Chalice Reflection & Grateful Guests

The Thanksgivings of My Life
Chalice Reflection of Kay Mixon
November 23, 2008

This past week I have been thinking a lot about Thanksgiving in preparation for this chalice lighting reflection and I realized that I could divide the Thanksgivings of my life into two parts: The first part would be the Thanksgivings of my youth and I call these Thanksgivings, “My Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings.” They were held in my hometown in Arkansas and were always at my Aunt Catherine’s house. Most of my uncles and aunts and cousins were there and I think that we must have looked very similar to the Rockwell painting, “Freedom from Want” with the grandparents holding and presenting the big turkey to the expectant family. But my strongest memory of those holiday celebrations is not of the big turkeys, nor my dear relatives, – it is of Pearl’s yeast rolls, called angel rolls. Even now my mouth waters when I think of them. My sister got the recipe from Pearl in 1974 and we have been trying off and on ever since then to duplicate these rolls – but with scant success. Pearl passed away many years ago and I like to think of her up there in heaven serving the angels her divine angel rolls.

During my adult years, I’ve never lived near my family. And since my immediate family agreed years ago to always get together around Christmas and not to get together at Thanksgiving, my Thanksgivings became a not too important holiday to me. But over the years an interesting thing happened. Various friends and neighbors and people in church, reached out and invited me (and Arthur when he lived at home and now Larry and me) to participate in their family Thanksgivings. So more often than not, as an adult I spend Thanksgiving with other families. I call this part of the Thanksgivings of my life, “The Guest at Your Table Thanksgivings.” I’VE been the guest at YOUR tables. And what a gift, a joy and a privilege it has been. We have our invitation for this year and I am really looking forward to sharing Thanksgiving with a new family. And apropos of Jan’s sermon today, I plan to be a “Grateful guest.”

Kay Mixon
November 23, 2008

“Grateful Guests”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
including the words of Ellen Snoeyenbos,
District Coordinator of our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee

First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 23, 2008
Guest at Your Table Sunday

Ten years ago this December I was in Berkeley, California, trekking my way through a rare unscheduled morning and waiting to meet with our denominational Ministerial Fellowship Committee, the last step on my road to ordination as a Unitarian Universalist minister. I’d never been to Berkeley, but it was an iconic place in my coming of age history. My heart led me ultimately to the center of Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, where the Free Speech movement was launched years before by Mario Savio. Marking the spot was a hubcap sized medallion embedded into the sidewalk and upon it, this inscription:

“This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”

A tiny space that long-ago free speech activists pledged should never be subject to anyone or anything. Free speech, free space.

On this November morning ten years later, I find myself in a different space and a new time. They connect. Just moments ago we dedicated the completely adorable Michael Rahal Shannon, and I tapped the wisdom of the Lebanese poet, Khalil Gibran. Gibran reminds us:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

What a reminder! Our children are not our own, but the very offspring of Life’s longing for itself.

Jeffrey Lockwood, a Unitarian Universalist whose professional focus is the linkage between the natural sciences and the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of life, reminds us that we are all transient on this planet.

“We are all visitors…. We are passing through… We might think of ourselves as uninvited, but not unwelcome, guests of the planet.”

How to be a good guest muses Jeffrey: “Ask little, accept what is offered, and give thanks.”

None of us or the earth beneath our feet or the air extending above it belongs to any of us. We are guests, and the space we occupy is ultimately free space. How then to live? Curtail what we ask for, accept with grace what is offered, and give thanks.

Now there’s the stickler. “Give thanks.” It’s a tight paradox. We’re thanking whatever or whomever for whatever, and we’re giving even as we’re acknowledging receipt. The “thanks for something” is commonly what we hold up at this season. I invite us this morning to hold up the other end of that paradox, the giving.

Why now, you might ask? We’re in economic crisis. Some of us are terrified of losing our jobs. Some of us have already lost them. Many of us have seen our pensions and investments nosedive. Why now?

Through it all, we remain guests, guests of this planet and guests at the table of one another. Like the tight paradox that is thanks giving, the art of being a good guest calls us to acknowledge another paradox. We are at the same time guests and hosts. This planet is our host. We are one another’s host. We are guests of the planet. We are hosts of this planet as long as we can lift a finger to partake of its care.

