow? Growth is too gentle, too tender. Life is basically hidden…. If you are committed to always saying yes to life, you are going to have to become a person who chooses it when it is hidden.” (“Fragile and Hidden” in The Impossible Will Take a Little Time by Paul Rogat Loeb, 2004)

The growth of trees and children is gentle, tender and hidden. Destruction is blatant. It’s in your face. Sometimes it’s cumulative, like global warming with symptoms multiplying with time. And at the same time, life is an incredible gift. Each moment brings gift after gift. Do I need to list life’s gifts in words? As if words could recreate the joy and healing that life gently and tenderly bestows moment by moment. Gracious life is more hidden and more real than any words. Wendell Berry writes:

“When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron fees. / I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief. I come into the presence of still water. / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” (Collected Poems: 1957-1982, 1987)

Easter is about the rebirth of hope—Spring is about rebirth of hope: Though winter’s death and destruction seems to be so cruel, green sprouts, blossoms and sweet-smelling, gorgeous flowers, nesting birds, eggs hatching with peeps, birthing mammals suckling, sunlight and warm breezes appear, and hope is reborn.

Forrest Church wrote: “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” How do we deal with the cruel realities of suffering and dying in the midst of life’s graces? Where do we find hope?

There seem to be two Easter messages of hope and courage: Western Christendom, now spreading world-wide, offers a theology of the cross and resurrection. A Catholic priest in Iowa, climbing into his van after a clergy meeting said to me: When people experience overwhelming suffering, the greater suffering of Jesus on the cross gives them comfort. Jesus knows their suffering. He shares their pain.

There are all kinds of reasons given for suffering: as correction, purification, penance. But in the end, reason doesn’t matter. Feelings of meaningless suffering fade in contemplation of Christ’s passion, his innocent suffering. By accepting suffering, by taking up ones own cross and following Jesus’ compassionate ethic nonetheless, Christians are able to persist in the face of injustice and cruelty. To be like Christ is to share in his suffering.

Our exchange student from Ukraine, Ivanna Koziy brought a gift to me from her country. I learned that, for all the Russian men who died in WW II, more died in Ukraine where the fighting largely took place. I think of the sufferings of the Eastern Orthodox people when I look at this gift, an icon of Madonna and Child and of The Christ. One evening at dusk, sitting at my Buddhist altar, a bit cluttered with other religious symbols, though everything around was dull and lifeless, the gold of the icons glowed. When life’s light grew dim, the icons were beautiful still. To many people, the passion of Christ brings such meaning to the meaninglessness of suffering.

Christianity can be exclusive. Some use Scripture to reject other sources of meaning. In I Corinthians 15.14 we read: “If Christ was not raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your trust in God is useless.” Rather than finding hope for the world in Jesus’ ethic of loving-kindness and generosity toward all beings, some of his followers found hope only by claiming he came back to physical life—and that bodily resurrection is our only, useful hope. Jesus’ example and call to create loving community is replaced by the death and resurrection message of his followers.

Perhaps after the Roman massacre and destruction of Jerusalem, the call to share in Christ’s suffering with the promise of bodily resurrection was meaningful. As my Catholic colleague pointed out, everyone knows suffering. Everyone needs some kind of hope. But the preaching of Jesus’ followers, that hope is only to be found in sharing the passion of Christ, in suffering, death and resurrection—well, that’s not the message Jesus seems to have been preaching himself, the message of loving community.

The growth of loving community takes time. It’s like the growth of a plant or of a child. It seems hidden until blossoms burst into flower, eggs crack open and the newborn announces itself with that tender cry. The growth of loving community grows from unseen influences. A single person’s act of conviction, can be traced to have had unforeseen influence. Paul Loeb writes:

“In the early 1960s, a friend of mine named Lisa took two of her kids to a Washington, D.C., vigil in front of the White House protesting nuclear testing. The demonstration was small, a hundred women at most. Rain poured down. The women felt frustrated and powerless. A few years later, the movement against testing had grown dramatically, and Lisa attended a major march. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, spoke. He described how he’d come to take a stand, which because of his stature had already influenced thousands, and would reach far more when he challenged the Vietnam War. Spock talked briefly about the issues, then mentioned that when he was in D.C. a few years earlier he saw a small group of women huddled, with their kids, in the rain. It was Lisa’s group. `I thought that if those women were out there,’ he said, `their cause must be really important.’” (The Impossible Will Take a Little While, p.7)

