Chalice Reflection & Notice!

Chalice Reflection
of
Diana (“Pokey”) Kornet
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Evolution Sunday – March 22, 2009

When Eric invited me do the chalice lighting for today, he asked me to reflect on my “struggles as a biologist and parent with the concepts of evolution vs. creationism,” but I have to admit I never struggled over this issue. Darwin’s theory of evolution poses a problem only if one takes the Bible literally, and the “Good Book” is so filled with allegory and parables that very early in my education I left behind any notion of its being a literal work. The high school I attended, non-denominational but whose founders were steeped in the Christian tradition, required that students take “Bible” as a minor every year: in 9th grade we were introduced to the major religions in the world and their founders, including the origins and wide variety of beliefs of many Christian sects. In 10th grade we studied the Old Testament, in 11th we focused on the New Testament, and during senior year we read more current material of the existentialists – philosophers and theologians from Kierkegaard and Sartre to Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and William Sloane Coffin. I often wished that our children had a similar requirement during their high school education, for it was a path that encouraged questioning and critical thinking during the formative years.

When our children were young, we read Bible stories to them so they would become familiar with them as a part of western culture, but we told them that often the stories were trying to explain something for people – whether it was the story of how the world was created, the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, or the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood. For me the concept of “God” has always been inextricably intertwined with the natural world; I had no problem conveying my awe and wonder at the intricate miracles of the natural world to our children.

In “Natural Faith” in the recent issue of UU World, William Murry says, “Before Darwin, people in the western world thought species were fixed entities, created by God in the exact form in which we find them today.” When Darwin’s theory of evolution explained that all living things evolved over millions of years from simple organisms through the process of natural selection, there was no longer the need for a “Creator.” This had huge implications for religious thinking: mankind was no longer a special creation made in the image of the deity; rather, man was a part of the natural world. Murry says that today many liberal theologians “conceive of God as a power within the natural universe rather than a source outside it.” Murry quotes from Reinventing the Sacred by scientist Stuart Kauffman, who suggests that we “rename God, not as the Generator of the universe, but as the creativity in the natural universe itself.” I have not read his book, but it is now on my list, for that is exactly where my thinking is: for me, God is the creative force for good. “May the Force be with you” really spoke to me!

Murry states that most UUs are naturalists as opposed to supernaturalists – whether theistic or non-theistic, most UUs do not believe in the existence of a supernatural realm…now THIS is where I have a different point of view. What is “supernatural” anyway?—something we can’t explain through the “natural laws” we understand right now? I would say it is all natural. I DO believe in an existence after this life…we just don’t understand yet how our energy continues.

Darwin’s idea has affected our religious story by calling us out of our separate self-centered worlds to recognize ourselves as part of a great living system…about which we still know relatively little. We are still learning…

“Notice!”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for Evolution Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 22, 2009

What did you do on your summer vacation? It’s a question that conjures up the first day of school, a blank page, and a blank stare back at the page. It’s a question which I’m hoping to answer this autumn with at least one book title—The Origin of Species, published 150 years ago this coming November, authored by Charles Darwin born 200 years ago as of this year’s February 12. I’ve enjoyed barely an appetizer portion of the grand feast served up by the writings of and about this man, who transformed our understanding of how we—the whole interdependent we—came to be through the most extraordinary acts of adaptation across the millennia. My appetite has been whetted.

This morning I offer a belated Happy Birthday to Charles, belated because over his birthday I was engaged with my own particular adaptation to life recovering from surgery. I trust you’ll forgive me, Charles, and accept this modest tribute to your life and work in the frame of a worship service in a faith in full partnership with your relentless search for truth and meaning. I’m so looking forward to stretching out on Minot Beach come the summer, after a dive into waters holding more forms of life than I can imagine, and plumbing the pages of your magnum opus from which we humans are still drawing epiphanies of knowledge and wonder. What better place to read The Origin of Species but a beach, where I can close my eyes and breathe in the salt scent inhaled by creatures billions of years ago, where I can swim and imagine that I haven’t yet lost the gills of my sea-siblings—ancestors all.

What a remarkable man was Charles Darwin. What a remarkable life and legacy we inherit. While his theories of natural selection and sexual selection—the two theories for which he is most noted—were not original with Darwin, choice and circumstance and a highly inquisitive mind conspired toward Darwin writing and publishing 19 books, each a facet of his kaleidoscopic powers of observation and reflection. Darwin heeded what I understand as the most compelling though implicit invitation greeting each of us upon birth: “Notice!”

Born on February 12, 2009 in Shrewsbury, England to Dr. Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, Charles was a middle child. His older brother, Erasmus, was named for their paternal grandfather, a physician and naturalist who preceded Charles in writing on the likelihood of natural selection as an explanation for the variability of creatures over time. Charles had three older sisters—Marianne, Caroline, and Susan—and a younger sister, Catharine. Altogether there were six children in this household parented by Robert and Susannah. Their maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, renowned for his pottery. Dr. Robert Waring Darwin was a physician, well-loved by his family and neighbors and patients. Susannah was known for her gentle and compassionate nature.

At the outset of what Charles Darwin refers to as a “sketch of my life,” begun in May, 1876, he recounts his earliest memory, “when I was a few months over four years old, when we went to near Abergele for sea-bathing, and I recollect some events and places there with some little distinctness.” Of course this bolsters my intent to read The Origin of Species on the beach.

Barely eight years old, Charles was sent off to day-school in Shrewsbury. Just a few months later, his mother, Susannah, would succumb to what was most likely tuberculosis, the disease that took so many lives on both sides of the Atlantic during this time. Curiously enough, he admits, his memory of his mother focused on her deathbed, what she wore, and the table where she had worked. Even as the young Darwin grieved the loss of his mother, his attention to detail is notable

By this time, he recounts, “my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals.” Darwin also admits to a reputation for mischief, albeit mischief with conscience, since the incident I recount troubled him greatly afterwards.

“I told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which of course was a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me.”

The young boy became the young student became the young man. He entertained the idea of becoming a physician—briefly. He even entertained the idea of becoming a clergyman—briefly. Darwin studied at Edinburgh and then at Cambridge. His was a mind that could have sauntered off in any of innumerable directions; but while at Cambridge, he sought the acquaintance of John Stevens Henslow, a professor passionate in his regard for the sciences. Young Charles was drawn to Henslow’s capacity to form “conclusions from long-continued minute observations.” Henslow served as mentor and muse, and it was he who alerted Charles to the opportunity to set sail aboard the Beagle as a cabin-mate to Captain Robert Fitz-Roy. Darwin was invited aboard as the Beagle’s resident naturalist. I can almost hear his response—a rousing high-decibel “Yes!”

The HMS Beagle set sail on the 27th of December 1831 for a round-the-world voyage that would last five years.

“The voyage of the Beagle,” wrote Darwin decades later, “has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career….I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind; I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were always fairly developed.”

Darwin observed; he collected; he documented; he thought; he reflected. He noticed. He wondered. His gaze fell on creatures of the sea and sky and land never imagined by him. His attention was drawn magnet like to sea shells found inland and coral reefs and atolls whose origins he theorized with inspiration from his Grandfather Erasmus, who had boldly declared “Everything from shells.” (Milner, 19) Off the coast of Chile in 1835 he witnessed a volcanic eruption and related it to the work of geologist Charles Lyell, who had theorized that with sufficient time, natural forces at play in the present explain the formation of such geological phenomena. (Milner, 20)

It was in the Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, where they arrived in the spring of 1836, that Darwin actually observed the coral reefs and atolls and formulated his theory of their formation over millennia atop sinking volcanoes. A few months later, the HMS Beagle docked in England. Laden with specimens and documentation and journals, Darwin’s primary sources were in hand. Soon after, he met with Lyell, who shared the excitement over Darwin’s theory of reef formation, though it varied from his own. Regarding the prospect of public credibility, Lyell’s words to Darwin, penned in a letter to his friend, rang as prophetic as they did enthusiastic:

“I could think of nothing for days after your lesson on coral reefs, but of the tops of submerged continents. It is all true, but do not flatter yourself that you will be believed, till you are growing bald, like me, with hard work & vexation at the incredulity in the world.” (Milner, 21)

Darwin began to distill his theory of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution as early as 1838, just six years after returning to England; but it would be twenty years before he published an account of it. It wasn’t that he didn’t publish. Eight of his 19 published works were issued before The Origin. Darwin was anxious over how it would be received.