Let’s start with the basics. Life isn’t possible without water. It just can’t happen. What do we look for when we check out the prospect of life on distant planets? Any sign of water. Any sign that there has ever been water. In this faith community, we dedicate our children by dipping a flower into this primal substance of nurture and possibility. As we celebrated the nurturing of all our children, water and sand were the media used to illustrate how this happens and how our children grow. Stories rise up out of water, and no story is possible without it.

Imagine if your water tap were cut off, if authorities with more power than you said, “No, that’s enough. You must pay for anything more.” Imagine! It’s not far-fetched for millions upon millions of our fellow-guests on this planet. A story comes to us from South Africa, where the water company determines how much water flows to each home. Is your family poor? You get less, not more, even though the law of the land dictates otherwise.

Consider the power of one to make a difference. A woman named Serafina was fed up with what the water company was doing and decided to work with a group of her fellow villagers to make sure that everyone had enough water to drink and cook with and bathe in and launder with. Serafina is 71 years old.

Her neighbors know her as Makoko, or Granny. This Granny inspired her neighbors to work with her and stand up for their rights. Serafina’s group of advocates grew and grew. One of them is our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which partnered with this grass-roots cluster of villagers and took the matter to court. The case went to the Supreme Court of South Africa. Stories were told. Songs were sung outside the court as lawyers and judge deliberated inside. After months of deliberation, the case was decided. Serafina and her neighbors won, in partnership with our Service Committee. Together they continue to teach other South African villagers about the basic right to water. Our Service Committee’s annual Guest at Your Table Campaign helps make it happen.

We are guests at Serafina’s table of love and justice making. Serafina is a Guest at our Table along with all the Serafinas who struggle and persevere. Our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and you and I make it possible and have done so for the past 68 years that the Service Committee has partnered with indigenous groups in this nation and globally to open hearts, change mentalities, and save lives.

Why will I take this little box home and place probably two to five dollars in it each night as my husband, Dan, and I enjoy dinner together? Why will I bring it back, as many of you will bring yours back, on January 18, Dr. Martin Luther King Sunday, with a check representing the bills that we’ve poured into it night after night between now and then? Because we understand that we’re among the guests of our world who can, and this is one wonderful way to be a grateful guest.

If we let go of $20, $100, $1,000, consider that it wasn’t ultimately ours to begin with. Consider the notion that if we are transient, our resources are even moreso. If by sharing who we are and what we have, we become more gracious and grateful guests, then that is cause for singing song upon song of Thanksgiving, because our gratitude will be given and received.

I welcome this morning Ellen Snoeyenbos, who serves as our district coordinator for our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Ellen is also a member of First Parish UU in Kingston. It’s probably tough to take the word of your minister when I ask you to give at a time when we’re all wondering what we have. Ellen will help us all with that question, “Why now? Why our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee?”


[Ellen Snoeyenbos speaks.]

Hi Folks,

I am very happy to be here. Thank you, Jan, for your kindness in inviting me.

As the Ballou-Channing District Regional Coordinator for The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee I get to visit many wonderful UU communities in this area as they deepen their faith and commitment to a better world through their participation in Guest at Your Table – the primary membership vehicle of our historic service organization.

As my kids grew up in the Kingston UU church, our family tried to make a little ritual of adding our money to the box before every meal and imagine inviting the people on the box to share our meal at our table. At the Kingston church, during our holiday season, we set at place for a Guest at our coffee hour table every Sunday – a reminder to adults and children alike that many people who are not physically with us count on us to reach out to them in meaningful ways with respect, honor and dignity.

Now in a family of adults I try to continue the ritual as it becomes an act representing far more than charity – it has become an act of empowerment. These are times of difficulty and economic strain. We are all re-evaluating how we spend our limited resources. Now is the perfect time to maximize your investment. By participating in Guest at Your Table, filling your box and signing up on the side of the box before you bring it back to church, in one fell swoop you become a crusader for economic justice, environmental justice, civil rights, and humanitarian relief. It’s one-stop shopping at a market of social justice that never gives up, never gives in and looks for every opportunity to support local organizations in fulfilling their goals through practical, grassroots action. Your UU values are put directly to work.

