Sermon
On Friday morning I was working in my study, and I looked out my window and saw three of the care givers at our Arlington Child Care Cooperative that resides in our building during weekdays pushing three carriages along the sidewalk each one overflowing with babies. I laughed with joy to see children outside again after almost three weeks of isolation.
If medals were to be given, after handing them out to law enforcement for apprehending the snipers, they should go all the teachers and childcare workers and mothers and fathers who had to contend with children who were not able to work off their excess energy outdoors. Thank you all for coping.
's been a time of coping for all of us. I believe the most effective way to cope is to recognize how personally powerful we are as individuals and as a community, and that we need to use our power to counteract the destructiveness of those who spread terror by spreading peace and justice.
One mission of our church is to always hold up examples of those who have used their power for healing and love instead of violence and hatred, individuals like Albert Switzer, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Clara Barton, Jesus, Buddha, and so many more. We need to embrace these people in our memories, especially at times when those who have done such great harm are on the front pages and in our consciousness.
But we also need to remember the many smaller acts of compassion practiced by each one of us every day. We tend to forget the ongoing, sustaining, inspiring affect all of us have on each other, but it is a vital part of our lives.
We must never forget that you and I have the power to strengthen or diminish the life around us. We can do that in many ways, through the words we speak or do not speak, the way we listen or do not listen, the actions we take or do not take.
In a marvelous book called My Grandfather's Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen, a physician and therapist, tells of her grandfather giving her a seed to plant when she was a girl. She planted it in a cup, watered it and cared for it until, miracle of miracles, a shoot grew up out of the ground and leaves appeared.
"I was completely astonished," she writes. Day by day they got bigger. I could not wait to tell my grandfather, certain that he would be as surprised as I was. But of course he was not. Carefully he explained to me that life is everywhere, hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places. I was delighted. "And all it needs is water, Grandpa?' I asked him. Gently he touched me on the top of my head. "No,..," he said, "All it needs is your faithfulness."
Yes, life needs our faithfulness if it is to grow and become a blessing. Remen's grandfather taught her to say a blessing whenever she had an unexpected meeting with the Holy. He taught her blessings for every event, even as mundane as going to the bathroom. Rachel learned that the greatest blessing of all was to serve life.
AWe bless the life around us far more than we realize," she writes. AMany simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognitionY"
Remen gives one example of a small but important blessing. A friend told her a story of when she was married to a man who was highly educated and respected in his profession and the community but who was physically and psychologically abusive to her, so much so that she lost her self-confidence, believing that his view of her as inferior was correct.
"All of this changed one day on a street corner in New York City. As Elaine and her husband were standing at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change, she had looked across the street and noticed a building with exceptionally beautiful prewar architecture. She had called his attention to it. >Look, Melvin,' she had said. >Isn't that building beautiful?' Thinking they were alone, he had responded to her in the tone of absolute contempt that he reserved for their private conversations. >You mean the one over there that looks exactly like every other building on the street?' he sneered.
"She had flushed with shame and fallen silent. And then a woman standing next to them, a complete stranger who was also waiting for the light to change, turned to fixed him with a glare. She's absolutely right, you know,' she said with a strong New York accent. 'That building is beautiful. And you, sir, are a horse's ass.' When the light turned green, this woman crossed the street and walked away."
Yes, there are many ways to bless the world ' some of them more enjoyable than others. A blessing is not a gift we give to another. "A blessing is a moment of meeting," writes Remen, Aa certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. By making a place for wholeness within our relationships, we offer others the opportunity to be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them and around them that is not genuine. We enable people to remember who they are."
And who are we? We are blessings, each and every one of us, blessings to life and to each other. No matter our age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability, we are on this earth to bless and be blessed.
Let's face it: most of us are not even aware of the many ways we are blest and the ways we bless others. Like the man who could not see the beauty of the building his wife pointed out to him, we are blind to the incredible beauty and love that surrounds us and that is within us. Perhaps our lives are too full of things and stuff to allow for true blessings, and so we ignore them or take them for granted.
The real obstacle may be that we haven't truly learned to bless ourselves, and we cannot bless others until we learn to bless ourselves first. To feel blessed requires not the ability to fix it but to celebrate and affirm the world. It requires being aware of the beauty and sensitive to the mystery. It requires the ability to serve life not out of sacrifice but for the pure joy of it.
Just as Rachel Naomi Remen discovered that to grow the seed her grandfather gave her requires faithfulness, so we need to realize that AThere is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act."
As a physician Rachel Naomi Remen learned the blessings of life from people who were dying because they were the ones who were most authentic in their relationships and who could most appreciate the preciousness of each moment. Like the New York woman who told the abusive man exactly what she thought, those who are dying don't have time to play games. They are who they are with no apologies.
To serve is simply to connect with other human beings, to allow our lives to touch each other as genuinely as possible with no games and no apologies for who we are. When we truly serve life we find our way home, to a place of belonging and strength. We move closer to each other and to our authentic selves.