Feelings and thoughts called for time to simmer. He had just become familiar with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who posed the dilemma of human procreation outpacing the food supply, with starvation as the solution. While Malthus’s ideas were understandably unpopular, Darwin respected the dilemma that he was addressing, as indicated in his own reflections years later:

“….being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.” (Autobiography, 48)

And so he did not, though his developing theory remained not quite on the back burner of his attention. He would write and publish on related topics, before occasion rose for the deep breath that told him it was time to make public his theory of natural selection. Weighing the pros and cons of what to say and when, he applied a similar methodology to his decision to marry.

Emma Wedgwood was his cousin, and surely not enough was known, even by Darwin, about the possible consequences of marrying one’s cousin, to pose a clear deterrent. The deterrents were recorded in Darwin’s vacillation about marrying at all. Yes, he made a pro and con list, with reasons for and reasons against. Among the “cons” were: “freedom to go where one liked—choice of Society & little of it…..Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.—to have the expense & anxiety of children.” On the “pro” side he listed: “Children…—Constant companion, (& friend in old age)” and most markedly, tongue in cheek I hope, “better than a dog anyhow.” Whether Emma ever saw the list is a matter of speculation, but if so, Charles surely had some explaining to do or he would find that it was not quite a lowly canine who belonged in a doghouse.

The couple exchanged many letters before and during their engagement. Charles poured forth his hopes and his confidence that he harbored a theory about where we all came from and how, along with doubts that stirred in him with regard to a divine force behind creation. Emma was forthright in declaring how painful it would be to her if he held to his theory and certainly if he made it public, and a plaintive opinion that it would prevent their being together in eternity. Emma came from a perspective of Unitarianism, and held firmly to her belief in God the Creator and the promise of an afterlife. Even then, it seems, Unitarians didn’t need “to think alike to love alike,” in the spirit of the 16th century Unitarian martyr Francis David.

Love won out, and Emma and Charles married in January, 1839. Residing for a few years in London, Darwin completed books on his voyage aboard the Beagle and his theory of the formation of coral reefs. The first two of their ten children were born there, including his beloved daughter, Annie. In 1842, the young family moved to the country into what would be their home for many years, “Down.” Emma would give birth to eight more children, though two died in infancy. By all accounts, Emma and Charles adored each other, and they adored their children. Affection was pervasive. Emma was warm and gracious; Charles was playful and indulged his children’s mischief making as if in appreciation for his own early pranks.

As prodigious in his work of observation and documentation and reflection, so was he prodigiously loving as a father. His was a parenting of full heart, and his heart was broken when Annie became ill, very ill, in April of 1851. On April 23 they lost ten-year-old Annie. Darwin poured his grief onto the page:

“We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face! Blessings on her!” (Autobiography, 102)

It was in an article in The Boston Globe just four years ago that Randal Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spoke in defense of his forebear’s theories and empathy with those who find them difficult to understand. Keynes further illumined the story of Annie. In the late 1990s, he had found in his parents’ bureau memorabilia of Charles Darwin which they had inherited. Among this historic treasure was a box with memos by Darwin about Annie. A few years later, Keynes authored: Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution.” While Darwin ceased to believe in a beneficent divinity, according to Keynes,

“…what he realized is that he just went on caring for Annie. He just couldn’t stop caring for her, even though she was dead, and year after year he found he still cared for her as much as he did when she was alive. He realized how fundamentally important the affections are between parent and child and how—to use a modern phrase—it must be a kind of hardwired part of our makeup. He went on to develop a view on our moral sense.”

A theory of natural selection in no way undermines love or the affections or conscience or gratitude or wonder or grief or humor. If we notice, if we deeply behold and reflect on what we witness, and if we bring to bear “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” we will collide with convention, we will unwrap the gifts of truth—hard truth and luminous truth, we will take to heart and mind what our sense of reason and soul reveal, and we will continue to search and to question.

Darwin worked with no knowledge of tectonic plate shifts, with no knowledge of genetics or DNA, with no firm proof that a coral reef is, as Adam Gopnik describes it, “just a funeral wreath around the tip of a defunct mountain.” Darwin’s work was girded by intentional observation and thoughtful reflection over time. “That the details have changed,” notes journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg, “does not invalidate his accomplishment. If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be scriptural. They were meant to be tested.”

Darwin was a man of insatiable curiosity and relentless observation. He was also a man of conscience, affection, humor, and peace. A contemporary of Abraham Lincoln and born on the same day, he was attuned to the anguish experienced by Lincoln over the threat to the Union and the moral quagmire of slavery whose abolition would seem to come only at the cost of civil war. In 1862, the second year of the carnage, Darwin’s friend, Asa Gray, had sent him a newspaper article on the war. Darwin responded to Gray:

“…we read [it] aloud in Family Conclave. Our verdict was, that the N. was fully justified in going to war with the S.; but that as soon as it was plain that there was no majority in the S. for ReUnion, you ought, after your victories in Kentucky & Tennessee, to have made peace & agreed to a divorce.” (Gopnik, 119)

What, I wonder, would Darwin have said on this day that we belatedly celebrate his life and legacy and mark also the sixth year of this nation’s war in Iraq? Surely resistance to the oppression of slavery and preservation of the Union outweigh any rationale yet in play for the current conflict that enters its seventh year. Darwin’s response resonates for our own day. Might we not paraphrase his words and heed his counsel that we ought, after whatever victories are claimed or disclaimed, to make peace and agree to a divorce?

Life is complex. Life is precious. How it began and how we began is not entirely a mystery, though still subject to fierce debate and inviting deeper knowledge. Reverence, that core religious stance, comes alive not through static belief, but through observation and wonder. Hear the final words of The Origin of Species:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Life is precious, wonderful, and amazing. How can we hold back from immersing ourselves in the whole glorious interdependent web of it? How can we resist the invitation of a lifetime: “Notice! Notice!”
Amen.


Sources:

“The Clergy Letter Project,” Michael Zimmerman, http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Backgd_info.htm.

“The Clergy Letter – from Unitarian Universalist Clergy – An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science,” http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/Unitarian_Universalists/UnivUnitarianClergyLtr.htm.

Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Introduction by Brian Regal, originally published in 1887, The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, New York, 2005.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, with an Introduction and Notes by George Levine, originally published in 1859, Barnes & Noble, Inc., New York, 2004.

Charles Darwin, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#CITEREFDesmondMoore1991.

Anthony David, illustration by Alicia Buelow, “Our Inner Ape How deeply rooted is our Unitarian Universalist belief in peace and justice for all?” UU World, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Spring 2009, 30-32.

Cornelia Dean, “Seeing the Risks of Humanity’s Hand in Species Evolution,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D4.

Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009.

Olivia Judson, “The Origin of Darwin,” The New York Times Op-Ed, Thursday, February 12, 2009.

Carol Kaesukyoon, “Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species’ Origins,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D5.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Editorial Observer, “Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His Unconventional Idea,” The New York Times, Thursday, February 12, 2009.

Jennifer A. Lane, “A Brief History of Reef Science,” Natural History, February 2009, 22.

Richard Milner, “Seeing Corals with the Eye of Reason: A rediscovered painting celebrates Charles Darwin’s view of life,” Natural History, February 2009, 18-23.

William R. Murry, illustrated by Alicia Buelow, “Natural Faith: How Darwinian evolution has transformed liberal religion,” UU World, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Spring 2009, 26-29.

Tatsha Robertson, “Darwin descendant defends evolution theory,” The Boston Globe, November 19, 2005.

Carl Safina, “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D3.

John Tierney, “Darwin the Comedian. Now That’s Entertainment!” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D2.

“The Voyage of the Beagle,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_the_Beagle.

Nicholas Wade, “A Mind Still Prescient After All These Years,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D1, 4.

Carl Zimmer, “Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life,” The New York Times Science Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, D1, 3.

Dream On

“Dream On”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 8, 2009

It’s hard to find a more dysfunctional family than that of the twin brothers, Jacob and Esau, and their parents, Rebekah and Isaac. As recounted in the Old Testament Book of Genesis, Rebekah learned early in her pregnancy that the twins she was carrying would contend with one another as “two nations” and “two peoples [that] shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Esau was the first to be born; then came Jacob. While twins, their temperaments were different, very different; their physiques were different. It was difficult to imagine them as brothers, let alone twins. Their father Jacob could not hide his greater affection for Esau, the doer, the outdoorsman, and the son with the direct approach. Their mother Rebekah could not hide her greater affinity for Jacob, the contemplative, the homebody, and the son of willful scheming.

How does the dysfunction play out? Recall the story of Esau as a young man coming in from the field famished, catching the aroma of a stew prepared by his brother, Jacob. “Pottage” it’s called. So hungry is Esau and so attuned to his brother’s hunger pangs as leverage for advantage is Jacob that Esau is seduced by Jacob into selling his birthright as first-born in exchange for “bread and pottage of lentils.”

