“SO IT ALL
ADDS UP TO SOMETHING”

The Sermon Given at
the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

on March 18, 2012

by the Rev. Ken
Sawyer

          Looking over
all the canvass sermons I have given here (which I have in a notebook that you
can borrow, if you’d like), I noticed two common themes: First, that ours is a
darned good religious community; and second, for it to continue in good health,
we need to pitch in financially, as well as in other ways befitting our
individual talents and interests.

          Hence the clever
title that I put in the town paper, “It’s Not About Money! (Well, Yes, It Sort
of Is).” It’s not about money, exclamation point, is what we in the clergy like
to say; and good for us, because in so much of daily life everyone is called
upon to think about money, for food, for good causes, for all the stuff in the
ads on TV; but usually this is an hour, this hour of worship, when those
pressures do not intrude, except for the collection, and a sermon a year. But
this is that Sunday.

          Before
proceeding, let me say, I want everyone to feel fully part of this religious community
whatever your means may be. We do not publish lists of levels of giving like at
symphony, well, like at a lot of places. I hope whatever your level of giving,
you feel yourself a valued member here.

          Anyway, I
wrote that sermon, about money being what it’s about or not, but at the same
time I was working on my talk this afternoon to the Wayland Historical Society;
and lo and behold, if the sermon was not mostly about the history of
fund-raising at First Parish.

          You see, my
original plan, when I accepted the lecture, was to use the same historic
information morning and afternoon, and it ended up happening that way, even
though this Sunday turned out to be canvass Sunday and I already re-scheduled
my historic sermon for next month. But the parish’s history with money
permeated this week’s anyway, or did until I made a different choice. 

          I did have a
few good paragraphs in that earlier sermon, the one I am not giving today. I
recalled that there came a time mid-nineteenth century when the congregation
did not need as much meeting space, when there were galleries along three
walls. They voted to build a new church. But the drive to fund it failed.

          “Church is
not about money,” I wrote, “really it’s not – it is about the life of the
spirit, the cultivation of goodness and wisdom, religious community, social
mission, love and justice and the making of peace. Those who founded this
congregation in 1640 did not leave their homes and come all this way to find
another way of parting with their income.

          “It’s not
about money … but it is. The little congregation rallied and came up with
enough money to create this room and the room underneath, and to do it a way
they were happy and proud about.”

          And toward
the end, I worked the point anew. “Having said money really does matter – and I
only say it once a year, or twice every ten or twenty years – let me say again
that it does not. As long as we can pay our bills and fund the dreams we rarely
but occasionally implement, after great consideration, what matters is the
sense of religious community, the warmth of our greeting to newcomers and
old-timers alike, the inspiration we take from Sunday morning for our lives the
rest of the week, the religious education and spiritual development we provide
for all ages, the solace and support when needed, the socializing, the
friendships, the fun.”

          But I did not
want to use so much about the church’s money-raising past, entertaining as I
find it, especially when I had a sermon I wanted to give more, one I had just
read again because it is in the afore-mentioned notebook. It is the sermon I
did the first canvass after 9/11, ten years ago.

          It began by
noting that since the previous September, many people had paused to ponder the
purpose of their lives and reconsider their priorities. So I said I would revisit,
with changes, a sermon I had given here ten years earlier called, “So It All
Adds Up to Something.” That also gave me a reason for using those fine readings
again [from Ecclesiastes[i]
and Harold Kushner[ii]].

The earlier sermon was about the
nature and meaning of human existence, seeking to reinvest life with the
prospect of purpose and satisfaction. But the truth is, it was a canvass
sermon. So was the next one. And so is this.

          For those who
are relatively new here and from other faith traditions, I should explain the
notion of a canvass. Long-time members will remember the spring, long ago, that
a British minister exchanged pulpits with me, and reported from this pulpit his
bewilderment at attending a board meeting largely devoted to an intense
discussion of tents (of canvass, you see).

          Actually, the
canvass is an all-church process in which everyone is asked to commit to
supporting the church’s operating budget in the upcoming fiscal year. Other
churches and temples do it other ways. They charge annual dues; or they expect
people to contribute substantially when the plate comes around, maybe more than
one time; or, like conservative Protestant groups and the Mormons, they simply
require that all members follow the biblical injunction to contribute ten
percent of their incomes.

          We do not do
it those ways. As in so many other areas of Unitarian Universalist life, in our
congregations we go with freedom, personal decision, and the hope of a
largeness of spirit. The canvass gives members and friends of the parish the
choice as to how much to give. It relies for its success on a common sense of
responsibility and devotion as regards the wellbeing of this congregation. We
want the church to be healthy, so we all give all we can – that is the hope.

          The moments
of choice are at hand, as all of us who are part of the church community will have
the chance to say what our generous pledge might be. This happens in conjunction
with last night’s traditional canvass dinners, overseen by Jean Milburn, and a
talent show along with a talent show for younger performers in the afternoon, both
coordinated by Sepi Hashemi. Great thanks go to them both, to everyone else who
pitched in, like emcee Will Ryan, Polly Oliver, and especially, of course, to
our canvass chair extraordinaire, Beth Cliff.

          I am always
aware on Canvass Sunday that there are people here for the first time, or
visiting from afar, who might appreciate a message with a somewhat broader,
deeper relevance for their own lives than, there will not be heat in this room
next January if the members and friends of First Parish are not devoted to
funding the budget. Indeed, regular attendees here may have winced upon realizing
that they had inadvertently shown up on a Sunday of such dutiful import.

          Maybe I am
being overly defensive, since television evangelists draw huge national
audiences week after week with a shallower, more mercenary message by far; but
I have never been able to understand why. I assume people attend religious
worship to deepen their spirituality, to nurture their powers of understanding
and healing, to awaken their appreciation for the blessings of life, to have
their consciences moved to action, along with enjoying the beauty of the space
and the music, and the fellowship of those all around.

          Which is what
we try to do, week in and week out, even if once a year the minister is
duty-bound to remind the room that the worship, music, space, and all, exist
only because people believe enough in the importance of the church to give to
help it survive, even prosper. Even on this such Sunday, I have hopes of
drawing a more general message in time from my topic, “So It All Adds Up to
Something.”

          But in the
first instance, the title’s meaning is more specific: the goal in the weeks
ahead is to raise enough so that it adds up to something like what will make
next year another successful one here at First Parish. It is up to us – in our
tradition, every congregation is in control of its own affairs. The church is
the congregation, people who come together to make a religious community. It is
us; and it is up to us, how well cared for it will be.

           One guideline is to suggest people pledge
about 2% of their pre-tax income, a greater percentage for those of substantial
means, a lesser one for those without. The Sawyers have been up around 3%. Some
will do substantially better than that, others less so. I like to think, we all
do what we can.

          It is, in the
words of the title of the sermon this morning, part of an effort that it all
add up to something; that our lives add up to something; that as best we can,
however we can, we maintain allegiance to those things we believe in, those
people we love, those institutions that make our world more nearly what we
think it ought to be.

          Two or three
percent seems a modest but reasonable level of support for me in my religious
home, the place I count on being there even when I do not attend, the place to
which I can take my tired soul for renewal, the place that will console me in
tragedy, support me in ordeal, give home to the rites of my family, and be a
persistent force for tolerance and caring in a cruel and bigoted world.

          It is not the
only cause I support. The church shares some part of my time, attention, and
financial support with political candidates, environmental groups, and
charities. Heck, my father’s career was as a United Way director. In lesser
ways, I also support my college, cultural institutions, and other causes. Most
of you do, too, and no doubt some of you balance the equation differently than
I.

          The point is
not that anyone needs to give to any particular endeavor to be correct and
acceptable. I assume that many of you are giving to causes, at least in the
world of politics, which hope to counter the effects of the money that I am
sending to my favorite groups. That is how life should be in a free country
among members of a free faith. Those people may be right – that is a
fundamental acknowledgment – though I will go on sending in my donations to
support the folks on my side, who may be right as well.

          No, the point
is that such support for causes, charities, churches, and temples is not merely
the token that one must pay to counter the guilt of listening to public radio
without paying one’s share, nor the tribute to the Mass PIRG or Greenpeace
worker who interrupts your dinner, but a part of an effort by which one’s life
is redeemed from meaninglessness by the investment one makes in the world
beyond one’s own passing moment.

          Such
investment can take many forms besides money, including some that are
conspicuously as important, like love and attention, caring enough about people
to sympathize with them, to delight in their happiness and feel for their pain,
to offer encouragement, solace, and kindness.

          Those are the
investments that offer the richest rewards. As I have observed before, when
people gather to remember a loved one, a co-worker, or a neighbor when she
died, when they talk with me about the things that most need to be said at the
memorial service so that the departed will be properly remembered and honored
for who she was, mostly they talk about the ways that she gave herself to them
and to the world.

          They may
speak of her accomplishments, but in admiring her devotion, her thoughtfulness,
her creativity, whatever things there were that she gave of herself, not how
high she climbed the ladder nor what she acquired along the way.

          No one has
ever said I had to be sure to note that the departed was a senior vice president or a full
professor or the best paid
salesperson on the staff, although they often want me to note the kindness he
showed to newcomers at work, or his devotion to the quality and integrity of the
product. No one has ever suggested I note that he bought a new car every year,
though they may warmly recall the trips they took in whatever car he had.

          The
realization of this truth does not require our dying. It confronts us all along
the way, whenever inertia’s distractions are momentarily insufficient and we
wonder whether our lives make any sense, whether what we do makes any
difference, any positive contribution to anyone or anything at all.

          This is the
dilemma explored in Ecclesiastes and in Harold Kushner’s book [When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough].  The answer seems to be, in every age, our
lives take on some saving sense of meaning by their investment in the world
outside ourselves, in the support of causes and candidates we believe in, in
the creation of beauty, in work done well, in the comfort, love, and support we
provide.

          Giving is
only part of the answer to what saves our days from pointlessness and despair.
Receiving is the other part, engaging with the world outside as grateful recipients
of its beauty, love, and grace, its sunsets and smiles and affection. Other
Sundays are devoted to the recognition and remembrance of the blessings of life
– and the best of those blessings also turn out to be other than goods that we
purchase.

          On this
Sunday, we recall what everyone should know, that our days are invested with
meaning – crucial to our deepest happiness and our sense of lives lived well –
not by what we spend on cars or clothes or homes or whatever else may bring us
passing pleasure. Our sense of meaning comes from what we spend on those people
and things, those causes and communities, whose existence we treasure, and
whose health and wellbeing we look upon with gladness, knowing that we had the
power to aid them and we did.

          I hope this
church has just such a place in your sense of what matters, and that today or in
the weeks upcoming you will use your means (however small or great) to
contribute to its health and wellbeing, as one valued way we all have here to
invest our lives with meaning and purpose and joy.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass. (UU)

By The Rev. Ken Sawyer

On March 11, 2012

          In October I gave a sermon “In Praise of What Sustains.” It was an update of a sermon I had given long before, and looking back over the years I am aware that it is one of my recurring themes: the attempt to help us remember and be grateful for and take advantage of things that buoy the human spirit, especially when life gets hard.

          It was on my mind again this church year because most of our minds were, and have been, on the tragic events of last July, when a wonderful, much loved and admired 18-year-old lifelong member of the congregation, Lauren Dunne Astley, was murdered. For those of you who were not here, the memorial service was attended by about 1,300 people, who filled this room and, with audio-visual equipment, the room downstairs, a large room across the street, and the lawn.

          Copies of that October service are available on the rack just inside the front door of the parish house, by request, or on line at our web site. I will give you a one-paragraph précis in a moment. But today we look at the same matter writ large, so large that one wishes no one ever had to face it: how does one recover from something as grievous as losing a child, and in that way, or anything that awful, if anything is.

