a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 25th, 2004
I was having a little trouble figuring out what I wanted to talk about this week. It wasn’t that I lacked inspiration; if anything, just the opposite -- I had too MUCH inspiration, too many things going on in the world, too many good ideas, all of which deserved fuller exploration and explication. Harry Emerson Fosdick once said that the modern preacher needed to enter the pulpit with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, but even if I just stuck to the headlines it’s hard to know where to begin. Last week’s Iowa Caucuses, next week’s New Hampshire primary, and sandwiched between them, like the rich, creamy middle of an Oreo cookie, the State of the Union Address...and that’s just the timely political stuff. We’ve also got robots on Mars (evocatively named “Spirit” and “Opportunity”), the Patriots are headed for the Super Bowl, and then there are always timeless themes like peace and prosperity, justice and compassion, honesty, integrity, generosity, forgiveness...all of which have received ample illustration, both positive and negative, in recent days, as they do almost every day. There’s so much, it’s hard to know where to begin.
One thing though that has been on my mind quite a bit of late is something that Woody initially brought to my attention. In the most recent issue of The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, there is a comprehensive sociological examination of “Clergy as Political Activists,” which runs well over 100 pages, and reviews the political behavior of clergy across the theological spectrum in the 2000 Presidential election. There are articles surveying both evangelical and mainline Protestant ministers, Catholic Priests, Rabbis and African American ministers, and we Unitarian Universalists even get an article all to ourselves. “Clergy are well positioned to influence others politically,” the study found, because they “tend to be respected both individually and collectively,...are generally perceived to be spiritual and moral leaders who are likely to be attentive to the moral conditions of the world around them, and finally...[they] are generally well educated and engage in more ideological thinking than those with fewer years of schooling.” Well, that all sounded familiar enough; but the most interesting revelation of the study was the extent to which conservative, evangelical Christian pastors now match their more liberal brethren in their levels of political activism.
Historically, mainline Protestant churches have been deeply influenced by a movement known as the Social Gospel, a “theological perspective that stresses structural reform, [and] not just spiritual conversion and personal sanctification, as the means for social change,” and likewise “implies a need for pastors to become politically involved in order to help the less fortunate.” The theology of the Social Gospel served as one of the main inspirations for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s, the Peace movement of the 1960’s, the Environmental and Women’s Rights movements of the 1970’s, the Sanctuary and Nuclear Freeze movements of the 1980’s, the anti-Globalization and Economic Justice movements of the 1990’s, and it continues to exert a powerful influence over the social justice ministries of mainline denominations today -- not just for Unitarian Universalists, but also for Methodists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Lutherans, American Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, even many Reformed Jews and liberal Roman Catholics.
But over this same period of time, there have been two other interesting developments in American society. The first is that political liberals have grown increasingly disillusioned with religious institutions as vehicles for achieving social change. There are a lot of different reasons for this, but the main one, it seems to me, is that Churches tend to move “at the speed of Church” -- we are far too process-oriented, far too interested in achieving consensus before taking any action, to satisfy most Activists, and thus liberal/progressive politics in this country have become increasingly secular in the last half-century, so much so that pollsters now say that Church attendance has become one of the leading indicators of one’s political sympathies among American voters.
This brings us to the second development, which is that over the past two decades or so religious conservatives have become far more politically active than they were a generation ago. Much of this is due to the efforts of national organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, and Focus on the Family, and it almost goes without saying that this activism takes a far different shape from that of liberals. The activism of religious conservatives tends to be focused on issues of “moral reform” -- advocacy of things like prayer in public schools and support for “traditional family values,” opposition to things like abortion and civil unions. And it is centered around a set of beliefs sociologists call “the Civic Gospel,” which goes something like this: “The United States was founded as a Christian nation; Free Enterprise is the only economic system truly compatible with Christian beliefs; Religious values are under attack in contemporary America; Government needs to act in order to protect the nation’s religious heritage; there is only one Christian view on most political issues, and...it is hard for political liberals to be true Christians.”