In reality many people live in disconnection, keeping their distance from others and from the source of life. We use technology to isolate us, to keep us from touching and being touched at our core. And the worship of the self over community and greed over generosity closes the door on the soul.
Those of you who volunteered yesterday may have discovered this truth: that we do not serve in order to save others; we serve in order to relate to others, to reconnect, to bring forth not only their wholeness but our own as well.
We do not serve another when we assume ourselves in any way as superior. We only serve when we enter into a relationship of equals, when we strive to see beyond race, religion, class so that we may move into the depths of being.
When we do serve each other, when we meet face to face, the superficialities fall away, and we see, for perhaps the first time, the light in the world that is always shining both around us and within us.
To discover this light is not easy in such a dark world. When we are threatened by acts of terror we tend to retreat and build walls to protect us from harm. But those walls also make us blind to the light of the world. We forget our own goodness and begin to see only the darkness in others.
Learning to bless each other is the hope of the world and the solution to the destructiveness and greed around us. To repair the world requires that we discover the deep connections to the life within and around us, that we rekindle our compassion and caring for those in pain.
To serve others is the work of the soul. Whenever we reach out beyond ourselves we are enhancing not only our own soul but the soul of the world. We are growing into goodness.
One of Remen's patients, a civil rights lawyer who almost died of cancer, puts it this way: "'I find something in others that I have found in myself. Something struggling to break through obstacles and live whole. I can see its struggle and speak its language. So I can strengthen it' he paused thoughtfully as others have strengthened it in me. My wife tells me that I have finally opened my heart. Perhaps so, but that's not exactly it.' He falls silent. >If it didn't sound so odd to say, I guess I can bless the life in other people and be blessed by them. I do it in my work, but it goes beyond my work. It seems just now like the most important thing I can do.'"
This is the most important thing we can do: to bless the world and be blessed by it. One of the principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association is that "We covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."
I like to visualize the interdependent web as a web of blessings, each one of us reaching out far beyond our mere physical presence to affect so many others around us, even those we will never know, even those who will live long after we have died. When we link our lives together, working together for the betterment of our world, then we weave a web of blessings that upholds and strengthens all that is good.
Perhaps this web of blessings is God, or perhaps it is the essence of life, but no matter what you choose to call it, let us agree that this web of blessings is why we exist, and it is why we will continue to exist even after our last breath is extinguished.
Have you noticed that when we are blessed by the caring and love of another human being that we are naturally inspired to bless others around us with our caring and love? This is how the web of blessings is created, by each of us being moved by the kindness of others to reach out and be kind in turn. It's not an obligation, and it is not done out of guilt. Weaving that web is as natural as breathing itself, as genuine as life itself.
I imagine those of you who were involved in the Working Together Weekend experienced that web of blessings yesterday. I hope your working together with others in our church and in the community motivated you to want to volunteer on a more frequent basis. Or it may have inspired you to reach out in other ways to those around you, to your family, friends, co-workers, or neighbors. And I hope this will be an annual event in our church, a periodic reminder and celebration of our continued involvement in weaving a web of blessings around us.
Let me close with this beautiful poem by Miguel Otero Silva that so well expresses the joy and promise of working together:
When nothing remains of me but a tree
when my ashes have been scattered
beneath our mother earth;
when nothing remains of you but a red rose
nourished by that which once you were;
...when even our names have become mere sounds without echo
asleep in the shade of a fathomless sound;
then you will live on in the beauty of the rose,
and I in the rustling of the tree,
and our love in the murmur of the breeze.
Listen to me!
My wish for us is to live ...
in the spoken words of men and women.
I would survive with you
In the deep lifestream of humanity;
in the laughter of children,
in the peace of humankind,
in love without weeping.
Therefore,
as we must give ourselves to the rose and the tree
to the earth and the wind,
let us give ourselves, I beg you, to the future of the world.
Amen.
Spoken Prayer & Meditation:
We are joyful this morning that the snipers have been captured, and we are now free to enjoy stepping outside our homes once again.
But we are also mindful and mournful of those who were senselessly murdered or seriously injured during these past few weeks.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to them and their families.
Our thoughts and prayers also go out to those who loved Senator Paul Wellstone, his family, and staff who were killed in an airplane crash.
His passion for justice and compassion for the victims of injustice was heroic.
May we learn from his legacy.
And may our mourning for these deaths remind us that in the face of terror and grief we need to work together for the betterment of our world and the wholeness of our souls.
Let us now open our minds and hearts to the place of quiet,
to the silent prayer for the healing of pain,
and the soft, gentle coming of love...
Amen.
Benediction:
In the words of Rachel Naomi Remen: ASometimes life's power shines through us, even when we do not notice. We become a blessing to others then, simply by being as we are."
May our light always shine brightly in our world, and may we always be a blessing to each other.
Shalom, Salaam, Blessed Be, Amen.