          Some of you, like me, have known the parents, Mary and Malcolm, for many years, and were involved in the remarkable effort to host the crowd that attended the service. But others of you have little or no familiarity with the family or the tragedy; so lest you think me insensitive, to be bringing up the death with both parents here, as they are — and, we are grateful to say, have been most Sundays this year — let me say that:

          It is the custom in this congregation, as in many UU congregations, to put up for bid at a service auction the right to choose the theme and/or title of a sermon by the minister. This year the winning bid was that of Mary Dunne, Lauren’s mother. She and I have had several discussions about the sermon, beginning the night of the auction. It was she who saw the bumper sticker, playing off the “Got Milk?” ad campaign, that said, “Got Hope?” and picked that as the sermon title.

          What if the answer is, No?

          I will share the definition I found on line: “Hope is the emotional state, the opposite of which is despair, which promotes the belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one’s life. It is the ‘feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best….’”

          There are times we may not have any, for a variety of reasons.

          There is a continuum among us when it comes to suffering, loss, and having or finding hope. There are copies of a book of my early Wayland sermons called Perspectives that you will find here and there and can have for the taking. In it is a sermon called, “The Devil of the Noonday Sun,” which is a monastic phrase for acedia, spiritual torpor, a feeling of pointlessness and disinterest in life.

          In it I say, “insofar as your sense of pointless drift and torpor grows from weariness of body and soul – take a rest…. And if your sense of drift and boredom grows out of laziness, … remember that a life of the spirit zesty enough to enliven your days is something that has to be fed and tended, worked on, stuck to.

            “So to the indolent, I wish you energy and discipline; and to the driven, I wish you serenity and renewal.

          “And for the rest of us,… know that the world is still tantalizing, as it was before and will be again. Wait it out, keep breathing, be faithful in small ways. The juices will flow again. Hang in there and try to stay open to newness as it awakens in you afresh: a new book, new interests, new loves, new caring, and yet again, the demon’s demise, new energy, new joy.”

          So at one end of the spectrum are any of us when life goes flat and maybe all you need is a pep talk from the minister. But in my sermon in October I moved on to acknowledge yet again that “suffering is universal [and] for everyone, life is sometimes hard, really very hard,” yet there a few “things that are also universal, and comforting, sustaining, restorative, and precious: those things that tend toward the healing of the hurting heart and [of] the anguished mind….”

          And this was before the latest CD from the writer/singer Leonard Cohen, the voice of anguish and hope on the edge of despair, in his song, “Come Healing,” which begins, “O gather up the brokenness” and includes the lines,

          Behold the gates of mercy

          In arbitrary space

          And none of us deserving

          The cruelty or the grace….

          Come healing of the body

          Come healing of the mind.

          My list of healing forces included minor, harmless diversions and indulgences; business obligations and everyday chores; communities in which we live, like ours here; family and friends; others (the casual acquaintance, the random co-worker, even the passing stranger, who offers some word of encouragement, advise, or kindness that somehow lifts the sinking soul); counselors, therapists, clergy, and other trained professionals; activity, some re-engagement with what gives us special pleasure; religious or semi-religious practices; reading; and then six powers of the human spirit: the talent for finding humor and irony in the face of disaster; will power; powers of faith; reason; courage; and the buoyancy of the human spirit.

          For most of us, most of the time, some combination of these things succeeds in nurturing and, when needed, restoring our spirits. Sometimes not. Sometimes it is a matter of chemical imbalance and medicine can help lift the fog. I left off the list this time, one possible cure I know I have included in the past: getting out of town, to surround yourself with people who seem to have worries of their own. I hope all of you have learned by now the ones that usually work for you in times of distress or loss or ordeal, and you avail yourself of them.

          But some events are more awful than others, and some of your lives have been touched with tragedy – and “touched” hardly seems the right word. Impacted? Crushed? But no, you were not crushed. Here you are still, some of you with losses that live with you every day, lost ones who live with you every day. It is a basic part of who you are – you, a person missing someone else, or more than one someone else — a person living with the fact that one deep and precious desire will never be realized. The dead do not return.

          Donald Hall, the poet, wrote a book of poems about the illness and death of his wife Jane Kenyon, also a poet, and another about his grieving her death. In the latter he has a poem called, “Distressed Haiku,” set in April. It ends with the line, “and the dead return,” but that follows the lines

The Boston Red Sox win

a hundred straight games.

The mouse rips

the throat of the lion.”

          These are things that do not happen. Just before that, in the same poem, he has said the hardest of truths,

You think that their

dying is the worst

thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.      

          Can one ever after be hopeful about the life that lies ahead?  

          I have not just been thinking and reading about this sermon since Mary bought it, but talking to others, including some of you. I realized that “Got Hope?” means different things to different people, even to the same person at different times.

          A non-member of the congregation assumed the question was, what hope was there for Lauren; she thought the answer might lie in reincarnation. I am not one to presume I know the answer to what happens after we die, although I do presume to know that no one knows or ever will.  One can hope whatever one wants about that.      

          One mother I talked with who had written about her own experience of losing a grown child to murder, a UU minister, conceived of the hope as that of forgiveness of the killer, which she still had not managed, although she had succeeded in getting the DA to plea bargain down to life in prison in a state with the death penalty.

          And then there have been the efforts of Lauren’s father Malcolm to create the hope that the disaster of Lauren’s death might serve to address critical issues of teenage relationships, dating, and abuse. Mary will also soon take a part in that effort, and both are committed through the Lauren Dunne Astley Fund to that effort, and to support for the kinds of engagement with social justice that Lauren embodied, as in her trips with other First Parishioners to help rebuild New Orleans.         

          One mother among us of a child who died, also told me that it helped, once she was ready, to start getting outside herself to help others, to make herself useful, first with close friends, then in larger and larger circles. 

          But that came later, after a time, and for many people it can be a pretty long time. Everyone’s grieving is different. She says, start slow, with small steps.

          And before that, at the long outset of living with the terrible absence? How can one have hope for the future after so great a loss?

          As Earl Grollman describes the situation in Living When a Loved One Has Died, “You have lost interest not only in yourself and those around you, but in life itself. You are empty, so is the world around you. This … is not weakness. It is a psychological necessity. It is one of the slow winding avenues of sorrow and loss. It is part of the mournful work of saying ‘Good-by’ to your beloved.” [44-45]

          The best answer I came upon was offered by our intern, Kevin Tarsa, who had heard it in a class with Dr. John Schneider. Every person I have talked to since who has been involved with awful situations like that faced by Mary and Malcolm has agreed. It is this:

          There are times – thank goodness, very, very uncommon times – but times when having hope is more than a person should expect of themselves, times just to get through, step by step, breath by breath, when hope is something people around you, your family and friends, hold for you until you are ready to receive it back.                

          In his book, Finding My Way: From Trauma to Transformation: The Journey Through Loss and Grief, Schneider writes, “hope may not be found internally – it may need to come from the outside. Others can hold hope while the grieving person explores hopelessness, loneliness and a lack of meaning and purpose, as it once existed.” [201] 

          “It’s a sacred trust to hold hope for grieving persons and families in difficult times. This trust may not require words, just intention and presence. It is often more important not to say that we believe that better days are ahead or that things will turn out for the best when others can’t feel that – and indeed, it may not be true.” [362]

          For the grieving and for those who care for them, it can be a tricky balance, giving and accepting that love and care — not always, and not too much, nor too little — changing day to day, hour to hour. But everyone knows that, and that it will not always be just right and that that is okay, that is just fine. Love and care keep trying, and forgiving when necessary, either way, and trying again. Because that hope we are holding for you, the hope you may not be able to have now or for a while, that hope we are holding for you, will not go away.

          In the weeks I have had this sermon in mind, I have collected readings I thought might fit, as usual. I printed one out, put it in the appropriate pile, and have it now to use – but I neglected to wrote down who wrote it, and searches in my computers’ histories have been fruitless. Maybe one of you wrote it; please accept my apologies if so. 

          “In my suffering I have been shown kindness.  I have been held by this love in action, and I have been consoled. Kindness explains nothing about why there is suffering, but it helps alleviate it nonetheless.  I cannot stress enough how much kindness can do for our loved ones. Kind actions, kind words.  They are deeply powerful and enduring.

          “Kindness and mercy and water and walks help us.  Kindness and mercy heal us.  Kindness and mercy guide us to put one foot in front of the other and walk forward.  It may be scary to know that there is no reason for why some things happen.  It may be terrifying to feel totally out of control.  

          “But there are things we can do for each other to lessen the fear and the dread.  We can accompany one another in silence and tenderness.  We can let our beloved cry until they can cry no more and then we can dry their tears and simply be with them.  We can assure them that when they are weary, feeling small, we’re on their side. 

          “Our witness and presence are enough” – or at least, it may be the best we can do, along with practical support, rides and meals and whatever else is called for.

          I like thinking that a religious community like ours is a place where kindness and kindnesses can do their healing work. My colleague Barbara Wells Ten Hove recently wrote that “we are called to transform the painful and harsh realities of our lives into as much beauty as we can. We are called to create mosaics known as community, as family, as congregations. And we are invited to bring our broken selves into relationship, and find ways to help each other heal.” [Quest, 3/12, 3]

          It can just be being together, in caring support. Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno is a Pennsylvania poet whose 21-year-old daughter was murdered. Her collection of poems about her daughter and the murder and its aftermath is called, Slamming Open the Door. One is titled, “The Unitarian Society of Germantown,” the congregation to which she belongs.

The church is a big wooden boat,

Dave and I in a corner,

As the rain drops patter

Then slash

Through the dark outside.

Hold on tight,

says the kindly moon face

of the minister.

But we can smell our own sweat.

We roll our eyes and moan

and grapple for position.

One by one, the others

press their bodies against us,

until finally,

we tire and lean in

to their patient animal breath,

to wait it out together.

          It is a slow process. I wish that were not so, but everyone I hear from or read says, it can take a long time. “At the beginning it is just terrible,” I read, “and then it gets worse.”

          But then it gets better, not as well as before, as one would wish, but livable, even enjoyable, much of the time, if not ever without the longing of loss. A UU colleague of mine [the Rev. Cathy Harrington] wrote, “My life changed forever the night I received the call that my beautiful daughter and her roommate had been brutally murdered…. A shroud of darkness fell over me in heavy layers suffocating me with fear and despair….  I was thrust on a journey through hell seemingly without end….”

          But in time a glimmer of hope for the future shone through, if only a glimmer. She wrote that a retired astronomer, Dr. Ed Dennison, when she mentioned to him that a counsellor had poked a tiny hole in her darkness, said, “’Have you ever heard of a pinhole camera?’ … He demonstrated it to me by covering the window in his laundry room with foil and poking a tiny hole in the foil. We huddled in the darkness and waited.

          “Impatiently, I squirmed in the dark, stuffy room as my eyes slowly adjusted.  I thought five minutes was surely enough, but Dr. Dennison told us that it takes a full thirty minutes for our eyes to adjust to the dark. After ten minutes, he held up a white paper to the beam of light coming in through the tiny hole and we were astounded to see the trees from outside outlined on the paper.   Gradually, we could see the details of the leaves and as we waited they became more intricate and clear. 

          “I was amazed at how I was sure that I could see clearly in a few minutes and how much more clarity there was in fifteen, and even more in twenty and twenty-five minutes. The trees were upside down, and though I haven’t found a metaphor to properly explain that phenomenon, I had no problem understanding the metaphor of the pinhole camera and my journey … parting my sea of despair and hopelessness one step at a time.  I may never arrive, but it is the goal … that I have set my compass.”

          When and if things ever get as bad as that, please, while you wait to be ready to start parting that sea, be good to yourself, and afterwards, too. It is okay if you sometimes even feel good.

          And it is okay when you don’t. Schneider thinks that “mourning the loss of hope is a spiritually necessary part of grieving.” [120] But he also notes that “eventually the time comes when grief no longer feels like a crushing burden.” [119] Eventually hope will return. 