I’ll doubtlessly return to this material again in more detail at some time in the future, since I find it fascinating and have only begun to scratch the surface of it, but the point I want to make today is that much of the bitter acrimony and political polarization we are experiencing in our country right now is, at bottom, a conflict between two very different understandings of what it means to be religious. It’s more than just a difference of opinion about policy options. Rather, it’s about two fundamentally contradictory world views, which sometimes use the same words, but in many ways are speaking entirely different languages: a conflict between a spirituality based on tolerance and mutual understanding, which sees all human beings as brothers and sisters created in the image of God, and thus embraces an ethic of pluralism and diversity, and a more rigid style of faith which often times views pluralism and diversity as intolerable violations of God’s Law, which “the faithful” are morally obligated to punish and suppress.
And I’ll tell you right now, I don’t know what the solution is. My faith tells me that if we all just do a little more talking with one another, eventually we’ll arrive at some sort of mutual understanding and a shared sense of purpose...but my experience says that the other side isn’t really interested in what I have to say...they’ve already made up their minds, and are basically willing to do or say whatever it takes in order to get their way. They’ll promise us the moon, tell us things they know aren’t true, spend money they no longer have to punish their enemies and reward their friends. And it all just leave me feeling frustrated, and not particularly tolerant or understanding. And yet, the irony of my situation is not entirely lost on me. I never really understood, until this President came to power, what the “vast, right wing conspiracy” of Clinton-haters was really all about. But now I kinda get it, and I even feel a little sorry for them...having to suffer through eight years of a leader they didn’t respect, and whom they felt didn’t deserve the high office that had been entrusted to him. When the mere sight of someone’s face, or even the sound of their voice, is enough to make you feel physically angry, you are stuck in an extremely unpleasant predicament -- which may be all the more reason for you not to like them, but also does little to help you get out of it. And while ranting and venting may make you feel good for awhile, in the long run what’s the point of haranguing the folks around you about something they aren’t really responsible for, and can’t actually do anything to change anyway? And it also occurs to me, as an historian, that there were people who felt this way about FDR -- the original “that man in the White House” -- and others who felt so strongly about Lincoln that they actually dropped out of the country and started a war of rebellion. And this, perhaps, is the greatest irony of all: that it is the descendants of the people whom Lincoln defeated who now control the political party he helped to create, and who are using their newly-found political power to dismantle as much of the New Deal as they can, ignoring the fact that in many cases it was their parents and grandparents who were the principal beneficiaries of it.
Sometimes politics appear to be about issues of policy -- specific steps that need to be taken in order to address particular problems. And sometimes politics appear to be about leadership: questions of character, vision, and personal integrity. But beyond leadership, beyond policy, are the more fundamental concerns of Peace and Prosperity, and whether or not the benefits of a peaceful and prosperous society are going to be broadly shared among the many, or narrowly concentrated in the hands of just a few. Are freedom and justice, education and health care, food, clothing and shelter, only for the wealthy, the privileged and fortunate, even the morally-deserving? Or should they be distributed as widely as possible, and as equally as equity will permit? What should a society do with its surplus, once the basic needs of its members have been met? Should it be invested for the public good? Saved for a rainy day? Left in the hands of private individuals, because they’ve “earned” it? Used to create art, music, literature, perhaps simply leisure itself? Or should it be given as charity to widows and orphans, the homeless and the less-fortunate, whether they “deserve” it or not? And who gets to decide, and how do these decisions get made? -- by everyone concerned, in an open and public forum, or merely by a handful of the most powerful and influential, and behind closed doors? These are not just political issues; they are also religious issues, involving fundamental questions of fairness and compassion, of right and wrong. The answers may seem obvious to you; I think they seem obvious to almost everyone, until we meet someone who sees things differently. And so the discussion begins again, from a slightly different perspective.
I don’t want to try to repeat here on Sunday morning things you can easily hear or read elsewhere. And I don’t think it really matters whether or not you know which candidates I’m going to support (or not support), or how I feel about specific issues, or even larger questions of public policy. I can’t imagine that it would be too hard to figure out, but it’s also beside the point -- because the real challenge is not to persuade you all to think just like me, but rather to get you to look at your own opinions from a slightly different perspective, until you’re certain you know both what and WHY you believe. And my main mantra for the fall is simply going to be "a free and fair election in which everyone who can vote does vote, and every vote gets counted." How can we possibly claim to be exporting Democracy to the rest of the world when we don't even practice it here at home?