Years passed and the family prospered through good times and hard times, even as the deception and favoritism continued. Isaac grew old and, realizing that his time was limited, called to him his favorite son, Esau. He asked him to go hunting and bring back the wild game that he so loved that he might eat and then bless his eldest before he bid farewell to all. Rebekah, eavesdropping on their conversation, confided to Jacob what was afoot and ordered her favorite son to go and bring her two goats so that she might prepare them for Jacob to take to his father with the intent of securing his blessing first. Knowing that her husband in his blindness might touch Jacob’s arm and recognize him as the younger twin, Rebekah counseled Jacob to cover his arms with goatskins to deceive her husband’s touch. Jacob complied, and just as years earlier he had leveraged his brother’s hunger to his own advantage, so now he leveraged his father’s blindness to his own advantage. He successfully secured his father’s blessing.

Isaac and Esau quickly discovered the deceit, but the blessing could not be revoked. Such were the ways of family in this culture of a few millennia past. Twice tricked, Esau was livid and sought to avenge the injustice by plotting to murder his brother. Once again, Rebekah came to the fore and sent her darling Jacob off to the safety of her brother Laban’s household in Haran. It is at this point that our morning reading begins:

“Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place, and stayed there that night, because the sun had set.” (Genesis 28:10-11a)

Jacob falls asleep and dreams of “a ladder set upon the earth,” with angels going up and down the ladder and the Lord God standing above all and proclaiming divine authority and divine promise, that God would multiply Jacob’s descendants and bring him back to this land. Jacob awoke and affirmed the ground as holy ground, calling the place Bethel, which in Hebrew means “house of God.” At this point, Jacob vowed that if God would be with him and sustain him, he would give a tenth of all his belongings back to God. In other words, Jacob promised to tithe! It seems to me a small price to pay for God’s promise of sustainability, especially given Jacob’s bad behavior in the eyes of God and family.

Let’s take a closer look at this dream, one of many biblically recounted dreams that shifted the tectonic plates of ancient history. A man in flight from an avenging brother, Jacob beheld in the vulnerability of sleep angels of God going to and fro on a ladder that joined heaven and earth, with God at the top proclaiming divine authority. Jacob awoke shaken by a transformed consciousness of where he stood—in a holy place. He was humbled. Yes, it was about time; but he was through a dream humbled. And from such a stance, he entered into a covenant with God.

According to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, Jacob’s dream is an example of “the Holy Other address[ing] people in the vulnerability of the night.” Writes Brueggemann:

“The dream requires a total redescription of Jacob’s life defined by God’s promise. …Jacob pledges to be allied with [this promise], a pledge that entails accepting himself as a carrier of the promise. Quite concretely, Jacob promises to tithe. When he awakes, the world is different because of this holy voice in the night.”

In the dream, unlike in Jacob’s daytime behavior, there is no guile. Ultimate gratification sealed in the covenant between God and Jacob trumped the immediate gratification through which Jacob had lived his life thus far. God promises sustainability; Jacob promises generosity through the specifics of tithing. A covenant is made, not a deal, but a covenant.

Dreams lace the biblical narrative. We read in the Gospel According to Matthew the account of the Magi, summoned by Herod the king who had heard the story of what they had seen, a star rising above the birthplace of a new king. Learning that Bethlehem was the place, Herod sent them to find the child and come back with a report. Off they went to Bethlehem, found the child, and left their gifts at his feet. In a dream came the warning not to return to Herod, but to travel home by a different route. Joseph, the father of the newborn babe, was similarly warned in a dream to take Mary and their child and flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.

Dreams are dreamt, plans shift, and history turns a corner. The devious Jacob becomes accountable to the holy in a new covenant. A king is prevented from venting murderous envy on the babe who would transform our understanding of how we might live. Dreams introduce radically different options at a time of natural vulnerability. Our consciousness takes a rest, and something else steps in.

“Dreams,” writes Brueggemann, “are recognized as disclosures of otherness, an otherness that may indeed open us to authentic reality and to a truth that lies beyond reason.”

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and scholar of matters mythical, psychological, and religious, observed that:

“…in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.”
(Civilization in Transition, Collected Works 10, pars. 304 f.
in a footnote to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 394)

A richer dimension arises in our dreams that gives us the chance—depending upon our interpretation, and this is pivotal—to turn enter new venues of consciousness and behavior, to become more whole than we had ever imagined possible! Enlightenment does not stop with reason. Wrote Jung:

“The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.”
(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 302)

Dreams and their interpretation are the very stuff of transformation. The biblical dreams that I’ve recounted speak to the realities of our own day.

Not unlike Jacob and his mother, Rebekah, not unlike the power-hungry Herod, we have escalated our assumptions into a state that is unsustainable. Once again, theologian Walter Brueggeman lends his interpretive gifts to the matter. The triumvirate of autonomy, anxiety, and greed describes a dysfunctional human family. Surely in our own nation and yes, as Unitarian Universalists, we have been giddy with individualism. Even the iconic Ralph Waldo Emerson lifted up “self reliance” to the status of an idol. The quest for autonomy, or hyper-individualism, perpetuates a myth that any of us might be non-dependent and unaccountable; we become anything but our brother’s or sister’s keeper, and we will surely not be kept! Who needs an ultimate Other? Who needs the notion of God—not an old man in the sky, but the transcendent power of love and life? I think of that game from kindergarten, The Farmer in the Dell. It concluded with one lone person in the middle of the circle, and we all sang out: “The cheese stands alone.” Such is surely the case with “big cheeses.”

The inevitable sequel to the myth of autonomy is anxiety. Runaway independence is neither achievable nor sustainable.

“The outcome of such autonomy without allies or support,” claims Brueggemann, “is an endless process of anxiety, for one never has enough or has done enough to be safe and satisfied. As a result the autonomous person, championed in current economic theory, is caught in an endless rat race of achievement that produces bottomless anxiety—about the market, about performance, about self-worth.”

Sound familiar? Anxious autonomy spills into desperate acquisitiveness—that is, greed. Anxious autonomy whispers in our ears, “You don’t have enough; you must do better; you must get farther ahead.” The mania overtakes not just those who stand at the top of a very different ladder, but those who stand in the middle and those who stand at the bottom—not quite like the angels who fluidly connected heaven and earth. Brueggemann speculates “that this triad of autonomy/anxiety/greedy acquisitiveness is the story of our recent economic collapse.”

How do we find our way out of this mess? How do we transcend our desperation to recover with a wholly other way of being?

Return to Jacob on the run. Return to the wise men, tempted to be not so wise. Return to a young father whose newborn babe is threatened by an autonomous/anxious/power-greedy head of state. Directions arrived in dreams. Wholly other options for being arrived through layers that lay deeper than reason, deeper than habits so ingrained that consciousness freezes.

In Brueggeman’s wisdom, the alternative to the autonomy/anxiety/greed triad is the biblically based covenantal existence melded with affirmation of God’s—or divine—abundance melded with generosity. Autonomy is traded in for the covenant of community. Jacob is the prime example of this, freed into the realm of covenant through his dream in flight to Haran. Anxiety is traded in for affirmation of the abundance of God. Once again, Jacob’s flight is taken in anxiety over his brother’s threatened revenge. As a consequence of his dream, he enters into a covenant with God in which God promises him abundance through sustainability and Jacob promises God generosity through tithing. Greed and acquisitiveness are traded in for generosity—that is, Jacob’s prior behavior contrasted with his newfound generosity. So too the dreams of the Magi and of Joseph hold the promise of relationships that are covenantal, directions that are life saving and life sustaining, and lives that are generous to the core.

“As far as we can discern,” wrote Jung, “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” It is time for illumination.

We are tempted—all of us—to succumb to a desperate hope that we’ll return to a Dow Industrial Average well above 10,000, fluid lending practices, and a job market with employment that is familiar if not sustainable. If we affirm a community of covenant grounded in love of neighbor, if we give thanks for an earth for which we still have a chance to be stewards, and if we respond with a level of generosity that embodies our gratitude—including generosity to this very community grounded in a covenant of love, we will know a future beyond our wildest dreams. We will know a future in which the angels of our most promising nature walk freely between what we imagine as heaven and what we inhabit as earth. It is possible, it really is. Amen



Sources:

Walter Brueggemann, “The Power of Dreams in the Bible,” The Christian Century, June 28, 2005, pp. 28-31, http://www.religon-online.org/showarticle.asp?title3218

Walter Brueggemann, “From Anxiety and Greed to Milk and Honey: What the Bible has to say about ‘bailout,’ and other comments on the crisis we now face,” Sojourners: Faith, Politics, and Culture, February 2009, 20-24.