          For anyone low on hope, or out of it for now, my own hope for you is that you will get to the place that D. H. Lawrence describes in the course of his poem, “Shadows”:

And if, in the changing phases of a [person’s] life

I fall in sickness and in misery

my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead

and my strength is gone, and my life

is only the leavings of a life:

And still, among it all, snatches of lovely

oblivion, and snatches of renewal

odd wintry flowers upon the withered stem,

yet new, strange flowers

such as my life has not brought forth before,

new blossoms of me.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On March 26, 2012

I have sometimes referred to this morning’s sermon as the one that got me this job. It was my pre-candidating sermon back in 1974, the one the Search Committee heard me give in Framingham, which served as the “neutral pulpit.” I had given it shortly before at the first church I served, in northern Maine, and they seemed to like the fact it was not one I picked as the best of my four years there, but just one I happened to have given recently that seemed to have gone over well.

I gave it again to the whole congregation that fall, and again in 1988, on which occasion I prefaced the sermon with a quote from Edmund Hamilton Sears. Sears began his career here in Wayland, but moved on to the Unitarian church in Lancaster, Mass. On December 29, 1844, at a service marking the end of his fourth year there, He said, “In the selection and treatment of topics, I have desired first of all to be useful, not caring to please the taste and the fancy any farther than as a means of addressing the understanding and the heart. I have often preferred an old sermon to a new one; have thrown aside the new when prepared, simply because I thought the old was better and more profitable, and that profit should be preferred to novelty.”

I do not know how often Edmund tried using that line, but after seven years he left Lancaster and came back to Wayland. Still, here I am, reusing a quote about reusing quotes, and the sermon that goes with it.

There are probably few passages in the Bible which have caused as much trouble for good-hearted believers as the business about Abraham and Isaac [in which Abraham binds and almost sacrifices his son Isaac because he thinks God has told him to do so]. It is the sort of passage that 18^th-century rationalists like Tom Paine feasted on as a tasty example of just how ridiculous the Bible can be. It is the sort of passage that was used to buttress the argument of those early Christians like Marcion who contended that the God of Hebrew scripture was a false, evil God, not at all like the loving God revealed by Jesus, and that what we now call the Old Testament ought not to be part of the Christian Bible.

There are even more perplexing examples, most strikingly the opening chapters of 2 Kings, where God teams up with the prophet Elijah to wipe out all sorts of opponents. That is the section that includes the ghastly episode wherein Elisha, Elijah’s successor, is going up to Bethel; “and while he was going up on the way,” the Bible says, “some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, ‘Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!’ And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.”

Hot stuff like that can cause your average church-goer to squirm a bit, which is why folks like Paine and Ethan Allen delighted in it so. It just does not fit together with the cheerier view of the deity we like to think the Bible propounds. Hot stuff like that can also lead to all manner of mischief, like Calvin justifying burning people at the stake for heresy because fire was the very means that God himself had employed in zapping for Elijah those folks who wouldn’t agree with him. But that is another Sunday’s sermon, and certainly not a very pleasant one at that.

And the Abraham-Isaac number does not quite qualify among the outrageously grizzly. The she-bear story is a grizzly one (and they called me anyway), but the first 14 verses of Genesis 22 at least offer up the possibility of a meaningful message, and no one gets killed in the end after all.

The message, of course, is that faith and obedience to God are more important than anything. As the Bible seems to set it out, and as preachers have intoned ever since, Abraham is the great Old Testament model of the person of total faith. He has such great, all-trusting, obedient faith that he is even ready to sacrifice his son to obey God’s command.

But, as I said at the beginning, a lot of people find that a bit much, and among that number I count myself. The objections are obvious enough. What sort of God is it who would put a person to such a test, and would value a person for the willingness to do something awful? And what sort of person is it, empowered by God with conscience and reason, who would hear a voice telling him to do something awful and accredit it the voice of God?

For many sensible folks, then, the story has been an embarrassment, and I suspect it is less often used by orthodox ministers than it is by liberal ones, who use the story to play off of, juxtaposing the unfortunate common interpretation of the story with a more enlightened view of God and humanity that says that Abraham should have known better, as of course he should have.

 Yet while the traditional interpretation leaves me cold, I have never given the other pitch either, although it make sense to me. I have not because I could not believe that there was not some way of making better sense of the story than is usually done. The Bible is like that. Time and again stories that seem misguided or stupid as usually read turn out to have meaning when studied anew. I think it is important that we have come far enough to know that as religious liberals.   

The miracles, for instance. Liberals of an earlier age were hot to do battle with their age’s orthodox view of the miracles. And I am not talking now so much about Unitarians as I am about the deists like Paine and Ethan Allen and the champions of natural religion. God does not work that way, they said, popping into history to pull off magic tricks; the miracles are not historically true; someone made them up, or (the more moderate would contend) there are better explanations for what the Bible describes as happening; and therefore the stories are meaningless, and, at its most extreme, the Bible itself is meaningless.

As I say, I think it is well that we religious liberals have gotten past that stage, that we can say, for instance, about the miracles, if we choose, that the stories are expressive of truths, that some may be statements of fact in the same way that, say, Hamlet is expressive of fact. I fear I am wandering off toward a whole other sermon, so let’s stop and simply note that, from a different perspective, I have shared the same reluctance that many orthodox church people feel at making much of this story as commonly told, awaiting some usage that would free it from the problematic grasp of its usual interpretation.

I mean really, there has to be some better explanation of what is going on there than the Bible or the church has afforded us. And since I had never come across one, I figured it was best to leave the crazy thing alone.

And then at the 1973 General Assembly of the UUA I heard the Rev. John Wolfe of Tulsa attempt just the sort of resuscitation I had been hoping the story would some day receive. Along the way let me add a plug for attending the annual UUA General Assembly; it is full of provocative and moving religious occasions, and I encourage you to consider attending this year’s in Phoenix in June, when the focus will be on social justice even more than usual.

Anyway, what Wolfe was grappling with was the great and mighty issue of good and evil. Why does good sometimes suffer and evil sometimes prosper; or, more precisely, what sort of God is it that is in charge around here? If God is good, why do the innocent suffer? If God is good, why was Lincoln shot? Et cetera.

Wolfe’s answer is that God is not good, and he cites with enthusiasm the poet Archibald MacLeish’s lines from his play “J.B.,”

If God is God, He is not good.

If God is good, He is not God;

Take the even, take the odd….

A far different attempt to escape this timeless dilemma was hinted at by the Protestant theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer shortly before his death in the early 1940s as a prisoner in Nazi Germany. Bonhoeffer seemed to be suggesting that this apparent conflict between God’s goodness and God’s omnipotence could be solved by letting go of the latter, by acknowledging a God that does not have infinite power and domain but a God who in fact suffers in the world – a God, incidentally, which should not seem so foreign to Christians who take Jesus to be the incarnation of the deity. Just so, Bonhoeffer would seem to suggest, or the imaginative mind at least infers, God is in fact a reality in our world that does not have full sway, that suffers and fails, and in whose suffering a person of faith is bid share.

But Wolfe resolves it by letting go of the other half, God’s supposed goodness, leaving God with cosmic dominion, God the ruler of the planets and galaxies, God the force of life that showers rain on flowers and brings the mare to foaling, the Living God, he calls it, Life in Its Fullness, neither good nor evil but God.

Which gets us to his central point, which is that good and evil are human terms. To talk of them otherwise, to speak of God as being good, while still responsible for all that happens, is to make God evil. We end up, as he titled his sermon, “Reconciling the Ways of an Evil God to Good Men [and Women].”

But God is not evil, unless we make God so by trying to make God good. God just is; good and evil are the terms that we humans devise to cope with our situation, to make things as much better as we are able for as many as we can; but when and where we fail it is not God’s fault, nor ought we burden and torture ourselves with the thought that our misfortunes derive from our lack of righteousness, our failure to be right with God. Good and evil are concepts we invent, and necessarily so, to deal with the world we live in; but they are ours, not God’s, and no blame attaches to God for our failures, for the evil that prospers, for God knows nothing of evil or good.

By the way, on other days I can go with God as the force of goodness itself, or of love or of justice, a way of talking about any of those things. And on most days I can do without the word God altogether. But I am intrigued by efforts to grapple with life’s deepest matters, and so God does sometimes come up, as for John Wolf. 

Label-fixers will have spotted him as a good old-fashioned Deist of sorts, akin to such as Paine and Allen. But unlike them, he is able to return to the Bible without feeling pressure to mock or belittle. Indeed, he notes that it was Jesus who said, “God makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” And so, too, Wolf turns to Genesis 22, and for the first time finds a meaning that makes any sense to me.

There is God, bursting forth all around Abraham with the miracle of life, Life in Its Fullness. But Abraham is not open to all that. God even springs a much-hoped-for son on him when he is a hundred, but that is not reasonable. That is not the sort of God that Abraham can get it on with. Abraham wants a God of good and evil, of rules and laws and order. He has a great notion of good and evil and he expects God to play an appropriate role in it all.

There is God, exploding in wonder all around him, but Abraham is not paying attention. He wants a God of good and evil. So God gives him the most outrageous assignment one can imagine, as if to shock Abraham to his senses. But Abraham responds, Now there’s a God after my own heart, and off he goes.  And he almost goes all the way when God intervenes, saying, as Wolf puts it, “No, stupid. The ram. Take the ram!”

  “Here, then,” Wolfe continues, “is posed one of life’s greatest ironies, one of its most shocking truths. It is” we who are good, when we are, but “not God. It is the business of men and women to work for the good, not God’s. And rightfully so.”

This answer to the conundrum of God’s Godness and goodnesss does two good things. On the one hand it allows us to affirm a God much similar to one that I have suggested can have meaning and importance: the Living God, Life in Its Fullness, wonder of wonders, God of the spring and of the fall, God of lichen and of stars, source of infinite wonder and awe.

And on the other hand, it forces us to recognize that in this wondrous world of ours, the meaning and the order and the rules of good and evil are things that we are left to make for ourselves, commanded not by some good God who must forever fail us, for suffering and evil will not go away, but commanded by the terms of our earthly existence, by our being together here on this planet with others like ourselves subject to the senseless vicissitudes of tragedy and pain.

  In a way this second point sounds much like the challenge offered by some Death of God theologians once, that we accept a responsibility for the world’s wellbeing, but with the difference that we need not kill off God, only remember that the good and evil we envision are our creations and our business and not God’s, not in the nature of God, which exists nonetheless, in this view, but as neither good nor evil, but as Life in Its creative, wondrous Fullness, the Living God whose recognition demands that we never mistake our laws and our notions of good and of evil for more than they are, never use them as the occasion for blaming God nor ourselves for life’s inescapable horrors, nor ever allow ourselves to grasp our notions with a tenacity befitting heavenly decree. 

And people do, of course, and maybe ever will, take humble attempts at order and dress them up as being God’s, get trapped by them, bow down and worship them. “Great moments of high excitement come along,” Wolf says, “but we are more concerned with good and evil than with sorrow and with joy, with righteousness more than with one another. And so the last days come upon us and we are terrified to discover that we are left with the Law, and the Life we love is sacrificed in its name.”

We end up like Abraham, locked into laws of what is right and proper and calling that God, ignoring the wondrous God of life right before us. But happily, and I will conclude with this final quotation from Wolf, “Happily – and this is the revelation upon which our ministry is founded! – the Living God, Life in Its Fullness, will break through all our attempts to beggar and contain it and will, if we listen, and if we will look – there in the brambles! The Ram, stupid, the Ram! – find the grace to release us from the command of Good and Evil, commands of our own making, and set us free. For this is the Good News we, here, have to preach and witness to: (in the words of Bernard Meland) ‘We are rewarded not according to what we do or do not do, what we deserve or do not deserve – thank God! – but only according to our ability to receive the good there is in existence.’”

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland (UU)

On February 12, 2012

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

            This morning I would like to talk about temptation, about some of those times when we are inclined to give in to our impulses. Now there is a good, traditional topic for a sermon. One wonders how many times over the centuries this congregation has been favored with a sermon on temptation. How many another Sunday morning my predecessors may have brought to mind the dread callings of sinfulness tempting the saints to turn from their righteousness into the paths of wrong doing. We are surrounded, my friends, the echoes say, by snares of delusion and lurid luring, opportunities too often at hand to betray our most noble nature for the moment’s sordid pleasure.