Instead of a Constitutional Amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage, how about one eliminating the archaic Electoral College, and (while we’re at it) making election day a national holiday? Or if we are truly interested in dramatic electoral reform, we could institute proportional state-by-state representation in the House, thus putting an end to partisan gerrymandering once and for all. In the last Congressional election, only four challengers defeated incumbent Congressmen, and according to the New York Times, of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, this year there may be as few as 30 where the outcome is truly in doubt. In Pennsylvania, there are half-a-million more registered Democrats that there are Republicans, yet Pennsylvania’s Congressional delegation with 12 Republicans and just 7 Democrats. Add in Florida, Ohio and Michigan, and the Republican Congressional advantage swells to nearly two-to-one, although the numbers of Democratic and Republican voters in these states are almost exactly equal. Proportional representation would mean the each political party would present a slate of candidates for the entire state, and representatives would be elected based on the percentage of votes polled by each party. Not only would it more fairly allocate representation according to the number of each party’s supporters, it would also make it slightly easier for minor party candidates to win election, once their support rises to a certain threshold.
I don’t actually expect any of these things to happen, of course. We’ve done things the way we’ve done them for so long, that even when it’s broken we are reluctant to try to fix it. Yet when the margin of victory in a national election is less than the margin of error, or when the winning candidate can poll fewer votes than the losing candidate and still claim victory, or when the outcome of an election is never in doubt in the first place, because the rules have been written in such a way that it is next to impossible for a challenger to defeat an incumbent, democracy itself is in danger. And this kind of threat to our freedom is far more serious than anything posed by foreign terrorists, since it strikes not just at buildings, but at the heart of our society itself. And we defend against it, not with soldiers and weapons, but with our own good hearts, and our willingness to stand up and say what we truly believe.
Top Ten Ways I, Howard Dean, Can Turn Things Around
10. "Switch to decaf"
9. "Unveil new slogan: 'Vote for Dean and get one dollar off you next purchase at Blimpie'"
8. "Marry Rachel on final episode of 'Friends'"
7. "Don't change a thing -- it's going great"
6. "Show a little more skin"
5. "Go on 'American Idol' and give 'em a taste of these pipes"
4. "Start working out and speaking with Austrian accent"
3. "I can't give specifics yet, but it involves Ted Danson"
2. "Fire the staffer who suggested we do this lousy Top Ten list instead of actually campaigning"
1. "Oh, I don't know -- maybe fewer crazy, redfaced rants"
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Sunday, January 18, 2004
THE STRENGTH TO LOVE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 18th, 2004
I once saw an interview with the actor Ben Kingsley, who casually observed that the secret to his successful characterization of Mohandas Gandhi in the renown Richard Attenbourgh film of the same name, was his realization that Gandhi was not so much a saint who "stooped" to participate in politics as he was a politician struggling to become a saint. I've thought about that apparently offhand remark a great deal since first hearing it. Why is it that professional politicians are so universally held in such low esteem in our society, so much so that even honest-to-God “saintly” individuals (like, say, Jimmy Carter) inevitably appear "compromised" in the public eye when they attempt to participate in the political process? It reminds me of a story I once heard about the syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers, who was approached one evening by a member of the Senate at an Embassy Reception in Washington D.C.
"So you're Ann Landers," the Senator remarked. "Say something funny."
To which Ms Landers immediately responded "So you're a politician. Tell me a lie."
Political activity is the lifeblood of a free society; it is the means by which the will of the people becomes the law of the land. We lift up American Democracy as a model for all the world, yet for some reason we find it all too easy to believe that those who choose to practice politics as a vocation must be doing so from base motives, avariciously, deceitfully, with only their own advancement rather than the best interests of the country or even their own constituents at heart. It’s almost as though we believe that true saints must somehow be "above politics" -- unsullied by the strange bedfellows encountered in smoke-filled cloakrooms. Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread; and Saints, of course, are expected to behave like angels. Politicians on the other hand, remain free to behave like fools.