The First Book of Moses Commonly Called Genesis and The Gospel According to Matthew in The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Collected Works 10, pars 304 f, in a footnote to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1965, p. 394

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1965.

Priceless

“Priceless”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 1, 2009

Today is Stewardship Sunday…sort of. This morning is our opportunity to think about stewardship, generosity, and all that relates to both. This week is our extended time to think some more about stewardship and generosity, to sift it out, to dream about it, to imagine, to reflect, to connect, and to prepare for next Sunday, when those among us who have agreed to lead our annual stewardship venture will help us morph our thinking into actions of commitment and commitments of generosity. So let’s call this morning Stewardship Advent Sunday.

What are we about with an advent? An approach, a preparation, a pregnancy of sorts, with the guarantee of an outcome if not a guaranteed outcome. For what are we preparing? Not quite a baby, but a hope that this congregation that was born 288 years ago will continue to breathe and will thrive.

During those 288 years, we have known good times and not so good times. Imagine all the members and friends of this church across these 29 decades. Imagine that all of us are assembled here this morning. Consider what we have witnessed in our cumulative lifetimes.

We the assembled historic congregation have borne witness to wars that tore body and soul, from the wars of European newcomers with the indigenous nations of this continent through the world wars of the 20th century into the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To each of these episodes of carnage, members of this congregation have borne witness as religious community. Members of this congregation have participated on battlefields and in the halls of power. Members of this congregation have figured in the founding and evolution of world organizations such as the United Nations, designed to convene in peaceful and respectful assembly an almost unimaginable diversity of cultures and viewpoints. Members of this congregation have convened in this Meeting House with what has sometimes felt like an almost unimaginable diversity of viewpoints, however culturally monolithic we might seem, to stretch our individual personhoods into a larger soul, the soul of religious community.

Yes, we have borne witness to wars that tore body and soul, and we have borne witness and continue to bear witness to the hope that peaceful assembly on matters intimate and global describes the foundational nature of this faith community. To paraphrase that 16th century Unitarian martyr, Francis David, as we sought to love alike, we didn’t always think alike. The fabric of our community has been shredded and parsed many times over. The fabric of our faithfulness has been stretched. The largesse of who we seek to be stops short of nothing less than beloved community.

We the members and friends of this historic congregation have borne witness to an ongoing roller coaster of socioeconomic health. While it wasn’t until the 19th century that economic statistics were even documented, there have been other markers, from weather to wars, that described economic cycles before that time. In 1797, seventy-six years after this church was founded and over 200 years ago, economics were topsy-turvy in response to deflation in the Bank of England propelled by England’s war with France in what was known as the French Revolutionary Wars. It was a crisis that lasted three years. This, by the way, was a time in the history of First Parish when there was no stewardship campaign. No need! This congregation was supported by taxes! Such would be the case until 1824, when we were no longer the “town church,” a delayed reaction to the 1820 separation of church and state in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Not a great time for a stewardship drive, since the previous five years were marked by a major financial crisis in this nation, with “ widespread foreclosures, bank failures, unemployment, and a slump in agriculture and manufacturing.” How did we do it? Somehow, we did. Those of you in our imagined historic congregation who hold the stories of this time are more than welcome to share your strategies for our own day.

Jump ahead to 1857. The iconic Rev. Joseph Osgood was your minister then. Just two years earlier, the women of First Parish had purchased an organ for the Meeting House. I trust that they paid cash. In 1857, over 5,000 banks failed and unemployment soared in reaction to the failure of an Ohio based bank that burst a bubble of European speculation in U.S. railroads. Sound familiar? Not the railroads, but the bursting of a bubble? Unemployment was rampant. It continued for three years, but in 1857, no one knew how long it would last.

Time for the 20th century, although the roller coaster of famine and plenty moved in its perilous course across the intervening years. It was October 1929 when another bubble burst. The fallout known as “The Great Depression” would span more than a decade. Some of you recall that time. It was not pretty. Soup lines and hungry children were commonplace in the national landscape. My own mother was 20 years old then, a young nurse in a small Midwestern town. Yes, she’s 100 years old now, and she still clings to habits of frugality. She also shares readily the stories of neighbor helping neighbor during the leanest of times because “What else could we do?” In 1921, just eight years before the fallout, First Parish had celebrated its bicentennial, still flush with the illusion of a booming economy, still hopeful that World War I, known then as the Great War, had been “the war to end all wars.”

As the nation recovered, albeit largely on the dubious economic merits of the Second World War, Roscoe Trueblood came to this pulpit. For 24 years, Rev. Trueblood joined with you as you continued to find your place in this community and this faith. During these two score and four years, some of you remember that you wound your way through three economic recessions, spanning a decade between the early 1950s to the early 1960s.

And here we are today. Take a deep breath. Times are tough. Times have been tough in the past. You, the historic congregation bear witness with your scars of loss and grief and yes, with your proverbial merit badges of resilience and vision and commitment. Stewards all, you have walked the walk; you have kept the faith.

The winter from which we are emerging has been marked by war and socioeconomic crisis. It has also been marked by a spate of illness and injury and loss. You, the historic congregation, have known such seasons intimately. Just three years before this parish observed its bicentennial, 21 million perished from the 1918 influenza epidemic linked to war that also ended that year. If you visit Central Cemetery, I don’t doubt that you will find an undue number of headstones marking lives that stopped short that year, lives fragile in their infancy and their age. How many funerals did our Meeting House host during this period of rampant illness and loss?

Surely one of the most poignant records of life’s fragility in our historic midst are the Cohasset Mariner Quilts, one crafted by the women of Second Parish, known to us today as the Second Congregational Church, the other, by the women of First Parish, known to us today as First Parish Unitarian Universalist. Thanks to current member, Penny Myles, we have a historical narrative of these two quilts, both crafted in the 1840s, just a few decades after the centennial of this congregation and about 15 years after the splintering of First Parish into First and Second Parish. (Sometimes, we haven’t been so good about not having to think alike to love alike!)

On the First Parish quilt, known as the Album quilt, there is a bittersweet reminder of how women of that time used this art as a testament that they had lived. Sisters commonly sewed squares that adjoined each other. In the case of the Hall sisters, it was as if they had stitched their memorials in the pattern of a family plot. Susannah Hall’s square held the inscription: “Hope on, hope over.” It was dated August 26, 1846. A few years later, at the age of 24, Susannah was gone. The wistful thread coursing through each square was a longing to be remembered. Life was fragile and precious.

Just yesterday, we celebrated the life and memorialized the passing of a dear and lovely young woman whose spirit of resilience embodies what it means to persevere with grace. We have been reminded again and again this year, this winter, and through the seasons of our historic faith community that life is fragile and precious.

We are reminded through reflection on times and circumstances past that this is a resilient congregation, upheld by the tensile strands of love. This has been a cruel winter, but it is not the only cruel winter we have weathered. You are a well-weathered congregation, seasoned by centuries of communal faithfulness. You are stitched together not by hard and fast creeds, but by a covenant of love that endures.

Do we always love well? Of course not. Do we have occasion to practice the hard stuff of forgiveness? Absolutely! Does redemption have a place in our faith? I surely hope so. Such is the ballast of religious community grounded in a relationship of covenant.

Consider where you have been. Consider the season upon us. Consider the approaching spring. Be reminded that just a few years ago, you adopted a statement of mission. Let it be a mirror for our spirits this morning:

We welcome all to our inclusive spiritual community. We affirm our Unitarian Universalist Principles and put them into action by worshiping together, caring for one another, and working for a safe, just, and sustainable world.

Ours is a mission of resilience, inclusiveness, affirmation, faithfulness, hope, perseverance, caregiving, and commitment.

Echoing those words that we spoke responsively:

“Alone in the world, I was beset by sorrow and hurt in my life—so much loss and emptiness, so little hope and understanding.
….Then I came into community, a religious community of hope and love. Here I found support and compassion, wisdom and grace, and the power of shared suffering. And together we made life sweeter.”

You, the assembled congregation of 288 years have made life sweeter. You, the assembled congregation of almost three centuries, have persevered.