            Nor can one think that message utterly out of date. But it is not the one I want to deliver this morning. In fact, one likes to think that most of us are most of the time pretty good at resisting the temptations of evil. Unfortunately, we may be nearly as good, much of the time, many of us, at resisting, too, the temptations of goodness.

            Surely our impulses run that way, too. I have no brief to make here on behalf of the inherent saintliness of humankind. No more can I accept, as I once did, growing up, or as the Transcendentalists tended to say, that people are pure, in essence, by nature, corrupted only by their participation in unredeemed social institutions.

            Impulses to cruelty, to self-abuse, to violence, to apathy have come to seem to me part and parcel of our being. Perhaps in time those things can be eliminated; I am sure they can be lessened, controlled, directed. But I not averse to talk about sin, the way that Jesus, for instance, uses the concept, as recognition of the personal depths of the problems of the human race.

            The error in the poor word “sin” is not Jesus’, but of those of his followers who would turn sin into the singular fact of the human condition, as though there are not also strong within us impulses of the contrary nature. Jesus, after all, never spoke so much of sin that he did not speak more of love, about that force more strong than sin that could overcome self-concern. That, too, is a native instinct of the human heart, to reach out to others with a selfless concern and compassion. Had the matter been otherwise, were love some desirable abstraction, Jesus would have been a teacher of a wholly different sort, offering a manual for learning the tricks of a strange way.

            Instead, he exhorts his followers to accept what is already theirs, prods them with parables and assurances of the divinity that is within them, within us, the instinctual impulse to love, a potential so potent that it can sweep away petty self-interests, can call us beyond the miserable, lonely jails of our egos to participation in the life of what many would call the life of God on earth, which is to say, in actions of sacrificial, redemptive love.

            It is not a matter of forcing ourselves into some un-human mold; it does not require some unnatural discipline, like learning a golf grip; it is not an alien adjunct to our natures that only comes with a conversion experience; it is innate, if anything is. If we can believe that anything is inherently human, as so much of religion has tried to tell us, all too often in pushing a view of humanity’s native depravity, surely it is inherently human to reach out, to love, to feel the welfare of another person, other people, as important to one’s own wellbeing and happiness.

            I was once at a workshop in Boston, listening to a psychiatrist discuss marriage. At one point he was listing what to him are the things one gets from any secure, prolonged intimate relationship, things like rootedness and a shared history. Those more expert than I in the congregation may challenge his assessment, but he contended that psychiatry has moved beyond Freud’s claim that in love one seeks gratification of the libido, to recognizing that what the libido seeks is not its own gratification, but an object. And he listed that among the assets of sustained intimate relationships. Which is precisely the point, of course, in different language than Jesus’: what the libido seeks is not its own gratification but an object, a recipient of its need for actuation and fulfillment.

            We have, then, in brief, a temptation to goodness, to reaching out to others in the spirit of compassionate care that Jesus calls love. This is not goody-goody stuff cooked up by a conspiracy of ministers and Sunday school teachers. Concern for others and involvement in their struggles and pain, in their defeats and in their victories, is a profound human need and a vital ingredient in the health of a person, that we shall not become trapped in ourselves, shut off from the demanding and sustaining life of the whole.

            But it is not necessarily easy. We can resist our temptations, our chances at opening up to others, the steps we might make to bridge the gaps that lie between our solitudes. It need not be done, you see. Oh sure, resistance in the long run is disastrous, but even if we know that, in the day to day decisions of our lives the moment of action can usually be put off or rejected outright. Some one we know is going through a difficult time, someone we do not know and are not sure we will like is nearby, someone we care for or admire might appreciate our encouragement – but it can be put off.

            That is often the easier way – although sometimes it is not. Sometimes by putting it off, when we know we ought to be taking steps beyond our walls, we end up wasting time and energy and our own self-esteem, stewing about the task, making ourselves miserable hoping the moment will pass.

            It is not that we are cruel. It is not that we delight in withholding ourselves from others. I do not believe that. I believe that we need others, and that our moments of greatest growth and satisfaction come when we succeed in getting beyond the walls and reaching another person, being truly with them, and I do not just mean in their hours of hardship or despair; I do not want to make the message that tragic, for often it is just reaching out and encountering someone else in honesty and humanness, not because their life at that moment is particularly hard but because all our lives at every moment are emptier than they need be, because closed off in part from authentic human contact.

            I do not think it is our cruelty, or even so much our laziness and apathy, and certainly not our self-sufficiency, but just because it can be hard. It involves a risk. There is no risk in doing nothing, or usually there is not. Usually we can breeze right by someone. If it makes us feel a little guilty, it is only for an instant.

            But to stop, to introduce ourselves, say, or to stop long enough to really give the other person a chance to talk – I think many of us much of the time do not do these things even with those we love most, even with close friends, with our own families, but often retreat from moments that might prove trying, intense, that might disrupt the surface calm, rather than meet another person as person, honestly, as just you with just me, or, more difficult, as just you with just me a person in need at the moment. That is a risk.

            We shall botch it, we fear. We shall end up feeling silly. Taking an immediate if mundane example, most of you here shall in a few moments be standing together waiting to go downstairs. And next to you may well be a person you do not know, or think you don’t. We all know the danger there. You can say, “Hello, my name is so-and-so,” and the person may say, “Of course, I have been sitting in church with you here for the last ten years.”

            Or they will say nothing, or, “So what?” I doubt if anyone would be that insensitive, but something like that has happened to most of us at some time or another. Blessed be those who have survived and go on saying, “Hello, my name is so-and-so.” (A personal unfavorite of mine is the time or two – I hope not many times more – when I have said at the end of a conversation, when the right words would have been, “It was nice to see you again,” and I said, “It was nice to meet you.”)   

            At other times the risk may seem more severe. We will be misunderstood, we will make fools of ourselves, we will make nuisances of ourselves. I am not trying to justify making nuisances of ourselves; but I think many of us err in the other direction. We avoid the risk.

            And who is to notice if we do? That is the safer course, at least in the short run. Don’t reach out. Stand pat. Guard the defenses. Sure, we have temptations to goodness, impulses to reach out, to show the world a loving openness. But we may restrain ourself, restrict ourself.

            I suspect that the attitude is habit-forming. I suspect that the more we respond to opportunities for openness and caring with procrastina-tion and restraint, the harder it becomes the next time to be open and caring. And I suspect that finally that attitude can become debilitating, robbing us of our ability to participate fully in the lives of others. And, finally, I would suggest that that debilitation is a form of spiritual death.

            The artist Corita Kent once illustrated somebody’s wordplay that said, “Don’t be little yourself; Be your big self.” Something in that contrast is what I refer to. To be less than our big selves, to restrain and restrict our virtuous impulses, our noblest nature, our yearnings to love, is to belittle ourselves. It is the opposite of growth.

            As the great 19^th-century Unitarian saint Margaret Fuller once said, “I learned at an early age that the one goal in life is to grow.” Growth is something that happens between us, as I open to you, as you open to me, as we come to see each other’s humanness, to grasp the hands of those fingers that sometimes point, to get beyond our piteous self-concern.

            I keep drifting over to a larger point about our human needingness, and the opening up to others that we might aspire to, that we might be more open to ourselves; but I have equally in mind the simpler point about the little things that we do not do, where maybe there is not any great risk, just some nice thought that comes to us and that all too often we too readily shelve.

            A late colleague, Arthur Foote, once noted that “So often we miss opportunities to help others. We see the need, but irresolution delays us, and the chance passed; or, preoccupied with our own concerns, we fail to see. The ancient prayer speaks of sins of omission as well as those of commission. Committed sins are no doubt the more serious, but one suspects that numerically, at least, the sins of omission carry the day. Most people are not downright vicious; the evil in their nature is diluted. They are fairly reasonable, reasonably good-natured and well-inten-tioned. They mean to be honest, fair, and kind. They are good, if not good for much.”

        I do not know if any of you can see glimpses of yourself in that picture, but I can. I am like that at times, too often. And for some of those times I do not apologize; we all need as well our moments of self-concern, our times when we regroup, consolidate growth, are alone with ourselves.

            It is a tender balance, then, and some of us may tilt too far the other way; but for many of us, maybe most, the pressing need is to unlock the outreachings, to give in more to our own kindness, not to let the moments pass, to shake off our preoccupation, to see, to hear, to sense the need, to let a good idea take form, come to life, to let ourselves grow, expand.

            What are we saving ourselves for? Do we fear our goodness to be in finite supply, to be hoarded up for some special time and person? Do we think our love grows stronger for its disuse? Or do we imagine that our time and energy can anyways better be spent than in this, that we shall brighten the day of others, that we shall let them know they have our love and sympathy, that we shall increase the world’s ever-insuffi-cient store of love?

            In the familiar words of an anonymous sage, “I shall pass through this world but once. And any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now; let me not defer it or neglect it, for I may not pass this way again.”

            There is a great goodness in the world, wanting to sing with our voices. May our chorus reach to the skies.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

On February 5, 2012

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

            Why would anyone read the Bible?

            I realize that may seem an odd question to the newest among us, and perhaps to a few others as well. This is, after all, a church, and in most churches there is an obvious answer, which is that in some timeless way, the Bible is an account of the nature, will, and historic activity of God – indeed, for most people, an account unique in that way – and for many, an account without error, flaw, or need of addition or explication.

            We are not a church like that, though. Truth to tell, I do not often turn to the Bible for readings on Sunday morning. I can forget how odd that is, how 90-some percent of the churches of this land use the Bible and nothing else for their Sunday morning readings. I gather many Americans think that the Bible and religion are pretty much the same thing.

            But Unitarian Universalists typically do not.  We almost none of us think the Bible is in some absolute and literal way the very and only word of God. And yet it retains some important place for many of us, and in our worship life, too, at least on occasion. One might well ask, why?

            Well, for one thing, just to be able to understand our neighbors and their religious beliefs, to give us some ways of imagining what is on their minds. I confess, though, that is a motive that may come more naturally to a born Unitarian like me than to the greater number of you who grew up with more extensive biblical indoctrinization. Many of you among that number, I know, feel you had by the age of twelve Bible enough for a lifetime.

            One might offer as reason the cause one could take on of keeping true believers honest when they claim to speak for sacred writ. It has been commonplace to note that theologically and socially conservative interpretations of scripture thrive in the land in part because educated religious liberals have stopped caring about the Bible enough to refute them.

            This is probably true, but I doubt it is sufficient to draw very many of us back into the struggle – where, as a result, only a few of the sensible and informed remain to point out what the Bible really says and probably meant – and point that out to an audience that increasingly does not care.

            But there are other reasons to read the Bible, at home or at church, than, on the one hand to know The Truth (with a capital T), or, on the other, to understand or to refute those who think they do. Or at least I think it is a question worth consideration.

            And so back in the ‘80s, having gone nine years in this pulpit with only one sermon devoted expressly to a book of the Bible – actually, to two, the prophets Amos and Hosea, and their notions of national strength – I began working my way through the Bible, taking up one of the books every three months. The goal was to provide information to help the texts make sense, and find inspiring words that might still stir the heart and mind and conscience even thousands of years after they were written, even those of a liberal UU.

            I did not do too badly, in terms of sticking to my plan. From 1982 to 1986 I did eleven, getting as far as Job. By the end of the century I had done eight more, the last being a sermon bought at auction on Job again. This week I reread all those services again, and they’re pretty good, if I do say so myself.

            I last preached on the Bible a year ago, returning to the first book, Genesis, and setting the Bible itself in the context of First Parish history, where it played a large part for many years. What I will do first instead is provide (as I used to) an overview, a description of the book which is not a book, really, but a library of books. There are books of about events in the past, beginning with creation itself, the creation of the humanity, and other flights of whimsy, not without their allegorical significance.