Of course, it’s not as if the politicians themselves don’t do plenty to bring on this sort of criticism. It’s almost enough to convert even a naive, wide-eyed optimistic Idealist like myself into a confirmed cynic. The events of this past week have been particularly egregious in this regard. While the Democrats were out west in Iowa engaging in their usual round-robin of mutual recrimination, insinuation, and name-calling known as a “Caucus,” the President flew to Atlanta to lay a wreath on the memorial of Martin Luther King Jr. (thus allowing him to bill the taxpayers for his travel), then rode across town to a $2000/plate fundraising dinner (where he raised more money in a single evening than the most credible African-American candidate, Carol Mosely Braun, raised during her entire campaign), after which he returned to Washington DC to announce a trillion-dollar program to send a man to Mars (most of which, if it is actually ever appropriated, will be spent in Texas and Florida: two states critical to the President’s re-election, and notorious for their efforts to circumvent the Voting Rights Act), and that incidentally, since Congress is now in recess, he is going to exercise his “emergency powers” under the Constitution to appoint Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the fact that the controversial Judge had already failed twice to win Senate confirmation, and was opposed (because of his judicial record) by essentially every important Civil Rights organization in the country, including Dr. King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But Pickering is popular with the Religious Right because of his views on abortion, among other things, thus making his recess appointment a perfect opportunity for both parties to pander sanctimoniously to “the Faithful,” portraying themselves as the last bold defenders of all that is Good, and Moral, and True in our society, while characterizing their opponents as Evil Incarnate. Just to be fair, guess where Howard Dean is attending church this morning? That’s right, in Plains Georgia with Jimmy Carter. And don’t even get me started on all the self-righteous double-talk about civil unions, and the so-called “Healthy Marriage Initiative.”
But confronted with things like this, what are we then to think about that rare politician, like a Mohandas Gandhi, who truly does struggle to become a saint -- who seeks to express through his or her political convictions the high ethical and humanitarian principles of a profound religious faith? Actually, despite my own evolving cynicism, I suspect that this sort of politician is far more common than we generally assume, and that our appreciation of their efforts depends to a great extent upon the degree to which our own political opinions are in agreement with theirs. The road to sainthood is long and arduous, and the dividing line between “saint” and “fanatic” typically razor-thin; many are called but few are chosen; ultimately only history will decide whether or not the struggle was fruitful. Sainthood and the aspiration to sainthood are hardly one and the same. Indeed, so rarefied is our view of the former that often merely the ambition to attain it is enough to taint its purity in our eyes. Yet it would be equally misleading to assume that only those who do not seek it, who have their greatness thrust upon them, are somehow deserving of the mantle of our respect. The inner quality of sainthood is a peculiar combination of humility and arrogance: the arrogance to believe that one's deeply held principles and convictions are important enough to make a difference, and the humility to recognize that this challenge cannot be met by aspiration and strength of will alone.
Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 years old when he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, an ad hoc black community group which had been organized to oversee the now famous Montgomery Bus Boycott. As best I can tell, judging from everything I have read, he probably didn't even want the job. At the time, King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for less than two years, and had only completed the final requirements for his Ph.D. at Boston University that previous spring. Furthermore, his selection as President of the M.I.A. was an overtly political choice. As a relative newcomer to the city of Montgomery, King had yet to become too strongly identified with any particular element within the black community, and thus it was felt that perhaps he could provide precisely the kind of neutral leadership which would allow all of the rival factions within that community to come together in this one common purpose. There was a downside consideration to his nomination as well. Should the boycott fail, as many of the more experienced black community leaders believed it might, this young preacher could easily be sacrificed without endangering these more established leaders' hard earned credibility with both the white establishment, and their own constituencies.
Knowing this aspect of the story, one might easily say that Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed have his greatness thrust upon him, and with the unanimous consent of older, wiser, and more politically savvy colleagues at that. But clearly, this would be only part of the tale. More importantly, there was an inner quality to this aspiring but untested religious leader, an intrinsic quality of saintliness if you will, which, once exposed, blossomed forth into a strength which enabled him to endure receiving dozens of threatening letters and telephone calls each day; to survive slander and harassment by police and other government authorities; to have the front of his parsonage blown off by dynamite while his wife and few-month-old child huddled in the kitchen...to experience all of the doubts and fears and pressures to which the human soul is vulnerable, and still not lose sight of the larger aspiration: a goal which in its very rightness and importance dwarfed both his abilities, and his frailties, as a human being.
To be sure, in many ways Martin Luther King Jr. did have his greatness thrust upon him: he happened to be in the right place, at the right time. But the reason we honor him with a national holiday on his birthday is because he also happened to be the right person to be there in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Yes, there was an inner quality of greatness to him. But more importantly, he did not shy from his responsibilities when the need to express that greatness presented itself before him.