Twenty-eight laughs, an underestimate; 9 hugs, think thousands more; 52 smiles, add an infinite number of zeros. A free day, a morning perhaps, to take them all in: priceless! Okay, this quip from the MasterCard commercial doesn’t distill it. How could it possibly do so? Close to three centuries of laughter and tears, births and marriages and illnesses and loss, economic rollercoaster rides, wars and epidemics, congregational splits and familial trials, and yes, the winter at hand. Yet the laughs and hugs and smiles and hope embodied in our very mission statement testify to the religious community that you have chosen, the religious community that has made life sweeter. This morning is a time to ponder this. This morning is priceless.

BUT that commercial, that MasterCard commercial, gives a clue to something else. The structure that cradles these priceless dimensions of our faith community carries a cost. Even a MasterCard credit card comes due. Our religious community is priceless, but it is not costless. It costs us time and energy and yes, money, that construct from which some of you recoil. But do any of us enjoy the comforts of homes rented or mortgaged without paying the bill? Do any of us enjoy the benefits of education for our children without paying the bill? Do any of us head to Shaw’s or Stop n’ Shop or in the most basic ways sustain ourselves without expectation that there is a cost?

Our religious community may be priceless, but the sustained covenantal relationship enhanced by the exquisite beauty of this Meeting House, the meeting rooms of our Parish House, the professionalism of staff called and hired, the richness of curricula that lend wisdom to our young and not so young, the music that peals from this sacred space Sunday after Sunday all carry a cost. Cherish what is priceless, and ponder if you will how we will bear the cost together, as we consider the commitment and opportunity of stewardship.

Yes, it’s a tough time, but we have weathered tough times before. We can do it now. It is my hope that for those who know especially tough times, we will do what we can, and for those whose homes and pantries and even a few vacations are secure, we will do more than we think we might. Religious community is sustained by gifts given and received, not in equal portion, but equitably.

If in years hence, you are imaginatively reassembled as a historic congregation of 388 years, I am counting on each of us to know that on our watch, we cherished the priceless and bore the cost. Let’s take a week and think about what this religious community means to us. What will we do to sustain it? What will you do to sustain it? I know you’ll respond generously. I’m counting on you. I will do my part.

I love you and am so grateful for each and every one of you.

Amen.




Sources:

Jan Carlsson-Bull, “Sacred Quilts,” A Sermon given at First Parish Unitarian Universalist, Cohasset, MA, February 5, 2006.

Selwyn D. Collins, Ph.D., “Influenza in the United States, 1887-1956,” Extract from Review and Study of Illness and Medical Care with Special Reference to Long-time Trends, Public Health Monograph No. 48, 1957 (Public Health Service Publication No. 544), http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/influenza_collins.htm.

“Congregational History,” First Parish in Cohasset, http://www.firstparishcohasset.org/about/history.htm.

Michael E. Hanlon, The Great War in Numbers, excerpt with permission, El Sobrante, CA, THC Publishing, 1992, http://www.worldwar1.com/sfnum.htm
“List of recessions in the United States,” from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States.

Penny Redfield [Myles], “The Cohasset Mariner Compass Quilts,” Paper prepared for Liberal Studies 401, Simmons College, December 9, 1991.

Douglas Taylor, “The Blessings of Community,” from For All That Is Our Life: A Meditation Anthology, Helen and Eugene Pickett, Editors, Skinner House Books, 2005.

Message from Jan

“Message from Jan”
First Parish
Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
February 15, 2009

Greetings and love to each and all on this mid-February Sunday morning as you gather once again to worship.

What does it mean to worship? Of course we’ll never reach consensus on an answer. We’re Unitarian Universalists after all. I do believe our capacity to worship together without consensus on what it means is a clue to how exactly we are bound in this strange and wonderful community of faith that we share—that is, love as a covenantal relationship. Not love as something distilled in a stale and dubious definition. Not love as an unattainable standard that is instant pie in the sky. Not even love in the form of chocolate that is savored, digested, and quickly forgotten—though the savor part is probably a point on which we actually could reach consensus. Rather, love as a dynamic fluid relationship of joys and concerns, silence and song, activity and respite, questioning and wondering, striving and stumbling—all laced with a behavior of deep caring.

For me, love is how we care. One of the most important questions to which I’m called to respond day after day is how I love, how I care, and what I love, what I care about.

Lest we lean too quickly into the ethereal stuff of love, what I sometimes call glazed donut theology—glazed on the outside, preservatives on the inside, and a hole in the middle—consider our morning reading, Teilhard de Chardin’s “A Hymn to Matter.”

“Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock,” moving into:

“Blessed be you, universal matter, unmeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations..”

From the immediacy of soil and rock, we travel into the far-reaching stuff of “universal matter” and “unmeasurable time.” We travel right out into the stars. This is affirmation that is grounded and transcendental, immediate and ultimate, here and now, and time without borders.

What do we love and how do we love? Loving the soil and the rock and the stuff that we recognize as earth-stuff is just as “spiritual” as loving the outer realms of space and time, the far stretches of imagination. It reminds me of the phrase chosen by a longtime Christian Ethics professor at my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Beverly Wildung Harrison referred to “embodied spirituality.” When I think of Bev, this notion works on a personal level. While Bev became one of our nation’s foremost feminist theologians, my first encounter with her when I arrived at Union was as the senior counselor on my dorm floor in McGiffert Hall, standing in the kitchen and teaching me how to make a proper cheese fondue! I love Bev for what she taught me about feminist theology AND for what she taught me the fine tunings for a sumptuous fondue. I know now what an artery clogger it is, but I can still savor the smell and the taste and permit myself every year or so to prepare a batch, no recipe needed.

We love and we remember with an embodied spirituality. Sometimes our sense of taste figures in, sometimes our sense of smell, sometimes our sense of touch. Commonly our object of love is within our field of vision or our field of hearing. All are constructs of the material world. As for love itself, it’s both grounded and transcendent. I do believe it outlasts our material selves as we know ourselves; but while we’re here in the form we assume as living breathing humans, our material selves matter mightily.

We’re brought hard into this truth this very winter as so many of us find ourselves challenged by injury and illness. You bet your life, we matter as matter! How well we function physically is intimately related to how well we function in ways that we don’t commonly consider physical. How we could ever buy into a tension between the physical and the spiritual is beyond me. Teilhard de Chardin observed and affirmed their intimacy. Charles Darwin observed and affirmed their intimacy. My friend Beverley Wildung Harrison recognized and affirmed their intimacy. We are body bound, body constrained, body defined; and it’s a matter of opinion as to whether we’re body liberated when we die.

The expressions of love and caring that you have shown me in these past weeks have been wondrously material. I smile with appreciation at every card, every e-mail, every visit. And my husband, Dan and I, ingest with appreciation every magnificent meal that you have delivered. Who even fantasizes about cheese fondue when you deliver the likes of aromatic stewed apples, citrus crusted fish, Swedish meatballs (prepared with ground turkey, thank you), acorn squash laden with apples and cranberries, chocolate meringues, and a tart that goes straight to my heart through my tummy. A Hymn to Matter? Absolutely! Food for body and soul? Explain the difference; I can’t.

I know this morning you’re hearing the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach through the sounds of organ, oboe, and voice. What can be more sublime than the music of Bach? Thank God or whomever or whatever magnificent twist in the process of natural selection that permitted us, who are human, to make music and enjoy it.

As this morning’s offering is given and received, ingest the sublimity that is this segment of Bach’s Magnificat, and be reminded of the truth held in the words of our closing hymn:

“…we are in the making still—as friends who share one enterprise and strive to blend with nature’s will.”

In this extraordinary here and now in which you sit side by side singing, praying, listening, leaning into whatever it is that you need this morning and whatever it is that happens this morning, we are like grace notes in a composition that goes on and on and on. As such, may we share the measures of our lives note by note, act by act, life by life, honoring the dynamic covenant of love that girds our glorious lack of consensus on what exactly it all means. It is the variation that enriches the community, the variation that makes harmony possible.

Consider what you love. Consider how you love. Consider that lyric of our final hymn reminding us that “what we love we yet shall be.” Trust it. Trust the love. Trust the covenant of love. There are no hard truths in this hard winter, but the songs that we sing and the notes that we heed are buoyant with the sacred here and now and the vibrant possibility of what can yet be.

“This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;
out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.”

ring the words of Robert Weston.

The intricate twining of body and spirit, intimate and ultimate, here and now and time without end proclaim that the wonder of Creation of which we are a part is barely underway.

In this winter of hard realities, breathe, taste, touch, smell, listen, watch. Sing a hymn to matter. Sing a hymn to the love that matters most of all.

I love you each and all—
Jan


Sources:

Teilhard de Chardin, “Hymn to Matter,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 549.