            Eventually we pick up the history of a people, Israel, the Hebrews, beginning with Abraham, leading his family out of the fertile crescent into Canaan. From there it’s on to Egypt, where over time the Hebrews fell into almost slave status before escaping under the leadership of Moses. They wandered for years, returning to conquer Canaan and settle down to centuries of rule, eventual defeat, exile and return.

            Amid the histories are books of law, elaborate systems of social and cultic requirements. Then there are works in the tradition of Middle Eastern wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs), a devotional collection (Psalms), two books about revolt and the end of days, then the social reformers called prophets, the books of the Apocrapha, rejected by Jews and Protestants but part of the Catholic Bible, and finally, for Christians, what is called the New Testament of gospels and letters.

            In picking out favorite readings I think you might enjoy, I was aided by a sermon on Jesus’ favorite texts, by the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, published in Boston in 1864. Clarke believed that “Jesus, the prophetic soul, reading the books of the great prophetic souls who went before him, interprets them to us best of all.” So Clarke went through all the sayings attributed to Jesus and counted up how often he quoted this book or that.

            He found 39 times Jesus quoted the books of the Hebrew Bible, but many books not at all, including the histories, the books of wisdom literature, and twelve of the sixteen prophets. He used the Psalms the most, and Isaiah second most.

            Religiously conservative Christians often use passages from Hebrew scripture as relevant to Jesus’ life, in that he is said to have fulfilled some prophesy. But Clarke rejects that interpretation of the word “fulfill” – he thinks it just means, to carry out perfectly, not because he was bound to because of what Isaiah wrote. But Isaiah does offer an image of the sort that reverberates, an ideal:  

Then a shoot will grow from the stock of Jesse,

and a branch shall spring from his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

            a spirit of wisdom and understanding,

            a spirit of counsel and power,

            a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what he sees

nor decide by what he hears;

            he shall judge the poor with justice

            and defend the humble in the land with equity;

            his mouth shall be a rod to strike down the ruthless,

            and with a word he shall slay the wicked.

Round his waist he shall wear the belt of justice,

            And good faith shall be the girdle of his body.

            Then the wolf shall live with the sheep,

            And the leopard lie down with the kid….

            I might as well say now, my favorite parts of the Bible are the books of wisdom literature and some of the lovely sayings of Jesus, along with – and this I suspect is an acquired taste – the dramas in Israel and Judea, like those involving David; and the prophets for their fire, their hunger for justice, even their extravagant metaphors to describe those who upset them.

            And the vision, like the one from Isaiah you just heard. Here is another:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen one in whom I delight, 

I have bestowed my spirit upon him,

and he will make justice shine on the nations.

He will not call out or lift his voice high,

or make himself heard in the open street.

He will not break a bruised reed,

or snuff out a smouldering wick;

he will make justice shine on every race,

never faltering, never breaking down,

he will plant justice on earth,

while coasts and islands wait for his teaching.

                                                            Isaiah 42:1-4

Isaiah did not have Jesus in mind in particular when he wrote that, but Jesus may well have had Isaiah in mind.

            And we know that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Isaiah on his mind. Can’t you hear him now?

                        There is a voice that cries:

            Prepare a road through the wilderness,

clear a highway across the desert for our God.   

            Every valley shall be lifted up,

every mountain and hill brought down;

rugged places shall be made smooth

            and mountain-ranges become a plain.

                                                Isaiah 40:1-5 (Second Isaiah)

In case it isn’t obvious, this was an agricultural society, not one that relied on tourism, say.

            Clarke cites another prophet, Hosea, as author of a passage Jesus used twice, and in reference to different matters – “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.” (Hos.6:6) It is what you do that matters, not the rituals you perform. It is your kindness that matters, your mercy, your caring, your taking the side of the poor and the troubled, your work for fairness and justice.

            And this, from the prophet Amos:

I hate, I spurn your pilgrim-feasts;

            I will not delight in your sacred ceremonies

When you present your sacrifices and offerings

            I will not accept them,

Nor look upon the buffaloes of your shared-offerings.

Spare me the sound of your songs;

I cannot endure the music of your lutes.

Let justice roll on like a river

And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. 

                                                Amos 5: 21-24

            In talking about the Bible one has to acknowledge that there are also things about it that are disturbing, brutal and cruel. But there are such lovely passages. A perfect example of both is Psalm 137, written during the Babylonian captivity, after Babylon had conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and taken the leadership hostage.

By the waters of  Babylon, there we sat down and wept

            when we remembered Zion.

 There on the willow-trees

            we hung up our harps,

for there those who carried us off

            required of us song,

and our captors called on us to be merry:

            ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’

How could we sing the Lord’s song

            in a foreign land?

But then later, in the same Psalm,

Remember, O Lord, against the people of Edom

            the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

when they said, ‘Down with it, down with it,

            down to its very foundations!’

Still pretty poetic, and understandably upset, but it concludes,

O Babylon, Babylon the destroyer,

            happy the man who repays you

            for all that you did to us!

Happy is he who shall seize your children

            and dash them against the rock.

It is not always easy reading.

            But then there is the 23^rd Psalm that we recited earlier and you heard sung. I have noted before, it has been the most-requested feature of memorial services I have done, and not because everyone who wants it believes in God as their shepherd. But the words are beautiful and comforting. Joseph Campbell once said, “[Mythologies and] religions are great poetry…. “

            I think the imaginative, poetic side of religion is part of why we might return to the Bible. When I preached on the books that purport to be history – Samuel, Kings and the like – I wondered why the stories there are so enduringly popular. For some of us – albeit an odd little group – they are puzzles to be solved. Much of the Bible, in fact. How many people wrote the book of Jeremiah, and when, and why: who is he talking about here, or there?

            Then there is the human interest, all the sex and violence, David and Uriah and Bathsheeba; or David’s son Amnon raping his half-sister Tammar and being killed in revenge by half-brother Absolom; or Absolom’s own revolt against his father, King David.

            But finally, the stories work as media for creativity and fantasy. All the unusual names! All the colorful language! Being exotic is not always a religious liability. The Mormons are thriving. New Englanders used to fall in love with that same exotic allure sporatically, and name their children not just Lucy and William but Elishama, Nogah, and Hemmoleketh. Sawyers were Lukes, Samuals, Marys and Sarahs except one generation Aholiab married Bathsheeba. It is a long, cold winter in Hubbardston, Mass., and novelty was apparently sometimes a relief -– as it sometimes serves in religion as well.

            But back to the business at hand: the best of the Bible. As those of you who know me and know the Bible will not be surprised to hear, I think the best parts are the books of Ecclesiastes and Job, the wise, tender, sometimes playful stories and sayings of Jesus, and the best line of all.

            I could preach about Job again, but I hope you already know the story and the lesson. In brief, God is goaded into testing Job’s faith by sending unbelievable bad fortune. Job has three friends who try to comfort him but who believe Job must have done something to deserve his fate. Job knows he has not and yearns to plead his case with God. But God tells him, basically, who are you to question me, and God delivers a fantastic accounting of what he has created and maintains. Job was right about the punishment, but that does not make God wrong. Life is not right or fair.  There is a happy ending, but the point has been made.

            I quote my own conclusion. “Job at the end lets go of his perfectionism and his determinism and accepts his place in a world whose workings are beyond our comprehension and judgment. What we can hope for instead is not assurance of fairness for ourselves but the chance to participate in and appreciate a universe as glorious and tender as it is as well cruel and frightful; that, and the acceptance of our human power to do good for the sake of goodness itself, for the sake of what pleasure and solace it might bring to other beings like ourselves, alone in a universe beyond our ultimate control or understanding.

            “We cannot expect perfection of ourselves, nor fairness of the universe. We can only offer what humble tenderness we have to share, and accept with gratitude what blessings may chance to fall upon us.”  

            Ecclesiastes has the same outlook, laced with some caustic cynicism, perfect for teenagers going through their Ambrose Bierce stage and for anyone feeling discouraged. You will be less so than he, and yet he is not. He gets along, and enjoys what he can. This life is not fair or as rewarding as one would hope, and here is nothing hereafter.   Somehow, that is a pick me up, like the saddest of Psalms can be, in tune with one’s spirit; and Ecclesiastes is one book I do read on occasion even without a sermon in mind.  And, of course, it contains the words from almost every memorial or committal service that begin, “To every thing there is a season….”

            And Jesus? I have used him most of all, although it must seem to anyone used to other traditions that I barely use him at all. But if you want to open your Bible and find something good, you can not miss with the Sermon on the Mount.

            Oh, and the best line of all. It’s from the prophet Micah. It comes at the end of the sermon I gave when I began the Bible series, back in 1982. I quoted Theodore Parker, who said, “As a master, the Bible were a tyrant; as a help, I have not time to tell its worth.” Then I said “I want to take time to make better friends with the Bible, learning like Parker to let it be a help, gaining easier access to its wisdom by better understanding its parts – when they were written and by whom and why – and hearing again the beauty and inspiration of words that people have turned to for centuries….

            “Times have changed since it was composed. Their science is laughable, their ethics sometimes barbaric, their biases sometimes lamentable. But in many ways the life they faced , we do still, in many ways the human condition is unchanged, jealousy and love, anger and faith are timeless. We shall try to tell of those gems of insight and inspiration that make it worth our dragging the rest along through the centuries. We’ll turn to it for the fun of the puzzle, for the fascination of te history it tells, but most of all to hear again the occasional voice of wisdom, the one that may stir us still.

            “What does the most high require, it is asked; to what high goals might our lives be devoted. “The Lord has showed you what is good,” wrote Micah, and you can translate all you want. “And what does he require of you but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. Great stuff,” I concluded. “Let’s look around.”      

a sermon by ministerial intern Kevin Tarsa

delivered January 29, 2012

at First Parish in Wayland, MA

Reading #1: A Litany of Change

1. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”    - Charles Darwin

2. “Things do not change; we change.”     - Henry David Thoreau

3. “We change whether we like it or not.    - Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”     - Benjamin Franklin

5. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”       - Victor Frankl

6. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”       - Anatole France

7. “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”     

- Charles Kettering

8. “Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.”        - Shunryu Suzuki

9. “We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”       - R.D. Laing

10. “Know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.”          - Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

11. “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”   - Joseph Campbell

12. “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”    - Barbara Kingsolver

Reading #2

Emily Perl Kingsley was asked to describe what it was like to live through and beyond an event that changed the course of her life. She wanted to help people understand and imagine how it might feel. She said, “It’s like this:

see “Welcome to Holland” at   http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

   © 1987 Emily Perl Kingsley

Sermon: “Change Happens”

by Kevin Tarsa, ministerial intern, First Parish in Wayland, MA

January 29, 2012

So… “Welcome to Holland.”

I don’t know where you expected to be landing this morning…or where you expected to be landing at this point in your life, but chances are at least a few times in your life, you found out quite suddenly that your flight plan had been changed mid-flight, and you landed in an unfamiliar land, where people spoke a different language.

“Welcome to Holland,” I say this morning, because I know that change happens, all the time, to all of us - change expected and unexpected, bidden and unbidden, in large doses and in small. For change is the very nature of existence and nothing escapes its reach. No matter what our age, we don’t have to look any further than our own bodies to know that change is perpetual in our lives, and that we must keep adapting to new realities. (I say, as I adjust my bifocals…)

As James Miller writes: “Infants turn into toddlers, children become adolescents, and adults mature in ways no less striking.” You’re supposed to go to Italy and then:  Your horse runs away, or your child, and therefore, you, are thrown by an illness,  “accidents happen, tragedies occur, … bodies, minds, and spirits are suddenly changed, either for a time or forever. Relationships [begin and] come to an end for all sorts of reasons. Jobs [start, change or] terminate with little or no notice. People die, expectedly or unexpectedly, and life is irreversibly altered for [those who love them] (Miller 13).”

But it is not only painful and difficult changes that throw us. Virtually all change is uncomfortable at some level, even the most positive or hoped-for change, because it disrupts the ways we are accustomed to being and to doing things.

