First Parish Sermon Archive

As some of you know, I have mixed feelings about change. I mean, I am a UU minister, and a lifelong UU at that, part of a people who merrily sing, “Don’t be afraid of some change.” And most of you went through a big change in your life, one I could not be happier about, in leaving the religion of your upbringing and becoming a UU yourself. Change is a very positive word among us. And of course, not just us - two presidential candidates just campaigned promising change. Boy, did they talk about change.

What I had in mind when I named this sermon, though, was not national but individual. How much does anyone change, how much can they change, how much should they change or at least try to - these are deep, compound, and puzzling questions, and I keep going back to them.

They have been on our Unitarian minds since before the religious liberals of the day had accepted the name. When in the second half of the eighteen century the congregational churches of eastern Massachusetts like this one began shifting away from the Calvinist beliefs they began with, there were a slew of issues, like the trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the use of reason in interpreting scripture, the nature of God, and the simplification or elimination of creeds. But it has been argued that the most significant shift was the abandonment of Calvinist doctrines of native depravity, predestination, and election in favor of a view of humans as being capable by nature of good as well as ill by their own decisions and efforts, a belief in free will and self-improvement, what would later be called “salvation by character,” which we don’t need to be born again to achieve.

The mid-nineteenth century word for this was “culture,” which Emerson and others extolled, using the word in the sense of cultivating the best aspects of ourselves, our best emotions, thoughts, and activities. Emerson wrote, “Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that people have a range of affinities, through which they can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in their scale, and succor them against themselves. Culture redresses their balance, puts them among their equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy…..” [adapted]

Along with that interest in cultivating the best parts of the self went a heightened concern for education and, for some, a reforming zeal to mitigate the social forces that work against people’s fruition.

Now as prominent as Unitarians were in promoting this progressive point of view, and as distinctively different as it was from the Calvinism of the day around here, other religious groups advanced or have adopted a faith with lots of free will. And let me say in defense of Calvinism, one can argue that if you have absolute predestination, where God has planned in advance everything you will do, you still have to decide to do it and do it, so effectively you do have free choice, even if God knows in advance what you’ll do.

The emphasis on free will, change, and betterment or healing is evident in the current popularity of the word transformational in preaching circles. It wasn’t long ago I asked a class of students at a theological school to name the characteristics of good preaching, and transformational topped the list.

And I would be delighted if any of you left this morning feeling transformed in a good way. But I also think preaching has a sustaining purpose, helping us hang in and hold steady being the person we are. Someone once wrote that the basic question that brings people to worship is, “Is it really true?” Meaning, I think, this notion that I should be loving and caring and basically good - remind me that that’s the right answer.

I treasure the knowledge that people have been transformed by their life at First Parish, and maybe you could say that we’ll all transformed at least a little just having our thoughts turned back to religious thoughts and community before we take on the world again, hoping to work some transformation there.

But I remember a piece that the mystery novelist Jane Langton wrote for the Lenten manual put out in 1990 by the First Parish in Lincoln. She wrote,

“Who are we becoming? Is it controversial to say that we’re becoming the same people we’ve always been? That we don’t change very much except very slowly over long periods of time? What if we are caught in our habits and metal processes that have been ours since birth?

“Is that so very bad?

“Well, of course it would be good if our flaws could be washed away by new attitudes, new understandings. But perhaps they can’t be. Perhaps the same stimulus will always produce the same response.

“I like people to stay the same. I enjoy knowing they can be depended on to be themselves, that Henry is always Henry, and Mary always Mary.

“Last fall when Oliver Powell interviewed five members of the congregation, Charlotte Phillips said, ‘I’ll be a gardener till the end,’ and Paul Brooks said, ‘I just go on doing what I’ve always done.”

And Langton concludes, “I think that’s fine.”

I confess that passage is somewhat self-serving, coming from the UU minister who has served his current congregation longer than any other. But partly that’s because we do change, new people arrive, we grieve together the death of people we love, an exciting new undertaking like the Interfaith Hospitality Network comes along, we redo the way we do Christmas. I’m not averse to change; I’m ambivalent.

I’m about to be on sabbatical. When I return in May, I expect to have new ideas, new outlooks. I don’t expect to come back a Mormon. Or Republican. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - I can not say often enough in these heady days for Democrats, we all need to remember and honor how different we are in all manner of ways. It’s just that, like Paul Brooks, in most ways I’m probably going to go on doing what I’ve always done, and being who I am, for better or worse.

But I’m not averse to change, just ambivalent, and I need to shift quickly to the positive side of the equation, because as sweet as Langton’s piece may be, she has not included the perpetrator of domestic violence, the sleezy businessperson, the charlatan, the liar, the crook, or the things about any one of us that we should not feel fine about continuing, flaws that deserve to be washed away if we can.