John and Mary Evelyn Grim, “Teilhard de Chardin: A Short Biography,” http://www.teilharddechardin.org/biography.html.

William DeWitt Hyde, adapted by Beth Ide, “Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 289.

Robert T. Weston, “Out of the Stars,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 530.

Message from Jan

“Message from Jan”
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
February 8, 2009

Greetings on this Sunday morning of being together in worshipful community.

It’s gratifying to imagine you clustered in the Meeting House on this day that promises a balmy 40-something. You could be out walking on the beach; you could be out breathing the scent of a promised spring in air that has been sub-freezing for so long; you could be somewhere other than here. Of course some of you probably are walking on the beach right now; some of you probably are outside inhaling the promise of spring at this very hour. You are where you are, but there is something about gathered community in worship that is sacred. You’re affirming your need to consider the intimacy of religious community and the ultimacy of those matters about which we sing and pray and speak and ponder. And there is much to sing about, pray about, speak about, and simply ponder, as we move through a winter that is trying body and soul.

What if we turned this winter upside down? Some of you might think: “Aha, the Southern Hemisphere sounds pretty good about now!” But I believe you know what I’m talking about—the hurdles of illness and injury, the heartbreak of loss, and the harrowing dynamic of our nation’s economy that has become the high uncertainty of our global well-being.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes was right by half: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The other half? Everything is new under the sun. It’s a new morning, a new hour, a new moment, a brand new breath. We bring into our “now” all that has happened, for good and ill; and we bring into our “now” all the possibility, all the vision, all the hope for what and how we might be.

A case in point. One among us suffered a serious fall this past December. For a perilous while, her life hung in the balance. An ambulance was called. Emergency surgery was performed. Surely it was the longest night for all who know and love her. Then slowly but surely the waiting and the wondering stretched into the knowledge that recovery is happening. In the words of her husband, “Baby steps, baby steps.” Our dear friend is healing.

Baby steps are how we all learn to walk, however slowly. There is much yet uncertain; there are no certainties for any of us. Yet healing is happening; recovery is in process. And from that fall to the astonishing steps she has taken, you have been there for our beloved friend and her husband and their family. You have been there in caring community. You have visited; you have sent cards; you have prepared meals for her husband; you have brought flowers to brighten the days of our dear friend who is returning, step by step, word by word, smile by smile, hand clasp by hand clasp.

So many of you have known the harshness of this winter through injury and illness and for some of our families, through the loss that is death. In just a few weeks, we’ll come together to celebrate the life of a young woman whom we have known and loved, a young woman who has for so long suffered from a debilitating illness. We miss her, and our hearts go out most especially to her husband at this time. Once again, you have been there with your love and support—not just this winter, but for many many winters of body and soul for this family.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” and everything is new under the sun. Every illness, every injury, every round of surgery, even each passing has marked an exquisite opportunity for us as a community of faith to practice our faith, to reach out, to listen, to know most of the time that we can’t fix whatever is ailing whomever, but we can be there. Healing and loving presence are at play amid a winter when the winds have blown harshly and the snow has fallen bounteously and the ice has sent us spinning sometimes out of control. What good is a faith if it doesn’t take practice? What good is a covenant of love if we aren’t there to hold hope for each other, when, as the song goes, “Hope is hard to find.” We find it in each other.

Be assured, be absolutely assured, that you have reached out and been there in the most loving way for me and my family through my autumn diagnosis of early stage breast cancer, through two initial surgeries and then through this major surgery just over a week ago. You have sent notes and e-mails of care and concern. You have brought meals to warm heart and tummy. You have sent flowers with the promise of spring. You have picked up the slack that I’m leaving in my four weeks away from you so that I might return in the best possible health. And you have shared your delight at my news that all that blankety blank cancer is gone. You’ve even laughed with me as I talk about my “brand new breast,” beyond embarrassment at talking to a congregation about my bust line, old and new. From Dan and me, thank you for your love and care. Thank you!

Many of us continue to struggle and resist the constraints and ambiguities of illness and more. All of us live with the abiding knowledge that life does not come with a guarantee of any sort. We light our chalice Sunday after Sunday reminded that the flame is dynamic; our faith is alive; and revelation is ever unfolding.

So let’s consider the revelation that is ours for the choosing as we move through this time. The realities of malady and misfortune are real. The realities of jobs lost and pensions nose diving are real. The realities of uncertainty are certain. Instead of retreating into anxiety or despair or a paucity of imagination that never suits us well, consider that this is our winter of promise. This is our winter of possibility.

This is a winter in which we keep our promise of living a covenant of love. This is a winter in which we make good on our promise to be faithful as members and friends to support one another and the 286-year-old institution that is this church. This is a winter in which we consider what our nation is all about, with a new administration struggling to lead a turning of the tide in bringing America not back to what we’ve been but ahead to what we might be as a nation that might at long last make good on our promises for the common good. This is a winter in which we are gifted to consider what we need and what we don’t, what is need and what is greed, and to discern the difference with new found consciousness. This is a winter to take a fresh look from the inside out and the outside in, from the intimacy of our First Parish community to the outer bounds of global well-being. This is a winter in which the roots of crocus and daffodil are moving differently, because the soil has changed. Its harshness is its possibility.

Consider the mission of this congregation:
We welcome all to our inclusive spiritual community. We affirm our Unitarian Universalist principles and put them into action by worshipping together, caring for one another, and working for a safe, just, and sustainable world.

Consider our principles as Unitarian Universalists, from honoring the basic worth of every person to affirming the interconnectedness of all life.

Welcome, affirmation, thoughtful action, deep caring, hard work, and a reverence for each and all. We are welcoming new faces, new families. We are trying out new ideas. We are finding fresh ways to put our principles into practice. We are discerning caring community through presence and more. We are hard at work on matters of sustainability and possibility. We hold hope that our nation might move beyond mere economic recovery into a new-found commitment to the common good.

Let us give thanks for such an amazing winter!

I miss you. I can’t wait to be with you on the first Sunday of March. And I love you each and all,
Jan

The Hopes and Fears of All the Years

“The Hopes and Fears of All the Years”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 18, 2009

Just a month ago we would have been seasonally attuned to the strains of that 19th century Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Rev. Phillip Brooks, a Philadelphia minister, first authored the lyrics as a poem. He had recently visited Bethlehem and was inspired by the Christmas celebrations at the Church of the Nativity. Brooks later urged his church organist, Lewis Redner, to set his poem to music, and the lasting treasure of this carol came into being. It’s an enchanting carol and one that allows us to envision an enchanted village referenced by the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke in their accounts of the birth of the baby Jesus—in Brooks’ terms, “The everlasting Light.” The first verse concludes with the lyrical reference to what was long hoped for and at long last realized in Bethlehem: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”

The ancient Jews had hoped for a Messiah who would deliver them from yet another oppressive force in a long history of oppression. This time it was the Roman occupation. It was in this milieu that Jesus was born, grew into manhood, taught, and was ultimately subjected to the horrific capital punishment so commonly decreed by the Roman Empire, crucifixion. The powers of Rome feared such a charismatic figure, who would bring to the oppressed a message of liberation. That message came in terms unexpected.

The Jesus deemed the Messiah didn’t arrive as a militant hero who would lead his people into a resistance in the tradition of the ancient Maccabees. He came with a force far more subtle and disarming, a liberation of heart and soul that would transform the hearts and souls and actions of women and men for millennia to come. The power of nonviolence was embodied in the brand of liberation brought by the babe of Bethlehem. Indeed, the hopes and fears of all the years were met in this tiny village, but in ways unexpected. Nonviolent resistance to the power of Rome wrought havoc with the images of what had been hoped for. The call of Jesus of Nazareth was not to take up arms, but to open hearts and minds. It was a Gospel of nonviolence, a Gospel of strategic love.


In the spirit of Jesus, but through a distinctly different window of faith, the person of Mahatma Gandhi brought liberation to an occupied India. It was a liberation just as hoped for and just as unanticipated. Through a decades-long strategy of non-violent non-cooperation, 1900 years after Jesus, Gandhi inspired his fellow countrymen to outwit and undermine the stranglehold of the British Empire. His strategy? Nonviolent resistance. It was savvy, intentional, and effective. Five months before Gandhi’s life came to an end, India won its independence from Great Britain. In January of 1950 the Republic of India was proclaimed. It will be 140 years ago this coming October that “the hopes and fears” of so many years for the people of India were met in Pobandar, a city on the shores of the Arabian Sea in western India, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi.