Lea Anderson took Ken and Lisa Maria and me on a wonderful tour of the new Wayland High School. The new auditorium, the “Main Stage” they’re calling it, is beautiful and state of the art, but many people are lamenting the loss of the old “Little Theater.” The new commons where students eat is light and open….but several of the tables are round, and instead of facing a friend or two across the table, students now have to face a whole group of people, which some are finding uncomfortable.

 “The … radio comedian, Bob Burns, …used to tell the story of eating Army food for the first time after eighteen years of his mother’s deep-fat frying. A week of bland GI fare was enough to cure something that he had never known that he had: a life-long case of heartburn. But rather than feeling relief at this improvement, at the lack of pain, Burns said that he rushed into the dispensary… yelling, “Doc, doc! Help me! I’m dying. My fire went out! (Bridges 13)”

Getting married, having a baby, receiving a promotion, opening a business - all change, even the most happy change, incurs loss because with change, by definition something ends, something is no longer exactly what it was, and so neither are we. We have to navigate not only the external changes in our lives, we also have to travel an internal journey in response to those changes and the losses that come with them.

This morning, I’m drawn to speak of that inner journey, using the travel guides of James and John. Not the apostle brothers James and John of the Christian scriptures, but two deep friends who each studied grief.

James Miller, a one-time minister, speaks of the link between change and grief, writing, “Whether the change is minor or major, whether its effect is fleeting or enduring, somewhere at the beginning [of our transitions in response to change] will be a sense of loss. And where there is loss there is grief. The grief may or may not go deep, but it’s grief nonetheless (Miller 23)”

The late John Schneider, a psychologist and a mentor of mine, writes that we all have “significant losses…that result from the changes that are natural parts of life. They come from catastrophes and tragedies as well as from successes and satisfactions (xxvii). Every change,” he writes, “… has both a loss and a gain component. Grieving is how we [know their proportions] and decide what to do with them (Schneider 111).”

There are plenty of books and websites with all kinds of valuable suggestions on how to change yourself or how to adapt to change, but I’ve found …that first paying attention to the losses that come with change and attending to the internal grieving process have been most helpful in my own life. I’ve found that unless I first acknowledge and grieve the losses that come with change, later I have difficulty accepting… the nice things about Holland.

You know, I was supposed to go to Italy. I was. Instead, I landed …in Wayland. Now first, I would like you to know that I am very happy to have landed in Wayland. Wayland has several hundred years of history. Wayland has a Whole Foods Store (for now). Wayland has First Parish. Wayland has Ken Sawyer (for a few more months), and most important, Wayland has you!  I am very grateful to have landed in Wayland.

I was planning, however, to do my internship next year, after I finished classes, but there were several changes in the flight plan: my mother died, our minister resigned suddenly, I lived an unexpected divorce, sold our house, and moved five times within six months. In that same time, John Schneider, my grief mentor, died. As someone at his memorial service asked, “What do you do when your grief counselor dies?”

I turn often to John’s wisdom. With some of the changes in your lives in my mind and heart, and knowing the link between change and grief, I offer a small piece of John’ insight to you this morning in the hope that it might serve you in your journey.

John said that we have to make three discoveries before we can realize the transformative potential of grief. We must discover what’s lost, what remains, and what’s possible.  They are each important, but it’s the first discovery, in particular, that I commend, because from it, the other two follow, and without it, they can be lived only incompletely.

First, John says, we must discover what was lost.

To discover what’s lost, the need may be as simple as taking walks to consider what ended for you when you got married, when you took that job, or when your child started school. It may be making lists of what you’ll miss about your volunteer role, or the home from which you are moving, telling a friend what you’ll leave behind when you graduate or when you follow your dream in retirement. Taking time to notice and to take inventory of what you have lost or are losing or will lose, is the task here, however you choose to go about it. It’s not the most pleasant step, but it’s a very important one.

This is the step that’s often missed when a change seems positive – Why would we be thinking about what’s lost when something good happens? 

William Bridges ran support group for people in transition. The members of the group who had lost loved ones, or divorced or lost jobs couldn’t figure out why the guy who just got a promotion had anything to complain about. But with the promotion came a loss of time with his family, a separation from close colleagues, a lowered sense of competence in his new role. A woman in the group who just had a baby, lost all sense of a life that was her own. Her life was now tied to that of a wonderful, demanding infant. Understanding what they had lost, helped each of them to grieve and move forward.

This step of discovering what’s lost, the step that’s missed when everything seems positive, is the same step that can become overwhelming when a loss is deep and it seems that everything is lost.

John says that when we first respond to change, we are likely to cycle “back and forth between the extremes of making too much or too little of what we’ve lost (114).”

If the change in our lives is a painful one, we may rollercoaster up and down between “everything’s fine” denial, and debilitating despair. Up and down. John says that the truth in such times is in the middle, “Yes, things are as bad as they seem – AND yes, there is hope [you] can get through it,” though most of us can feel only one of those feelings at a time.

What comes next is a time of more “active grieving” in which little by little we face “the full impact of our loss.” Here we cycle back and forth between our coping strategies of either clinging to what we are losing or letting go completely, and our gradual awareness of the depth of our loss. As long as we don’t get stuck in our coping mechanisms, - clinging or letting go/fleeing - they are normal and helpful survival strategies. They give us respite from the pain, and allow us to “take in our loss one manageable bit at a time (116).”  Coping… touching a little more loss… coping… touching a little more loss…

Acknowledging, identifying and gradually feeling the fullness of our loss is the vital first step on the internal journey of transition that comes with all change. The size of this step for you, will depend upon the depth of the change in your life.

It’s the doorway to:

Discovering what remains.

This, I expect, you can imagine easily and I need only state it briefly.  In our own time and way, after honestly facing our loss, we gradually start to look around, and discover that not all is lost after all, and we start to take stock of what we do have. I have seen this remarkable journey many times in people who mourn. James writes, “In this time of discontinuity, …we start to remember our continuities.” Here’s the key: to remember that “No matter what has changed, some things have not changed, (at least not in ways that matter.)  We can “find reassurance [by] recalling those things. [By noting, consciously, what’s left. What’s still here.]

Whatever inner strength you’ve already known, you can draw on it again. However resilient you’ve been, [or] practical or determined, you can be that way once more, for you [already] know how. If someone you love is gone from your life, others remain…(Miller 29)” Recognizing and taking stock of what remains allows us to:

Discover what is possible. 

The spirit of this is not difficult to imagine.

Once we’ve faced our loss and then discovered what remains, we catch our breath, we look around and begin to notice not only what we have brought with us, but also …that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. Emily Perl Kinsgley, who wrote “Welcome to Holland,” was writing about giving birth to and raising a child with Down Syndrome.  That was her change in flight plan. Discovering what’s possible is when we find it in ourselves to go out and look at the new landscape in which we find ourselves. We find the new guidebooks, learn new languages, meet new people, see with new eyes - as Joseph Campbell put it, it’s when we “let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”

In the interim time ahead, as you search for a new minister, those of you from First Parish  will be asking yourself these questions about every aspect of cong life and your connection to it – What’s lost, what remains, what’s possible? I encourage you to ask them about the changes in your personal life as well.

For large losses, you will need to cycle through these three steps again and again, gradually carving your way through and grieving transforming loss one manageable fragment at a time. What’s lost, what remains, what’s possible?

You may someday reach the very final step of discovering what’s possible - which only happens at the very end of the grieving process, if ever, John says: it is accepting that the past cannot be changed and that we are who we are because of the past, not in spite of it; that we are who we are because of the changes and losses that came our way, not in spite of them; that we are who we are, because there was a change in the flight plan and we never made it to Italy. If we can reach that understanding, we will not spend the rest of our life in mourning, wishing that our life had been other than it has been.

For all this talk of loss and grief, my inspiration this morning is really hope. By acknowledging and grieving the losses that come with change, we best enable ourselves to see and appreciate what’s left, and open our selves to what is possible, so we can know in our bones, that there is yet more love to come for us, more peace, more hope, even more joy to come…somewhere, and we’ll free ourselves to appreciate and enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about …about wherever it is that we’ve landed for now.

So may we be.

Works Cited

Bridges, William. Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Print.

Kingsley, Emily Perl. “Welcome to Holland.”  © 1987 at  

http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html

Miller, James E. Changes and Possibility: Discovering Hope in Life’s Transitions. Fort Wayne: Willowgreen, 2005. Print

Schneider, John M. Finding My Way: From Trauma to Transformation: The Journey Through Loss and Grief. Traverse City, MI: Seasons Press, 2012. Print

by the Rev. Kenneth W. Sawyer

A sermon preached at the First Parish in Wayland

On Sept. 16, 1979; Feb. 6, 1994; and Jan. 22, 2012

To the list of the basic categories of religion, elements of life most fully lived, to faith, belief, doubt, compassion, justice, mercy, community and love, this morning I want to add one other.  I want to talk about passion.

I do not mean passion as the word is most often used, to mean that which, for instance, goes on in many a movie or television soap opera, I am told.  It is not that I wish to reinstitute religious wars against that sort of behavior, by which I mean your basic 6a definition, passion as “ardent affection,” mixed with something of 6c, “sexual desire,” both of which, you understand, are affirmed in Scripture, but not what I mean to talk about this morning.

While I suppose that that is the most common use of the word “passion” that I don’t want to use – passion as in passionate embrace, or as in “passion pit,” which is what teens once called a drive-in theater  - there are a wealth of other meanings of “passion” that don’t fit my intentions this morning.  I don’t mean, for instance, to affirm the religious nature of outbreaks of bad temper, however well Jesus’ example in the temple with the money-changers would provide a text.

Nor do I mean to affirm uncontrollable displays of emotion, nor a physical disorder that causes suffering, nor (and this one’s the most obscure) that state of being subjected to or acted on by what is external or foreign to one’s true nature, especially a state of desire or emotion that represents the influence of what is external and opposes thought and meaning as the true activity of the human mind.  End quote.  I definitely do not mean that.  I don’t even understand that. (It sounds to me like a definition snuck into the dictionary to get back at someone with whom someone had argued about the proper use of the human mind, perhaps a disliked relative or a professional colleague.)

Nor do I have in mind even more far-fetched uses of the word, of which I know one in particular.  I took a course in Cambridge years ago from a brilliant sociologist and psychologist whose passion it was to decry passion.  (This brings to mind May Sarton’s poem, “Dialogue”:

                The teacher of logic said, “Reason.”

                The poet said, “Passion.”

                “Without logic, we muddle

                And fail, said the teacher

                Of reason.

 The poet said, “Fiddle!

                What about Nature?”

                “Has Nature no plan,

                You poor fuddled creature?

                You’re a rational man,

                Not an ape or an angel.”

                The poet said, “Nonsense!

                I’m an angel, an ape,

                And a creature of sense,

                Not a brain in a box

                That a mere jackanapes

                With logic unlocks.

                I’m total.  I’m human.

                It’s you who are not.”

                “You sound like a woman.”

                The poet said, “Rot!

                You’re just a machine.

                You can’t write a poem.

                You can’t make a dream.”

                But the logical man

                Said, “I’ll stick to my reason.”

                (He said it with passion.))

So it was her passion to decry passion, to study it in surveys and interviews and unmask it for the danger that it is to us all, to women in particular, to anyone who strives for full maturity.

But her definition was so forced as to create no end of confusion, for what she really wanted to attack is what is commonly called Romantic Love.  And one kept having to translate as she would lambaste passion as the root of a good deal of evil, meaning by passion none of the things I have mentioned so far, nor what I mean to affirm later, but meaning instead the kind of ardent affection that is not love, the kind that is not focused on another person but on one’s own idealizations projected onto another.  That’s not mature love at all but a form of narcissism, common to people in their late teens.  She labored mightily and well to identify that kind of behavior, and to contrast it with mature love, which cares for the other person as herself or himself, not as a mirror that we hold up to stare into adoringly; she wanted to insist on the dangers of that deception, and the poor grounds that such feelings make for a marriage.