So I want to get back into UU mode, although from an odd perspective but one I think serves well in more places than its actual subject, which is medicine.

Back in November, one of you came through the line and handed me a wrapped gift. I was holding the gift as the rest of you came by to shake hands. I wasn’t thinking about it until someone looked at it pointedly, and I said, as straight-faced as I could, “Did you forget to bring your present?” By the time I had engaged in this banter with several more of you, it was agreed, first, that if I were to hold a present or two every week, people might start bringing other gifts - and in fact that a minister could start the ball rolling herself or himself by arriving with a gift to hold, or at least a brightly-wrapped box.

Anyway, the gift was the set of CDs of the book, The Anatomy of Hope by Jerome Groopman, a doctor, author, and contributor to the New Yorker. I listened to it. Groopman wants to establish a middle position between those who discount the role of emotions in medical treatment, and those who think that disease can be controlled by right thought or emotion. He wants to find a balance between giving the patient so much honest but frightening information it conquers hope and giving so little the hope is not balanced with reality.

He writes, “Many of us confuse hope with optimism, a prevailing attitude that ‘things turn out for the best.’ But hope differs from optimism. Hope does not arise from being told to ‘think positively,’ or from hearing an overly rosy forecast. Hope, unlike optimism, is rooted in unalloyed reality. Although there is no uniform definition of hope, I found one that seemed to capture what my patients had taught me. Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind’s eye - a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along that path. True hope has no room for delusion.

“Clear-eyed, hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances and the capacity to surmount them. For all my patients, hope, true hope, has proved as important as any medication I might prescribe or any procedure I might perform.” [xiv]

Let me offer just a little more:

“…True hope … is not initiated and sustained by completely erasing the emotions, like fear and anxiety, that are often its greatest obstacles. An equilibrium needs to be established…. False hope is an insubstantial foundation upon which to stand and weather the vicissitudes of difficult circumstances. It is only true hope that carries its companions, courage and resilience, through. False hope causes them to fall by the wayside as reality intervenes and overpowers illusion.

“Each disease is uncertain in its outcome, and within that uncertainty, we find real hope…. This is the great paradox of true hope, there is not only reason to fear but also reason to hope. And so we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein to hope.” [210-211]

I think the outlook Groopman suggests applies not just to medicine but broadly, to the country, our communities, this congregation, our families, and ourselves.

I heard a political analyst this week say that what irreparably damaged John McCain’s campaign, at a time he had the lead, was McCain’s saying that the economy was basically sound. He tried to say afterwards that he was honoring the working people of the country and our abilities and that may be true, but lifted out and repeated, it made the hope he was boostering sound less true. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter’s appearance of gloom over America’s malaise left the country hungry for someone who exuded hope.

I think it applies here in church, where I don’t think we can still maintain as cheery, highly hopeful a view of human nature as did religious liberals of the nineteenth century, in fact right up to the Great War and all that followed as the twentieth century unfolded its miseries and horror. But that is no reason not to grab every measure of hope we can muster.

Forgive me, I want to go off on a tangent: On NPR this week I heard an interview with a scientist who studies group dynamics. He had done studies with college students. They showed that what most influenced the success of a four-person group trying to address an assignment was not how good the best member was, but whether there was what he called “a bad apple,” an actor whose job it was to play one of three roles: the jerk, the slacker, or the depressive pessimist. Each could destroy a group’s dynamics, the depressive pessimist by infecting the group with a can’t-do spirit, bridling hope rather than giving it free rein.

As a short tangent to that tangent, the one group that wasn’t taken down by the actor was one in which there was a member whose father was a diplomat. And the tactic that worked was just this: he made sure everyone had a chance to talk and be heard. I mention that in light of my earlier remark about valuing our political diversity as much as any other.

Here I am near the end of my sermon and I have not gotten yet to the reading that inspired it, celebrating a familiar tale of wonderful change while noting, too, that fear and anxiety, some ouchiness, can be part of the process. These are the lyrics of the song “Chrysalis” by the folk singer and performer and author and UU minister to boot, Meg Barnhouse:

I’ve got to tell you something you need to know.
You’re going to be fine.
They said the walls are there for protection.
That used to be true.
It’s time to break through.
CHORUS: Butterfly, you can try your bright wings.
Let your colors fly.
A chrysalis really is a fine thing -
‘til it’s time to take the sky.

It feels like it’s all falling apart. What’s happening is unfurling.
Where do you migrate? How do you get there?
When it’s time to go, you’ll know.
CHORUS

Wishing you honey, wishing you sunlight,
a little rain - not too much pain.
And in the end, your body may break,
but your spirit’s due to surprise you.
CHORUS: Butterfly, you can try your bright wings.
Let your colors fly.
A chrysalis really is a fine thing -
‘til it’s time to take the skies.

I wish you the same whenever that time comes for you. Amen.