My membership last year helped win a civil rights case in South Africa resulting in turning on water spigots all over a Johannesburg Township. I helped a group in Ecuador pass an amendment to the Ecuadorian constitution guaranteeing the right to clean, accessible, and abundant water! I helped women on the Gulf Coast get their daycare licenses so they can care for the children of neighbors struggling to rebuild their homes. I helped win landslide victories for ballot initiatives that achieved minimum-wage increases in six states: Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Arizona.

Please check out my table at coffee hour to find out more about the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and ways you can connect more deeply in the work of UUSC. Thank you!


Jan:
Thank you, Ellen. Now I should warn you that as you explain Guest at Your Table to your children, who are receiving their boxes during religious education classes this morning, there’s a risk. In one of our congregations, a family took their box home, placed it on their dinner table, understood that their daughter was clear why it was there, and during dinner one night caught their daughter trying to cram part of her dinner through the slot in the top of her box, so that she could help feed the guest at their table! But she understood, and so might we at this time of Thanksgiving and giving thanks.

For each and all of you, I am ever grateful! Amen.


Sources:

“The History of UUSC,” http://www.uusc.org/history.

Jeffrey Lockwood, “The Fine Art of the Good Guest,” a guest of the world: Meditations, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2006

Story 1: Serafina, in Stories of Hope 2008-1009, Guest at Your Table/Celebrate UU Faith in Action, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, http://www.uusc.org/files/guest_storiesofhope.pdf

Chalice Reflection & Beliefs and Perspectives

Lessons from My backyard
Chalice Reflection of Susan Etkind
November 2, 2008

I was pondering this chalice reading while gardening and when I wasn’t thinking of the reading I was worrying about the economy and the upcoming election. During tense times I find I retreat to the backyard and wanted to share some simple wisdom absorbed from my parents, hearty New Englanders, Conservationists, and Unitarians.

This year I’ve doubled the size of my garden to increase the months we feed the family from 3 months to 6 months inspired by the Green Sanctuary people and the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. My father, however, was into this in the 1950’s. He revived former Victory Gardens from WWII and eventually had 20 neighborhood families under his tutelage- recommending ladybugs, praying mantis and his own organic compost over pesticides, assigning the rows and urging them in their weeding.

Starting at age 8, I was planting/weeding and harvesting and probably complaining a bit too. As a teenager I did all of these jobs in a bathing suit working on a tan.
At age 5, I remember hiding my peas under the table. By age 9 I loved most vegetables…eventually even brussel sprouts and turnips.

Appreciating animals was also something I learned. He urged everyone to use “Have a Heart” traps instead of killing the animals. He would then take them over to the woods of the Wellesley College campus and let them go. Jane Goedeke, you may have seen some of these critters if my dates are right.

Another lesson was about patience. My father said, “If you make this particular chirping sound and bring seeds to the stone wall where the chipmunk lives, he will eventually eat from your hand.” I saw this with my own eyes.

“If pheasants, turkeys or other unusual animals land in the backyard, wake everyone up to see them- even the teenagers.”

My father lived just long enough to help Steve and I plant our first garden in our first house. He was able to convey his excitement to my husband. They planted our first garden together. Two things Steve remembers are 1.) Start planting on Memorial Day, and 2.) Don’t harvest until just before you are going to eat the vegetables. 10 minutes is ideal.

We have carried on the gardening. It is a wonderful legacy. My kids have it in their bones. Zach wandered the gardens as young as 3 munching on broccoli and peppers. He wants to be part of planting even now at age 21. As young adults Alex and Zach have become my human rototillers and they are both studying environmental conservation.

No matter what kind of garden you have: flowers, vegetables, grass, indoor plants, my father and I say: “Engage your children in the process. Imprinting works and the earth will benefit.”

“Beliefs and Perspectives”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 2, 2008

The year was 1568. John Sigismund was king of Hungary. Sigismund was history’s only Unitarian king—that’s right a Unitarian king. You never thought we were cut out for royalty, but John was, and he ruled as Hungary’s king from his birth in 1540 for the next 30 years, with a little help from his mother until he grew up. In the later years of his reign, Francis David became his court minister. Through careful biblical research, David had arrived at the belief that God was not three but one. David had begun as Catholic, converted to Lutheranism, converted then to Calvinism, and landed finally in the “God-is-one” theology that is Unitarianism.