Which I thought a good point.  But it helped not at all for her to call that passion, since nearly everyone already had a perfectly good definition or two of what passion is and none were apt to be that.

For instance, the way I want to use the word is in the sense my dictionary calls 5b: depth or vehemence of feeling, a state or capacity for emotional excitement.  Like ardor, like enthusiasm, most of all, I suppose, like zest.  Like the gusto the beer ads used to speak of, however unlikely their claims were for providing it; but more than just gusto, just bigness, something like that but better focused, more intent, more purposeful.

Let me tell you about Giacometti’s dog.  In 1951, the sculptor Alberto  Giacometti, the one who does those tall, skinny people, that year he did a dog.  It stands 18” high and is now at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.  Jonathan Aaron has a poem about a dog, in which he credits the inspiration to Giacometti:

                A Dog

    (After Giacometti)

While he jogs

head-down toward

memory of a taste,

a voice, a pale rectangle

of open doorway,

his front legs

constantly fail

to correct his hindquarters’

sleepy need to travel

somewhere else.

Only his narrow,

low-slung muzzle

gives the rest of him

reason to follow.

His skin

is a thin blanket

thrown over the old argument

of his skeleton

to keep the rain out

and the dry guts in.

Each step he takes

is an achievement

of what remains

ready at any moment

to become less

than the sum of its parts.

But whenever paw hits

pavement, and the shock

ripples down or up his knobby

spine, his bones are shaken

into cooperation,

and all of him

settles into motion

as continuous as the

twist of water

in the gutter beside him.

Ready to cross the wet street

he glances at the traffic,

his eyes glowing zeros,

neon and depthless

before they dim

to a green of sea-worn glass

as he looks the other way.

     (The New Yorker)

OK.  that’s a picture of a dog like Giacometti’s.  Now I will offer another poem, this time by Robert Wallace, and this time precisely about Giacometti’s dog (that’s the name of the poem), which shifts our focus at the end:

                Lopes in bronze:

                  scruffy,

                     thin.   In

                The Museum of Modern Art

                  head

                      down, neck long as sadness

                lowering to hanging ears

                  –he’s eyeless –

                       that hear

                nothing, and the sausage

                   muzzle

                        that leads him as

                surely as eyes:

                    he might

                        be

                dead, dried webs or clots of flesh

                    and fur

                        on the thin, long bones – but

                isn’t, obviously

                    is obviously

       travelling intent on his

                own aim:  legs

                     lofting

                        with a gaiety the dead aren’t known

                for.  Going

                     onward in one place,

                        he doesn’t so much ignore

                as not recognize

                      the well-

                         dressed Sunday hun-

                dreds who passing, pausing make

                       his bronze

                          road

                move.  Why

                       do they come to admire

                           him?

                They wouldn’t care for real dogs

                       less raggy

                           than he

                Is.  It’s his tragic

                      insouciance

                           bugs them? or is

                it that art can make us

                      cherish

                         anything – this command

                of shaping and abutting space - -

                      that makes us love

                          even mutts,

                even the world, accept

                       even

                           the starry wheels by which we’re hurled

                toward death, having

                      the rocks and wind

                           for comrades?

                It’s not this starved hound,

                       but Giacometti seeing

                           him we see.

                We’ll stand in line all day

                       to see <anyone>

                           love anything enough.

Now we are speaking of passion.

That love, that focused, affectionate, active engagement with the materials of his life and of his mind, with the bronze and with the image he holds of the dog, that engagement is a passion whose model bespeaks a more general awakeness, an involvement in life that is available to us each.

“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun,” said Thoreau, “the day is a perpetual morning.  It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of <women and>

men.  Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”

Marvelous!  Morning has broken, indeed, but only if we are awake to its dawning, said Thoreau: but if we are awake, it our senses are opened, our vitality stirred, if the world has engaged our attention, our love and our energy, if our lives are “passioned,” as the verb used to be, passioned by life itself, then morning breaks ever for there is dawn in us.

But were Thoreau’s words the mere boasting of youth, a young man’s taunting celebration of a vigor that characterizes our earlier years, repeated by me first when I was not yet thirty-five. The vigor of youth, the wisdom of age, a hundred liturgical pieces in every tradition speak of and praise, as though youth were daft and maturity enfeebled.

But even granting time’s toll on the body, the passion of which I speak knows no such season, it stirs the old at least as well as the young.  This is from Clarke Wells:

                “I suppose I should write this week something institutional or churchly or ethical, but my heart

                isn’t in it.  Where my heart is these days is a very personal thing between me and God.  Or who-

                ever it is that turns the seasons and lays the sun across the trees with that sudden and terrible

                beauty.

                “You know, I’ve been taught all my life to believe that growing up meant to become less

                vulnerable, that getting overwhelmed by life is what happens when you are young, that the

                charge of visions, feeling, and nameless longing gradually spends itself in the process of

                maturing, that life as we get older is less tearing, not as confusing, ecstatic, strange.

                “Well, I’m here to testify to the opposite.  And to warn you and others…about what life may

                have in store.  I was driving back from Lowell State University yesterday afternoon on some

                country roads, and I simply had to stop the car near a stone fence and go through it for an

                hour.

                “It had nothing to do with practical matters or politics or theology or vocation or marriage

                or my maturity or immaturity.  It had to do with autumn trees against the blue and shattered

                light and where I am with living.  I report it to you on the chance that you’re as odd as I – that

                it all gets more intense, not less – so that if you have to go through the same thing, like stopping

                your car for an hour, you’ll not feel crazy at your age being torn apart that way.”

One has only to listen to recordings of the cellist Pablo Casals when he was in his 80’s as engaged, as alert, as awake as ever; while even at thirty-four I spoke of looking back on younger years beclouded by concerns of self and identity and other meager distractions.

I certainly don’t feel a whole lot less clouded over now.  I suspect that at any given time many of us at our many different ages are in need of a touch of greater passion, of devotion, of enthusiasm, even a bit of what my dictionary calls “agitated vehemence.”

Now there are limits to such engagement.  Passion is not IT but only a part, albeit an important one. 

I like the way the poet Don Marquis has his cockroach hero archy describe the sides of the balancing act I would call us toward:

                                the lesson of the moth

                I was talking to a moth

                the other evening

                he was trying to break into

                an electric light bulb

                and fry himself on the wires

                why do you fellows

                pull this stunt I asked him

                because it is the conventional

                thing for moths or why

                if that had been an uncovered

                candle instead of an electric

                light bulb you would

                now be a small unsightly cinder

                have you no sense

                plenty of it he answered

                but at times we get tired

                of using it

                we get bored with the routine

                and crave beauty

                and excitement

                fire is beautiful

                and we know that if we get

                too close it will kill us

                but what does that matter

                it is better be happy

                for a moment

                and burned up with beauty

                than to live a long time

                and be bored all the while

                so we wad all our life up

                into one little roll

                and then we shoot the roll

                that is what life is for

                it is better to be a part of beauty

                for one instant and then cease to

                exist than to exist forever

                and never be a part of beauty

                our attitude toward life

                is come easy go easy

                we are like human beings

                used to be before they became

                too civilized to enjoy themselves

                and before I could argue him

                out of his philosophy

                he went and immolated himself

                on a patent cigar lighter

                I do not agree with him

                myself I would rather have

                half the happiness and twice

                the longevity

                but at the same time I wish

                there was some thing I wanted

                as badly as he wanted to fry himself

Given excesses of drug use and violence, I think we have had enough flying into cigar lighters to avoid the boredom of only life.  There are limits.  But archy’s feeling at the end is mine, too, and I want and need to find ways of giving sway to passion’s enlivening spirit, that our alternative to self-immolation not be equally destructive, trivial chores and mediocre challenges and a day-to-dayness that numbs us on our passage to the grave.  “Just as the hand, held before the eyes, can hide the tallest mountain,” says the wisdom of the Hasidim, “so the routine of everyday life can help us from seeing the vast radiance and the secret wonders that fill the world.”

The water metaphor stays with me from Thaddeus Clark.

                (“Life and no moment of it can any more be seized and held than the flow of

                water which streams from an open faucet.  One can only drink and drink deeply

                and continue to drink.” Quoted by Laurel Hallman, “Salvation”)

Of course, it also suggests that any too-consuming thirst for life is going to have us gasping and gagging.  We have to rest, like a person drinking from a faucet, we have to catch our breath.  But still, the water flows and flows, and for all of us the well will run dry.  Our hope and our task and our glory is to drink fully and deeply of life as it flows.

And I say that even knowing that at times the taste is bitter at best.  The word itself knows this.  “Passion” derives of all things from the Latin word for suffering, and it still means that in one sense, as in the passion of the martyrs or of Jesus.  The passion flower is called that not for romantic reasons but because its petals reminded someone of Jesus on the cross.  “Passion” contains in itself etymologically

and as a secondary meaning an awareness of the suffering and pain that passion can involve, and redeem.

I don’t know why I’m so quotey today.  Every now and then it happens, usually with a subject like this one that I have been turning over for years and tossing things into a folder somewhere, anticipating an eventual morning.

I have quotations that are mystic, like this from Annie Dillard:  “Everywhere I look I see fire:  that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”  (Which reminds me, although I don’t have the quotation, of a literary contribution, from Brendan Behan, who said about the same thing – as I recall, that one is a fool who cannot see that all the world is on fire.)

And I have quotations psychoanalytic.  This is from Freud:   “The difference between nervous health and nervous illness (neurosis) is narrowed down to a practical distinction, and is determined by a practical result – how far the person concerned remains capable of a sufficient degree of capacity for enjoyment and active achievement in life.  The difference can probably be traced back to the proportion of energy which has remained free relative to that of the energy that has been bound by repression…”

Energy, enjoyment, active achievement – elements, then, of the healthy life as well as of the religious life. 

I even have quotations theological, and with that we come full circle, back to an artist – not surprisingly, to Vincent Van Gogh:  “You must love with a high and intense determination,” he said, “with your will and your intellect, and seek always to deepen, expand and improve your knowledge, for that way lies God.  If a <person> loves Rembrandt profoundly, then in his heart of hearts he knows he knows God.”

If a person loves Rembrandt, or bronze and the image of a dog, or nature, or the progress of the humankind, or excellence, or beauty, or leading the minds of youth to goodness or knowledge, or trading honorably and well in the marketplace of goods or services or ideas – if a woman, if a man, love deeply and fully some good thing, some decent aim, some ennobling process – if her life, if his life be touched with passion, just so much is that person blessed.

May life’s entrancing challenges and joys arrest our wandering attention, and invest our lives with such love, such engagement, such passion.  Amen.

The Homily at the First Parish in Wayland, Mass.

At a Multigenerational Service

On January 15, 2012

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

       Does anyone here dream when they sleep at night or when they fall asleep because the sermon is too long and boring?

       Everybody dreams. Some people dream in color, some people don’t. People have been known to come up with inventions or solutions to problems they were working on … in dreams.

       Some dreams are things we wish would happen, just like it said in the song [“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”]. But maybe not as many as we would like. It’s not like we go to sleep and every time we enter a world where everything is beautiful and fair and delightful.

       At least that is not the way it for me. Most people at least sometimes have dreams that are scary or sad. I hope you don’t have many of them – in fact, I hope you do not have any. I do not have many. No, what I sometimes have are dreams in which I am lost or otherwise frustrated, which is not a wish my heart makes.

        But here’s the thing: Dream can also mean a wish the heart makes when we are wide awake, when we picture something we would like to see happen, like a world that is beautiful and fair for everyone everywhere.

       That is the kind of dream Martin Luther King was talking about. Did he actually dream it one night in his sleep? Probably not. But he could dream it in a sermon or in a speech, and there he was, in Washington, D.C., talking to hundreds of thousands of people, who were there because they wanted freedom and justice for everyone in America, and he was saying the words on the papers in front of him, words approved by the people who organized that big rally, because they wanted to know in advance what everyone was going to say, and the words on the paper were good, not very exciting, but good.