From Montgomery, as we all know, King went on to face new challenges and achieve new triumphs: in Birmingham and Selma, in Washington D.C. and Oslo, Norway, where he became the youngest man ever to receive a Nobel Peace prize. Yet I've often wondered whether or not King's greatest challenge and achievement might not have been related to the conflicts which he faced within his own soul, such as the temptation to "retire" as it were from the Civil Rights movement, and accept a lucrative post somewhere in academia, or to spend more time with his wife and his children, away from the death threats and the FBI wiretaps; to grow old in the bosom of the liberal white establishment, lecturing to wide-eyed freshmen about Socrates and Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau, while writing bestselling books for Harper and Row.
These options were certainly made available to him many times. And yet he chose instead to continue to fill that role which destiny had thrust upon him there in Montgomery in 1955; and this, to me, seems a far more telling mark of King's true "saintly greatness" than any of his other achievements or laurels. It is not merely because King achieved great things that we celebrate his birth as a National holiday. It is also the price he was willing to pay in order to achieve these things -- not for his own personal benefit, but for the benefit of an entire society.
It is difficult for those of us who lack this inner quality of saintliness, this peculiar combination of humility and arrogance,to fully understand what was at stake in Martin Luther King Jr's decision to continue along the path that had been chosen for him, a path which eventually led him to his death on a motel balcony in Memphis. There have been those who have claimed that King was, in fact, a megalomaniac, or that he suffered from a "martyr complex," that his ego was such that he simply could not step out of the national limelight once he had tasted the sweetness of being Time magazine's "Man of the Year."
Nothing, I think, could be further from the truth.
King himself knew better than anyone what was at stake in the drama that was being played out in his frail, mortal human existence. And he spoke of it simply in terms of "The Strength to Love:" the power of God's own overflowing, passionate, creative love for human kind manifesting itself in a single human life. Perhaps it was a form of megalomania, a delusion of grandeur of the most grandiose proportions. But it was also an ultimate act of personal surrender, a martyrdom of the self in the truest sense of that word, as a witness to a creative power for justice far greater than one's own power or creativity.
In the final analysis we must recognize that it was not delusion, but vision, which animated King's career as a civil rights reformer. Commentator Gary Wills has noted that the changes which Martin Luther King Jr. brought to American society were "so large as to be almost invisible." In a few short years, King and those who worked with him swept away an entire system of American apartheid which had existed in the South for nearly a century. Men and women of my generation have had no experience of "whites only" lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains; we have been educated in integrated schools, voted for and elected black politicians, patronized black-owned businesses; and, for the most part, we have done so without giving it second thought.
This is not to say that racial prejudice and discrimination no longer exist in this country. White Sheets and cross-burnings may seem like things of the past, but we still have hate crimes in this country; the Ku Klux Klan is still alive and kicking, and has spawned numerous imitators; access to jobs, housing, justice, health care, educational opportunity is still not completely color blind, nor anywhere near equally available to all. In many ways racism has become much more subtle, even sophisticated; it has replaced its white sheets with pinstriped suits, and is fueled as much by the ignorance and the naivete of the well-intentioned (who would just as soon not think about it, and who wish that the problem would simply "go away"), as it is by the malice of those few (albeit increasingly vocal) kooks who would just as soon trot segregation (or its functional equivalent) back out of the closet, if they thought they could get away with it.
Yet King's vision of a truly pluralistic, inclusive, and democratic society, in which individuals are judged by the quality of their characters and not the color of their skins, remains a vivid beacon of our future, untarnished in the nearly half-century which has now elapsed since the bus boycott in Montgomery, which first brought this man to our national attention.