Unlike many converts, Francis David respected the beliefs of those with whom he disagreed and urged his king to do the same. Inspired and encouraged by David, King John Sigismund held a forum at which various religious views were openly discussed, and in 1568 he issued the Edict of Torda, a proclamation of religious tolerance inspired by David’s conviction that “We need not think alike to love alike.” The Unitarian Church of Transylvania was established, but it was okay to worship as a Catholic or as a Lutheran or as a Calvinist. The qualifier was that the choices were limited. Judaism or Islam, for example, would not have had equal standing. As with the founding fathers of our own nation, liberty was not quite “liberty for all,” but nonetheless a stance was taken 440 years ago upholding the ideals of religious liberty and the right of conscience.

In 1570 the Hapsburgs assumed the kingship of Hungary and John became Prince of Transylvania. A year later, the once and only Unitarian king and prince would be dead, and another ruler, not as tolerant, moved quickly into the vacuum. Under this less progressive monarch, David’s views were no longer sanctioned; he was thrown into prison, and he died there. Yet the Edict of Torda that established religious tolerance, the courage and perseverance of David, and the brief spell of relative religious liberty are part of our legacy as Unitarian Universalists.

Freedom, reason, and tolerance are, dare I say, the “trinity” of beliefs that surfaced through the centuries to our own. Just like the 4th-century Council of Nicea, during which Arius the Unitarian lost out to Athanasius, the Trinitarian; just like the forum at Torda, where Unitarianism won out and tolerance carried the day, however short-lived, religious matters for centuries have been at the mercy of political bodies in Europe and other continents. In our own infant nation, churches were for many decades financially supported by the state. It was not until the early 19th century that the separation of church and state took firm hold in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Neither religion nor the state could call the shots of how government should be run or how we should worship.

As Unitarian Universalists and as Americans, we uphold the ideals of freedom, reason, and tolerance. As Unitarian Universalists, we add to those three the ideal of inclusiveness—a large tent of opinions, a never-ending story of spiritual paths, an open door of welcome, and yes, civil marriage as a civil right. From tolerance, we are moving to celebration of the wide-ranging perspectives of the human family invited to find a religious home in our midst.

How is it, I sometimes wonder, that we are dubbed the people who don’t believe anything? Belief in the historically unpopular ideals of freedom, reason, and tolerance has cast our forebears into prisons, into the flames of the heretic’s stake, and onto vessels of escape from one nation to another in search of the liberties that we seek to uphold and sustain.

In our own country many of these liberties have been honored in the breach in recent years. Many of the spiritually honed values that every person has some worth, that we’re all connected, that justice and compassion go hand in hand, that global peace is a state to which we aspire and toward which we are called to work—have been honored in rhetoric only. It would be cowardly of me not to remind us of this at a time of pivotal choice, a time when we who value religious freedom and political freedom are choosing who presides at the helm of this nation. It would be cowardly of me not to remind us of this at a time when our nation has lost its grip on even the idealized principles of the founding fathers, even those principles that were so long honored dishonorably when it came to people among us of color, people among us who are women, people among us seeking asylum from nations where their fates were sealed if they did not find it.

Revelation is not sealed, either in our faith or in the principles and practices of this nation. We are an aspiring democracy. We aspire to inclusiveness. We are not yet there, and we are struggling.

“We do not need to think alike to love alike.” No, we don’t; but we do need to think; we are called to love; and we are challenged to meld our reason and our love in actions that shape a legacy for our children and our children’s children.