Eleven years after Gandhi’s death, a rookie Baptist minister from the United States would visit Gandhi’s family in India. Martin Luther King, Jr. aspired to liberation in circumstances quite different from those faced by Gandhi or Jesus. Rather than an imperialist occupation, King strained at the shackles of Jim Crow racism in a nation whose early economy rested on the sin of slavery, the practice of buying and selling human beings as property. It is the fault line on which the economy of this nation was built—a tenuous foundation for any society. King’s ancestors were slaves. King and everyone who bore Negroid features carried the legacy of slavery in the brutal realities that marked Jim Crow America. It was a racism that was overt, and not just in the South. Many of the practices that the powers of this nation denied or ignored or both were as barbaric as those of the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day.

King’s meeting with Gandhi’s family was transformative for this 30-year-old Baptist minister from Atlanta. Through them he became intimately acquainted with the tactics of non-violent resistance used so effectively so recently however disparate the political context. He became intimately acquainted with the quality of leadership it had taken for Gandhi to convince his countrymen to adopt such tactics. To follow in the footsteps of Gandhi for the oppressed of India had been no easier than to follow in the footsteps of Jesus for the oppressed of Palestine.

Gandhi, along with the African American Bayard Rustin, served as core influences on this high energy young man with a mission. I find it not coincidental that we so seldom hear about Rustin’s influence, since Bayard Rustin was gay and on the far fringes of the political left. He was also a strong advocate and practitioner of non-violence, and King heeded his savvy counsel. Rustin, after all, bore the burdens of at least two counts of oppression.

King, armed with the legacy of a strong family, a deep faith, a doctorate from Boston University, and a passion for equal rights, became the lodestar of this recent chapter of the Civil Rights movement in these more or less United States. To follow in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to go to Selma, to march to Montgomery, to picket and boycott and resist nonviolently forces that had the imprimatur of “legal” was no easier than to follow in the footsteps of Gandhi for the oppressed of India or the footsteps of Jesus for the oppressed of Palestine.

As a white person, it is not for me to say what African Americans hoped for during the years of slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or for that matter, what my fellow Americans who are African American hope for now. I can only speak for myself as a woman who has known oppression as such that there is a seductive inclination to want someone else—some towering giant of a savior or Messiah—to do the job for me. Then I can follow along behind as the accolades are sung and the flowers strung. But such is not the way of discipleship, of non-violent resistance to oppression, of love.

Dr. King filled the shoes of leadership, but he was not a Messiah or a lone-star Savior. Charisma he embodied and used brilliantly, but he would not and did not “save” the oppressed. He led the oppressed. It took life-threatening sweat equity to walk the walk alongside him. The hopes and fears and yearnings of African Americans and every committed white ally were met in the Atlanta of King’s birthplace 80 years ago this month only in our glazed over memory; because King was a mesmerizing, remarkable, visionary, courageous leader, but neither he nor Gandhi nor Jesus Christ himself was a high riding derring-do superman of a Messiah.

King stood on the shoulders of Rustin and Gandhi, who stood on the shoulders of Jesus, who stood on shoulders that have faded into a certain degree of historical myopia, because, in the words of the late Unitarian Universalist minister, Clinton Lee Scott:

“…it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.”

Of Jesus of Nazareth, we have just an inkling of the life that he lived. The Gospels give no clues as to Jesus’ “shadow” sides. Of Gandhi, it may be said that he did not properly affirm the rights of women. Of King, it may be said that he strayed too easily into the affections of women other than his wife. All were humans with feet of clay. All were leaders who inspired and perspired and embodied hopes and fears that took root over years and years in people oppressed by fellow humans who were tied into the seemingly permanent knots of their own fears and who chose privilege and power over the common good.

It is no less so in our own day. While many in this congregation are hurting amid an economy that has been on a roller coaster ride for years—not months, years; while some in this congregation have known the oppression of other systems of government and yes, other approaches to faith so intensely that they can barely acknowledge the scars; while some in this congregation have known the oppressions of sexism and classism and ableism; while a few in this congregation have known the oppressions of racism and homophobia; and while almost all of us in this congregation have been complicit in some form of oppression—IF we are paying attention at all, we know that our nation is at a crossroads of moral choice.

Gathering as we did yesterday morning to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a program of fellowship and discernment, gathering as we are this morning in the framework of worship to honor the life and legacy of Dr. King and to anticipate a historical presidential inauguration, gathering as we are this morning with our children echoing the words of Dr. King, gathering as we are this morning with the increasingly familiar cadences of an eloquent President-Elect singing in our ears, we are at a crossroads of moral choice that is above all communal. What hopes and fears do we harbor? What hopes and fears do we own? What do we hope for? What do we fear? We stand uneasily on the shoulders of the prophets. We stand anxiously in this slice of history. And we hold hope. We hold hope.

How to dismount from the shoulders of the prophets? How to transform an uneasy stance into a steady walk? As people of faith, we’re called to meld our aspiring spirituality with that of the prophets—with Amos’ cry to “let justice roll down like water” (Amos 5:24); with Micah’s call “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly…;” with Jesus’ discomforting response to the trick question: “Who is my neighbor?”; with Gandhi’s perseverance against imperialist odds; with King’s unswerving proclamation that “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now;” and with Barack Obama’s declaration of our choice between “a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism” and the will to “come together” and take on the hard issues of our time in the service of a union that “may never be perfect” but “can always be perfected.”

What will it be? Come Tuesday, we will inaugurate Barack Obama as the 44th president of this nation, this union. Come Wednesday, we cannot expect President Obama to do the work for us. Without our will toward the common good, this union will falter. Without our will to transform an economy that serves the privileged few; without our will to transform what it means to be a functional member of the family of nations; without our will to pay our citizen’s fare share so that every woman, man, and child knows the rights of health care and decent housing and fine schools; without our will to justice that is as compassionate as it has been harsh; our 44th President cannot lead as I believe so many of us hope he will.

We are the vanguard. The hopes and fears of all our years will be met in a covenant of leadership whose promise can be realized only if we take up the mantle of everything we espouse—the worth and dignity of each of us and the connectedness of all—and “take one more step, say one more word, say one more prayer, and sing one more song” and then do it all again and again and again until our hopes for peace and compassionate justice are met and our fears of whatever power and privilege any of us might lose en route will dissolve in a great sigh of enlightened gratitude.

This is our now. It’s fierce, and it’s urgent. Amen.

Sources:

Amos, Micah, and The Gospel According to Luke in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Phillip Brooks (lyrics) and Lewis Redner (music), O Little Town of Bethlehem, described in Best-Loved Christmas Carols, Ronald M. Clancy, Edited by William E. Studwell, Christmas Classics, Ltd., North Cape May, NJ 2000, 68-69.

Indian independence movement, from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Independence_Movement

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#cite_note-55.

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A time to Break Silence,” Speech delivered at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967,
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.

Martin Luther King, Jr., from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr#Influences.

Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” Speech delivered in Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2008, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords/.

Joyce Poley, “One More Step,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 168.

Clinton Lee Scott, “Prophets,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 565.

God: A Multiple Choice Test

“God: A Multiple Choice Test”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 11, 2009

God is… God is not… Surely these are among the most loaded of lead-ins. They can start conversations, or they can stop them cold. It all depends. See, already we’re into the realm of relativity, true to the spirit of conventionally unconventional Unitarian Universalists. It all depends on a, b, c, d and so on. Yet this matter is far more than an intellectual premise with contingencies. I’m betting that your notion of God or non-God is more emotion-filled than intellectual.

What kind of a God did you grow up with? I’ll start with mine. The God of my childhood was something like Santa Claus, but not always as jolly. He—and it was definitely He—had a long white beard and probably flowing robes. A red and white suit with a snowy white pom-pom on the tail of a floppy red cap would have served him better, and such attire would have led me to believe he was cutting me some slack if I did something “bad” whatever that might be—from being snippy to a friend to saying a cuss word to not doing my homework to talking back to the real gods of my childhood, my Mom and Dad! At least neither Santa nor God would say to me, “Janice Marie, come here right now!” when the jig was up. Not that my parents weren’t also loving and tender. Both were, but I tested the limits enough to evoke their no-nonsense discipline, as if they were God’s very own representatives on the be-good-or-else front.

The God with whom I first became acquainted was the God of my Sunday school. Even a Presbyterian Sunday school unwittingly set forth lots of notions for a child to consider, from a God of love to a God vindictive and vengeful, from a God who forgives to a God who would send his only son into the world and let him be crucified. There was a lot that never quite gelled. No wonder I ended up in this living tradition of liberal faith and doubt.