It’s a little-known fact, but my ex-wife Margaret and I were married in Atlanta: at midnight on the Summer Solstice at the Peachtree Plaza hotel during the UUA General Assembly in 1985. It was the first time either of us had ever been in that city; and while we were there we had the opportunity to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, which is located just up the street from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, "Daddy" King's church, in the neighborhood where young M.L. King spent his childhood. It was the only "touristy" thing we did while we were in Atlanta (we were much too busy being newlyweds to bother with such foolishness as art museums), but we made the most of it; we even bought each other T-shirts. And I spent an hour or so in the small museum there, which is filled with memorabilia of the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King's ministry. The one exhibit I found most fascinating was that of Dr. King's preaching robe, a robe not so different from the one I'm wearing now. It surprised me to discover that he was actually a rather short man; I had always envisioned him as some sort of giant, yet I doubt the man whom I imagined could have ever squeezed into the tiny robe I saw hanging there in that glass case. Nor would he have had to. For I realized in that moment, standing there in awe before that tiny robe, that stature is not always a function of physical size. Nor is the significance of a life extinguished by death, when all which that life stood for still burns within the hearts of others. And there is a vitality to all that Martin Luther King Jr. stood for, an immortality if you will, which still lives today beyond the grave. It is a vitality which grows from the capacity for self-sacrifice, from the willingness to stand faithfully in the presence of evil, and surrender one’s ego to the truth of a higher principle. It is an immortality born of our Strength to Love.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 18th, 2004
I once saw an interview with the actor Ben Kingsley, who casually observed that the secret to his successful characterization of Mohandas Gandhi in the renown Richard Attenbourgh film of the same name, was his realization that Gandhi was not so much a saint who "stooped" to participate in politics as he was a politician struggling to become a saint. I've thought about that apparently offhand remark a great deal since first hearing it. Why is it that professional politicians are so universally held in such low esteem in our society, so much so that even honest-to-God “saintly” individuals (like, say, Jimmy Carter) inevitably appear "compromised" in the public eye when they attempt to participate in the political process? It reminds me of a story I once heard about the syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers, who was approached one evening by a member of the Senate at an Embassy Reception in Washington D.C.
"So you're Ann Landers," the Senator remarked. "Say something funny."
To which Ms Landers immediately responded "So you're a politician. Tell me a lie."
Political activity is the lifeblood of a free society; it is the means by which the will of the people becomes the law of the land. We lift up American Democracy as a model for all the world, yet for some reason we find it all too easy to believe that those who choose to practice politics as a vocation must be doing so from base motives, avariciously, deceitfully, with only their own advancement rather than the best interests of the country or even their own constituents at heart. It’s almost as though we believe that true saints must somehow be "above politics" -- unsullied by the strange bedfellows encountered in smoke-filled cloakrooms. Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread; and Saints, of course, are expected to behave like angels. Politicians on the other hand, remain free to behave like fools.
Of course, it’s not as if the politicians themselves don’t do plenty to bring on this sort of criticism. It’s almost enough to convert even a naive, wide-eyed optimistic Idealist like myself into a confirmed cynic. The events of this past week have been particularly egregious in this regard. While the Democrats were out west in Iowa engaging in their usual round-robin of mutual recrimination, insinuation, and name-calling known as a “Caucus,” the President flew to Atlanta to lay a wreath on the memorial of Martin Luther King Jr. (thus allowing him to bill the taxpayers for his travel), then rode across town to a $2000/plate fundraising dinner (where he raised more money in a single evening than the most credible African-American candidate, Carol Mosely Braun, raised during her entire campaign), after which he returned to Washington DC to announce a trillion-dollar program to send a man to Mars (most of which, if it is actually ever appropriated, will be spent in Texas and Florida: two states critical to the President’s re-election, and notorious for their efforts to circumvent the Voting Rights Act), and that incidentally, since Congress is now in recess, he is going to exercise his “emergency powers” under the Constitution to appoint Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the fact that the controversial Judge had already failed twice to win Senate confirmation, and was opposed (because of his judicial record) by essentially every important Civil Rights organization in the country, including Dr. King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But Pickering is popular with the Religious Right because of his views on abortion, among other things, thus making his recess appointment a perfect opportunity for both parties to pander sanctimoniously to “the Faithful,” portraying themselves as the last bold defenders of all that is Good, and Moral, and True in our society, while characterizing their opponents as Evil Incarnate. Just to be fair, guess where Howard Dean is attending church this morning? That’s right, in Plains Georgia with Jimmy Carter. And don’t even get me started on all the self-righteous double-talk about civil unions, and the so-called “Healthy Marriage Initiative.”