Our beliefs as Unitarian Universalists are not for the faint of heart. Our ideals as Americans are not for those who aspire to anything less than an inclusive democracy.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in a loving God, a force in the universe that does not micro-manage, does not do our work for us, but breathes the wherewithal for love and compassionate justice into each of us and trusts that humankind just might be kind, might be reasonable, might affirm inclusive love, and might withhold judgments and practices harsh and fatal.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in the capacity of humankind to be kind—not “nice” within the genteel limits of good manners, not “tolerant” within the grudging limits of “putting up with so and so,” not “charitable” if charity trumps compassionate justice.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in the capacity of our nation to turn from its foolish ways, to turn from practices of civil liberties constricted, to turn from practices of torture sanctioned, to turn from practices of war precipitated by lies confessed far too late to bring back the hundreds of thousands who have been downwind of our folly, to turn from a veritable chasm between those of us who have and those of us who have not, to turn from a jaded understanding that the wealthy deserve all that they claim to own and the poor and quickly-becoming-poor deserve the anxiety and devastations that some of us know because after all we just didn’t use good judgment.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in truth telling. I believe that truth hurts and heals, but that it heals more than it hurts. I believe that our citizens and leaders alike are accountable for rendering truth visible and accessible. I believe confession has a place in our relationships intimate, communal, political, societal, and global. We screw up! We sin! We violate the miracle of life in which we find ourselves. Truth and reconciliation as practiced from Rwanda to South Africa long for a home in our United States of America. Truth and reconciliation is the hardest of spiritual practices. “Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil, especially the evil of our own lies to ourselves!”

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in a covenantal grounding over a creedal grounding for our religious community. Covenant considers that we’re each and all flawed, that we don’t always live up to our ideals for ourselves or for one another. Covenant is like a patchwork quilt that reminds us we are carefully and sometimes carelessly stitched together; that we’re not all one fabric but connected by intention and by resilient strands of thread and fabric, each with their own stories, each emerging from their own historical garments. I believe in a covenantal grounding for our national community, albeit with a fresh look at our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Whenever a state or a nation considers rescinding a basic right through a proposition wrought by that perilous notion “I and the other” or “we and them,” we are selling the soul of our aspiring democracy to brokers who have no role in the marketplace of caring community.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe with the late Unitarian theologian and scholar James Luther Adams that our goal “is the prophethood and priesthood of all believers, the one for the liberty of prophesying, the other for the ministry of healing.” Prophets are not the most popular folks in the neighborhood, but they don’t’ mince words. Priests defer to the common good, the healing and wholeness of not just you and me, but of this nation, this world. I believe with Adams that we are accountable as, in Adams’ words:

“the prophetic liberal church…in which persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in the light of their faith, to make explicit through discussion the epochal thinking that the times demand, …in which all members share the common responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional), with the intention of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it.”

As a Unitarian Universalist, I believe with Forrest Church that a two-hour sermon in the Puritan tradition doesn’t cut it today and that our Puritan forebears held a standard of moral perfection that none of us could attain. I also believe with Forrest that come Tuesday, “we will be casting the most critical vote of our lifetimes,” and that “the choice we must make, not just with our vote, but with our lives, is a choice between hope and fear.” And like Forrest, I’m not telling you how to cast your vote. I am not and will never tell you how to exercise this precious right.

As your minister, I concur with the mission of this congregation that we are called “to affirm our Unitarian Universalist principles and put them into action by worshipping together (as we are doing right now), caring for one another (as we do week after week, year after year), and working for a safe, just, and sustainable world,” for which our work is just beginning.

“We need not think alike to love alike;” but we need to think and we need to love.

We share core beliefs of love and compassion and justice, freedom, reason, tolerance, and inclusiveness. As to how we realize them, there lies the venue of perspective. Your perspective may not be my perspective may not be his or her or their perspective. We have varied angles of vision as we answer the question of who will lead this nation honestly, justly, and compassionately for the next four years. We have varied angles of vision as we debate the particulars of how to realize the beloved community in a world that aches, simply aches, for that caring and compassionate community which I understand to be the most realistic hope imaginable if we are to know “a safe, just, and sustainable world.”

As people of faith, we are called to draw on that which we believe. As people of faith and practice, we are called to choose. And then we are called to act through the balance of our days with all the hope and love we can muster to sustain or resist or renew or reform the harvest of our choices.

I love you, each and all! Amen


Sources:

James Luther Adams, “I Call That Church Free,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 591.

James Luther Adams, “The Prophethood of All Believers,” in The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses, Edited and introduced by George Kimmich Beach, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998.

Forrest Church, “Election Sermon,” October 26, 2008, Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York City, Mark W. Harris, “Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith,” http://archive.uua.org/info/origins.html

Mark W. Harris, “Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith,” http://archive.uua.org/info/origins.html.

John II Sigismund Zápolya, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_II_Sigismund_Z%C3%A1polya.