That’s how loving community grows. Spiritual growth and inspiration grow in sometimes hidden ways, as Unitarian Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Plant the seed of hope and caring, and leave the garden to God.” Marian Wright Edelman of The Children’s Defense Fund writes: “Many dismissed him as a crank or a social deviant. But Leo Tolstoy read Thoreau’s essay `Civil Disobedience’; Gandhi learned about it from Tolstoy; Martin Luther King, Jr., read Gandhi; and the civil rights movement made history. Don’t be afraid to be a voice in the wilderness for children and the poor. It’s the moral and sensible thing to do.” (“Standing Up for Children” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, p.42)

Although Marian Wright Edelman didn’t trace advocacy for children and the poor to Jesus’ message of loving community that includes everyone, especially the outcast and the poor, we know that Thoreau was nurtured in Jesus’ ethic: “`Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25.40, RSV)

I find a book by Paul Loeb to be very encouraging. The title of the book comes from a song lyric by Billie Holiday that became the WWII motto of the Army Corp of Engineers: “The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.” The Impossible Will Take a Little While (2004) is the title of his book. Growth, constructive growth of gardens and of community takes a little while. It’s not like resurrection or the promised rapture in the twinkling of an eye when the last trumpet sounds. It’s like the sprouting of a seed and the growing of a child.

Paul Loeb writes about hope: “Nothing buoys the spirit and fosters hope like the knowledge that others faced equal or greater challenges in the past and continued on to bequeath us a better world.” (Ibid., p.6) That is why he quotes Unitarian Victoria Stafford who advises us to “plant ourselves at the gates of hope” no matter what the circumstances, because it is “with our lives we make our answers all the time, to this ravenous, beautiful, mutilated, gorgeous world.” (Ibid., p.9) This is the witness of Jesus and all the prophets of every faith.

Hope is not optimism, positive expectation based upon reason and evidence. Vaclav Havel writes: “Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” (Ibid., p.82) Hope is based upon faith, upon spiritual conviction that it is good and right and worthy of commitment.

Paul Loeb asks: Why do some people lose faith, why do some give up on life, on love, on a better day, and others do not? The difference between hope and despair is based on two things: 1) the feeling that we have options—have influence, and 2) the ability to savor the abundance of the world, life’s grace and gifts.

Our spiritual courage, our faith is rooted in the witness of thousands, “a community of like-minded souls stretching across the globe and extending backward and forward in time”… “many people taking small steps together over a long period of time.” (Ibid., p.5) Many forgotten, their hidden influences unknown. And we are called to join the cloud of witnesses, to exercise our options, our small influence in building a better world.

And our spiritual courage, our faith to hope is based on the gifts of life graciously renewed with spring, with each morning light, with each breath. Hope of Easter.

Rose Marie Berger writes: “I stare out the window and daydream when I’m desperate…. `Life shouldn’t be this hard,’ I think…. After some time staring at my mind-mud, I turn to the window. I watch butterflies and wonder about color variations on peaches.” (Ibid., p.111-2)

I don’t believe in wordy prayers anymore. I believe in breathing: whether daydreaming in my chair or waiting in line or standing on my back deck or walking the dog. I practice respecting others’ efforts, both the bumbling and the efficiently misdirected, as are my own, sometimes. Call it Buddhist meditation or wasting time, such attentiveness and longing for a better world are the Sabbath we need to renew our faith—faith that life is gracious and surprising and gives many good gifts.

“Have you ever seen a tree actually grow? Can you see a child grow? Growth is too gentle, too tender. Life is basically hidden…. If you are committed to always saying yes to life, you are going to have to become a person who chooses it when it is hidden.” (“Fragile and Hidden” in The Impossible Will Take a Little Time by Paul Rogat Loeb, 2004)

May our faith be renewed in this community of conviction and by opening to life’s grace. May have hope, courage to influence, to change the world.