We as Unitarian Universalists have strong Judeo-Christian roots which inform this elusive living tradition that we espouse. So let’s begin with the Bible, with a promise to get nothing more than our theological toes wet when it comes to the myriad manifestations of divinity set forth in what Christians call the Old and New Testaments and Jews call the Law and the Prophets.

God the Creator

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” reads the very first verse of the Book of Genesis. The writers of Genesis—and there were more than one—go on to deliver two Creation stories and a dramatic sequence of what was created when and who ruled over whom. It’s a high drama story of what some call “intelligent design.” Given our hurting world, even one who cleaves to “intelligent design” would do well to reconsider that adjective, “intelligent.” Nonetheless, many millions, even billions, of humans understand the world as we know it and the world as it was first formed as the creation of a transcendent being called God, an English translation for Adonai, Elohim, and Yahweh for starters.

One notion that defines God the Creator is the Latin phrase, deus ex machina, god from the machine literally. It was a device used by ancient dramatists when a plot became so entangled that the construct of a god was introduced to resolve the confounding strands. It seems to apply just as well to the improbable creation from nothing of the sky and the seas and the continents and women and men and all the non-human creatures that populated the earth in its earliest days. Rather like a plug-in device. Blame Creation on God. Praise God for Creation. Take your pick! For some the notion evokes wonder. For others, it stunts it. Yet I can’t imagine anyone who affirms the observations of Charles Darwin suggesting that the man lacked a sense of wonder!

God the Intervener
It’s confusing sometimes to pray to a Spirit of Life. So much easier to direct our hopes and wishes and gratitude even to an invisible albeit image-laden form, who listens and responds and alters her/his marionette strings in the affairs of history. Now remember, we’re talking in terms of this earth, and there’s a lot more out there in space that no one has begun to measure from the vantage point of our tiny planet spinning in it.

Does God intervene in human history? We read in the 20th chapter of the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah,

“And God spoke all these words, saying,
‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage,
You shall have no other gods before me.’”
(Exodus 20:1-3)

This would indicate a faith tradition that holds to the notion of God as intervener, liberator, and the one and only manifestation of divinity. The writer of this segment of Exodus continues:

“You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
(Exodus 20:4-6)

By now, some of you have surely recognized the narrative of what has come to be known as the Ten Commandments. The God of Exodus is intervener, liberator, and “commander in chief,” with severe consequences for anyone who doesn’t lend full allegiance to him and constant love to all who do.

God the Forsaker
Among the questions raised by mortals who have initially bowed to an almighty seemingly merciful God is the cry of the same mortals who have been visited by suffering that seems too much to bear: Where is God when we suffer? Volumes have been written by angst-filled theologians struggling with this age-old question. Prayers unending have been raised by common folk who could care less about the fine points of theology but whose torments of body and soul have evoked the same question. Where is God when we suffer?

In the words of the psalmist:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.

Yet thou art holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In thee our fathers trusted; they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
To thee they cried, and were saved;
in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed.

But I am a worm, and no man;
scorned by men, and despised by the people.
(Psalm 22:1-6)

In other words, where in the blankety-blank are you, God, and why me?

The scribes of both the Gospels According to Matthew and Mark echoed this cry of ultimate despair through the voice of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and suffering. In Matthew:

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice,

'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' that is, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
(Matthew 27:45-46)

And in Mark, the earliest written Gospel, we read exactly the same words.
(Mark 15:34)

For him whom millions understand to be the Son of God, indeed a manifestation of God himself, came the most mortal of cries to a God experienced as a forsaker. Yes, there were later words that suggested Jesus commended his spirit into the hands of a loving and ready God. Yes, there is the legend of resurrection. But this cry of utter wretchedness is a cry ultimately human.

God the Giver, God the Taker
How can one begin to describe the deity cast into the plot of perhaps the most haunting book of Old or New Testaments, the Book of Job? It is God who meted out Job’s early wealth and happiness—his family, his land, his power, his position. The story goes that one day Satan came to God with a challenge. God had held up to Satan the goodness and faithfulness of his servant Job, and Satan essentially said, “Of course Job is good and faithful. He has everything any man could possible need. But ‘put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee to thy face.’” God proceeded to do just that. Job lost all that he had except the last shred of his own life. He lost his family, his land, his power, his position, and his health. Then friends come who end up rebuking and accusing him. Job himself despairs of his plight, but he does not curse God.

The story of Job is far more complex than this. It is nuanced, multi-stranded, a story credible for our understanding of how some among us suffer so much without having done anything “to deserve it” as we glibly say. Toward the end of the Job narrative, God declares his power:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding,
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?”
(Job 38:4-5)

followed by a long string of evidence.

Job is broken, but he does not curse God. Rather he declares:

“…I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
(Job 42:6)

In the end, God “restored the fortunes of Job,” his faithful servant. It is written that “the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning...” (Job 42:10a, 12a)

Did this “justify” the actions God? In the tenor of Job, we who are mortal are in no position to even suggest that God needs to be justified. Like no other book in the Old or New Testament, the Job narrative embodies the God who gives and the same God who takes away. In the very first chapter lies the seeming kernel of an answer to the seemingly futile question of why God allows us to suffer. Job has just learned of the death of his children. He is bereft, AND he falls upon the ground and worships, saying:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return;

the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
(Job 1:21)

As the Book of Job concludes, the character of Satan is not even mentioned.

God who so loves the world

As a child, I learned from memory that lodestar of a verse from the Gospel According to John, the most enigmatic of the four gospels that made it into the biblical canon:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,

that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
(John 3:16)

It is a topic of centuries of controversy that led to centuries of murder and mayhem, this matter of God and the relationship of Jesus, who millions believe was indeed the incarnate Son of God. Among Unitarian Universalists there are Christian grounded believers who might debate how woven into the fabric of a Godhead Jesus was, but who deem the life and teachings of Jesus so highly that they are not willing to forsake the term, Christian. I understand myself to be Christian inclusively but not exclusively, given the seeming truth in so many other faiths.

What seems wholly credible, given our most limited knowledge of the life and teachings of Jesus, is the centrality of love and compassion in the Jesus narratives. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in that passage from the Gospel According to Matthew that describes Jesus going up onto a mountain and teaching his disciples about who is blessed:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

On into:

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
(Matthew 5:3-5, 9)

Underdogs, unpopular, non-mainstream describe those who were deemed blessed by this teacher of love and compassion. Of all the figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jesus was wholly about love and preached a God of love. It is a teaching held up more than any other in that outer branch of the Judeo-Christian tradition that is our Unitarian Universalist faith. It has always confounded me that for a faith that holds doubt in such high esteem, we are so opinionated and quickly contrary in our dealings with one another about what matters, when our grounding lies in a relationship of covenant based on love.

_______________

None of us has the last word on God or on how many there might really be and what forms deity assumes. All of us are challenged to consider the context, including the personal history, which we bring to our statements of belief, disbelief, affirmation, and worship of what we sometimes call “God.” As Karen Armstrong reminds us,

“…there is no one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God;’ instead, the word contains

a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually

exclusive. ….the reality that we call ‘God’ exceeds all human expression.’”

Hers is a perspective echoed in the lyrics of the hymn we sang earlier:

“Great, living God, never fully known, joyful darkness far beyond our seeing….”

If “God” exceeds our expression, how is it that we speak or write a name at all? The ancient Hebrews didn’t. Yahweh was an acronym for “I am who I am,” that ineffable elusive non-name given to Moses by the ineffable elusive voice in the third chapter of the Book of Exodus.

By now, you may have realized that this isn’t a multiple choice test at all, but a reflection on how we might consider the multi-faceted, perhaps infinitely-faceted notion of transcendence. If we who are mortals understand that we are not Creation’s last act, we strive for a language of transcendence, a language of reverence. This in no way denies scientific discovery. Rather it unleashes our capacity for awe and humility on all fronts of being. “Reverence,” suggests Paul Woodruff, “is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods.”

Unitarian is in many ways a misnomer. We hold in our religious imagination a panoply of gods, even as we hold up the notion of One God. Perhaps like our Muslim sisters and brothers, we can embrace an Allah, who is the God of Abraham, the God of Moses, the God of Jesus, the God of Muhammad, the God of all. Perhaps like all mortals who have ever wondered beyond ourselves, we can embrace a wisdom grounded in awe, embodied in compassion, and fluid with gratitude.

Amen.

Sources:

Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Ballantine Books, New York, 1993, xx-xxi.

The Book of Genesis, The Book of Exodus, The Psalms, The Book of Job, The Gospel According to Matthew, and The Gospel According to Mark in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.

Brian Wren, “Bring Many Names,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 23.