       The big crowd applauded now and then, and one time you can hear, they applauded more than before, and not long after that a woman on stage with Dr. King says, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” because she had heard him do that before in other places, at churches and other rallies.

       And off he went, not reading any more but sharing this vision of how things should be, with that great repeated phrase, “I have a dream,” that both ends one part of the vision and rolls into the next one, carrying the energy and vision along.

       I thought of calling this homily, “Do Dreams Just Happen?” Well, when it comes to dreams we have when we’re fast asleep, there are people who spend a lot of time studying and thinking and arguing about why anyone has the dreams they do.

        But dreams like Dr. King’s are created, and they get handed down. King’s dream explicitly echoes dreams from the Bible and from our national history, visions of life and of our country people before us created.

       I thank my colleague Victor Carpenter for a quote by the filmmaker Henry Hampton, who produced the television documentary “Eyes on the Prize” about the civil rights movement in America. Hampton said, “When you dream of something, you can begin to take it upon yourself, make it yours, change it. But you have to dream it first.” Like the dream of making that documentary, Victor points out, adding Hampton’s words that a dream is “thinking of the world as you really would have it. I don’t mean wish it. I mean dream it.”

       It is like that for any of us. There are dream we have when we’re fast asleep, but then there are dreams we make for ourselves, what we set ourselves to accomplish. You can read more about it in Kevin’s sermon on will power from two weeks ago. But Hampton says, before you can even draw on your resources of resolve you need the dream – more than a hope, a dream, just this side of an expectation, and definitely a challenge.

       Just last week I read that the psychologist John Norcross said that “Contrary to widespread public opinion, a considerable proportion of New Year resolvers do succeed…. You are 10 times more likely to change by making a New Year’s resolution compared to non-resolvers with the identical goals and comparable motivation to change.”

       It counts for something that at the outset the country resolved that “all people have certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We made that resolution, and from the beginning, with slavery, we failed, and again in other ways thereafter, and in some ways still. But the dream has persevered, not just the hope, but the dream of country we seek to be.

       Likewise as a congregation – and I refrain from noting at any length the dreams included in our current capital campaign, even if they are perfect illustrations – right off, when first we gathered in 1640, the act of creation was the signing of a covenant, the whole Puritan venture was inspired by a dream of the society they would create.

       Parts of the dream have changed, but not all. And we go on nourishing in each other a dream for ourselves and society. Henry Hampton, who since has died, accused his fellow UUs of wishing more than we dream when it comes to achieving peace and justice and freedom.

       Maybe so, but we keep trying. And for us, and the country, it helps to be reminded of our dreams, like the one so powerfully put forth by the Rev. Dr. King.

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On January 8, 2012

Here we are at the start of another calendar year, and an exciting one it will be here at First Parish. I do hope everyone has read the latest church newsletter, called The Unitarian, prepared by Nan Jahnke, and a beautiful thing it is to behold on screen, but either on screen or in printed form it is also just chock full of activities to look forward to.

There are Walden Forums coming up, and the auction, one of my favorite occasions for the fun it affords, there are special services planned for the spring, including another music Sunday with the return of Carmina Burana (talk about exciting), canvass afternoon and evening talent shows and dinners, the Rummage Sale, museum visits, groups of many sorts, more Interfaith Hospitality Network housing, I could go on and on, and through it all our capital campaign, For All The Ages, culminating in a celebration of its success.

Most of you know, because you read your mail or heard it by word of mouth, that about that time, toward the end of the church year, I will be saying a goodbye to First Parish, having finished my thirty-eighth year as your twenty-ninth minister.

For me, and I know for many of you, it will be a sad occasion. But as it happens, life goes on, and eventually a person turns sixty-eight, as I will this July, and at the end of that month I’ll be gone, not from town, but from this congregation I dearly love. 

I am sorry I did not say in my letter, but given some of the response I have received I will say now that my decision was not based on my illness. Most of you know I have prostate cancer. I don’t think ministers should burden parishioners with details of their personal health, but I know there has been concern that eventually I will need further treatment following surgery last summer. I suppose an illness like that does make one more aware of life’s finitude, and weighs on the side of having time enough to enjoy life in other ways before it ‘s all over. But a half year after the operation what cancer remains has been pleasingly indolent, it’s just wait and watch for now.  

It is uncommonly immodest of me to repeat, but it has been nice to hear not just that people appreciate my efforts over the years, but that I will be leaving, as one of you put it, at the top of my game. This is good, because I am looking forward to a fun and exciting and spiritually rewarding half year ahead.

But as Michael Stipe, lead singer of the group R.E.M. said when the group broke up this past September, after only thirty-one years (ha!), “A wise man once said, ‘The skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’” And I get to leave knowing things are going so well – and that they will continue to, and more so, or at least in interesting new ways, along with all the ways life here will continue.

I like the way Ann Gordon put it once. She likened First Parish to a big, strong, healthy ship – and said while the crew may change now and then, First Parish sails on smoothly.

And while I know it may take a while to see the transition as a good thing – and please know, I know some people may have been looking forward to it – it will be good in many ways, ways that excite me on your behalf. It has been pointed out the asset having Kevin Tarsa as intern this year is in showing again, as in years before, how good the people are preparing for our ministry along with those already experienced at it, like our three second ministers in the last twenty years.

And Lisa Maria will still be here as the other fulltime person, with her abundant energy, skill, fresh perspectives, and personality. She will be joined by an interim minister, and a search process will begin to find your next settled minister, your thirty-second. There is a process for this in place, it is something the UUA has been doing through the ages and they know how to help. Not to worry, things will go fine, and I trust you will return from the summer as glad as ever to see each other and your new minister and the other members of the great staff you have.    

I have a second reading, one I have been saving for this occasion since 1996 when a colleague of mine, Ed Lane, wrote it for the congregation he was serving, at the end of a long career, as the year began in which he would be retiring. He wrote,

“I grieve the loss of Calvin and Hobbs. Bill Waterson closed down my favorite comic strip on December 31. We had been warned several weeks ago that it was going to happen, but, still, I went out to pick up my Sunday Globe hoping to find a last-minute reprieve, that Waterson had changed his mind, that the strip was going to continue.

“No such luck, of course. The last strip marked the end of the year and the new beginning of 1996. Calvin and Hobbs are out with their toboggan. Calvin says: ‘Wow, it really snowed last night!’ May I add, this was back when it used to snow. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Hobbes: ‘Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new!’ Calvin: ‘A new year … a fresh, clean start!’ Hobbes: ‘It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!’ Calvin: ‘A day full of possibilities! It’s a magic world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy … Let’s go exploring!’ as on their sled they are heading off the comic strip page and into the woods.

“I was almost in tears. I want to frame that last strip and drape it in black. Calvin and Hobbes – I’ve long wondered if they were named after the sixteenth-century theologian, John Calvin, and the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes – have long been my philosophical and theological mentors. Calvin, with his direct but devious no nonsense way of getting right to the issue at hand and sure he is always right – not unlike John Calvin; Hobbs, with his reflective empiricism, finding the holes in Calvin’s logic – not unlike Thomas Hobbes.

“The last words of the strip, ‘Let’s go exploring!’ give us a profound benediction – words for a new year, words of endings and beginnings. I think of them in the context of the excitement of my retirement and of your transition to a life with a new minister, both of which are endings and beginnings. As we grieve the ending let us celebrate our time together, but most of all let us look ahead. ‘Let’s go exploring!’”

But that is the basic message of many a New Year homily or sermon, even at the start of a year that does not have one big change already built in. I think that is the minister’s assignment, to use the occasion of the new year dawning to generate enthusiasm for what things may lie ahead, while acknowledging that not all of it will be easy or good.

I went back and looked over how I handled that assignment in days of yore, when I did (and I did not always), and I noticed several things. First, how often I refer to the current time, whatever time it was, as one particular trying on the spirit. “As we meet in this chilly, troubled time,” that sort of thing. Reading on you find what we were troubled by that year, like the hostages in Iran.

Second, I make a really big deal about the ordeal that winter is, or was at the time. It is as though I never noticed the skiers for whom winter was the payoff of the year. And I like winter myself, even if I once quoted Thoreau, who said, “Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.” [2/2/54]

Twice I developed January as a theme, comparing the harshness of the month and the struggles we sometimes have “within our personal lives at times, the Januarys of our lives, those blocks of time that must be endured and lived through somehow, around which there are no shortcuts, which simply arrive to sit upon our days in their lugubrious, cumbersome way, when it seems hard to believe that February will ever come, and knowing that February is no better, only that much closer to March and maybe by then the drift will be carrying us into a new spring.”  [1/4/76]

And yet every time the message is ultimately one of hope and faith and expectation. Even Thoreau, in another winter, in another mood, wrote, “I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.” [12/5/56] And you don’t need to stay imprisoned indoors, though you may, but either way, winter or not, and in the many months after, we are free to find new fields and resources, to go exploring.

Because, as I said on yet another early January occasion, “life goes on unfolding, revelation is not sealed, prospects open up again and again, new challenges, new promise, love yet fresh, peace still possible, hope alluring still.” [1/6/91]

It has been said that every minister has one sermon that they preach over and over in different ways. I think this is nonsense. But I concede that there are themes that persevere, which is, incidentally, one of the reasons I am excited about your having someone new as your regular preacher with different themes than you have been hearing the last thirty-seven and a half years.

Still, it is doubtful you will escape the message of hope and expectancy despite life’s frustrations, failures, pain and loss. It is what our religion does, as do many others. Our Unitarian Universalist take has been a particularly strong hopefulness about human possibility. Some of us are reading William Ellery Channing, founding father of American Unitarianism, as it were. He thinks there are no bounds on human improvement, to the point of the perfection Jesus achieved. So we have never lacked for optimism, though most of us have more modest aspirations. 

New Years can be a time for affirming those aspirations anew — as Kevin discussed in his sermon last week, which you can read on line — as well as a spirit of hope and fresh resolve. Which leads to my final points.

Two years ago I attended a conference on how to use the last years of one’s ministry well. One person was there with only months to go, one was looking ahead ten years. I was not sure.

I learned some things. One exercise was to pair off and tell a colleague what our normal leaving style is, just everyday. I knew the answer for me, because I am aware that there are people who say, I’ll be leaving now, which means a process has begun that will lead to their driving away in about twenty minutes, whereas when I say I’m leaving, I am up and gone, ordinarily. But that will not work here. It was recommended no more than a year’s notice, but more than a few months. Seven months sounds about right, especially since attention at the start of the year needed to be on the new staff and the capital campaign, and by now the Parish Committee needs to start working on the transition.  (By the way, my colleague said he was the person you had to make leave the party so the hosts could go to bed. I heard that he has given his church three years notice.)

But the main thing I took from the conference was the importance of being intentional about the use of one’s time and efforts, discerning what is worth attending to and what can be ignored. This is always a good idea, but it helps when one knows the time involved is limited, in a fairly immediate way. One line was, “Live so as not to later hold any sense of, ‘If only I had….’” Obviously this applies to others than ministers nearing the ends of their careers.

To help us focus on what those things might be that we would be sure to try to accomplish, we made lists, year by year. I have that list. Just making it helped. For one thing, you can see that not everything can fit. Of the things on that list, I have done some. But not all, because other things happened; that’s just how life is. It’s good to focus on what matters and plan ahead, and necessary to alter the plan as circumstances change.

As I have said one way or another several times in the last twenty minutes, such is life. None of us gets to find it nice to be a certain age and decide to remain there, eternally thirty-nine. People we like and count on change, and so do we. But some things go on, and this congregation is one. The new minister will assuredly feel as lucky as I to serve a congregation so vital and able and so fond of each other and of the religious community that lives here.

 So, in the spirit of Janus, as we pass through the door of the new year and then the gate of a new ministry, I hope you all have happy things you can look back on, and lots and lots of happy things to look forward to.*

*The second half of this paragraph repeats the closing words of the earlier Time for All Ages, which talked about Janus.