But confronted with things like this, what are we then to think about that rare politician, like a Mohandas Gandhi, who truly does struggle to become a saint -- who seeks to express through his or her political convictions the high ethical and humanitarian principles of a profound religious faith? Actually, despite my own evolving cynicism, I suspect that this sort of politician is far more common than we generally assume, and that our appreciation of their efforts depends to a great extent upon the degree to which our own political opinions are in agreement with theirs. The road to sainthood is long and arduous, and the dividing line between “saint” and “fanatic” typically razor-thin; many are called but few are chosen; ultimately only history will decide whether or not the struggle was fruitful. Sainthood and the aspiration to sainthood are hardly one and the same. Indeed, so rarefied is our view of the former that often merely the ambition to attain it is enough to taint its purity in our eyes. Yet it would be equally misleading to assume that only those who do not seek it, who have their greatness thrust upon them, are somehow deserving of the mantle of our respect. The inner quality of sainthood is a peculiar combination of humility and arrogance: the arrogance to believe that one's deeply held principles and convictions are important enough to make a difference, and the humility to recognize that this challenge cannot be met by aspiration and strength of will alone.
Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 years old when he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, an ad hoc black community group which had been organized to oversee the now famous Montgomery Bus Boycott. As best I can tell, judging from everything I have read, he probably didn't even want the job. At the time, King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for less than two years, and had only completed the final requirements for his Ph.D. at Boston University that previous spring. Furthermore, his selection as President of the M.I.A. was an overtly political choice. As a relative newcomer to the city of Montgomery, King had yet to become too strongly identified with any particular element within the black community, and thus it was felt that perhaps he could provide precisely the kind of neutral leadership which would allow all of the rival factions within that community to come together in this one common purpose. There was a downside consideration to his nomination as well. Should the boycott fail, as many of the more experienced black community leaders believed it might, this young preacher could easily be sacrificed without endangering these more established leaders' hard earned credibility with both the white establishment, and their own constituencies.
Knowing this aspect of the story, one might easily say that Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed have his greatness thrust upon him, and with the unanimous consent of older, wiser, and more politically savvy colleagues at that. But clearly, this would be only part of the tale. More importantly, there was an inner quality to this aspiring but untested religious leader, an intrinsic quality of saintliness if you will, which, once exposed, blossomed forth into a strength which enabled him to endure receiving dozens of threatening letters and telephone calls each day; to survive slander and harassment by police and other government authorities; to have the front of his parsonage blown off by dynamite while his wife and few-month-old child huddled in the kitchen...to experience all of the doubts and fears and pressures to which the human soul is vulnerable, and still not lose sight of the larger aspiration: a goal which in its very rightness and importance dwarfed both his abilities, and his frailties, as a human being.
To be sure, in many ways Martin Luther King Jr. did have his greatness thrust upon him: he happened to be in the right place, at the right time. But the reason we honor him with a national holiday on his birthday is because he also happened to be the right person to be there in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Yes, there was an inner quality of greatness to him. But more importantly, he did not shy from his responsibilities when the need to express that greatness presented itself before him.
From Montgomery, as we all know, King went on to face new challenges and achieve new triumphs: in Birmingham and Selma, in Washington D.C. and Oslo, Norway, where he became the youngest man ever to receive a Nobel Peace prize. Yet I've often wondered whether or not King's greatest challenge and achievement might not have been related to the conflicts which he faced within his own soul, such as the temptation to "retire" as it were from the Civil Rights movement, and accept a lucrative post somewhere in academia, or to spend more time with his wife and his children, away from the death threats and the FBI wiretaps; to grow old in the bosom of the liberal white establishment, lecturing to wide-eyed freshmen about Socrates and Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau, while writing bestselling books for Harper and Row.
These options were certainly made available to him many times. And yet he chose instead to continue to fill that role which destiny had thrust upon him there in Montgomery in 1955; and this, to me, seems a far more telling mark of King's true "saintly greatness" than any of his other achievements or laurels. It is not merely because King achieved great things that we celebrate his birth as a National holiday. It is also the price he was willing to pay in order to achieve these things -- not for his own personal benefit, but for the benefit of an entire society.
It is difficult for those of us who lack this inner quality of saintliness, this peculiar combination of humility and arrogance,to fully understand what was at stake in Martin Luther King Jr's decision to continue along the path that had been chosen for him, a path which eventually led him to his death on a motel balcony in Memphis. There have been those who have claimed that King was, in fact, a megalomaniac, or that he suffered from a "martyr complex," that his ego was such that he simply could not step out of the national limelight once he had tasted the sweetness of being Time magazine's "Man of the Year."
Nothing, I think, could be further from the truth.
King himself knew better than anyone what was at stake in the drama that was being played out in his frail, mortal human existence. And he spoke of it simply in terms of "The Strength to Love:" the power of God's own overflowing, passionate, creative love for human kind manifesting itself in a single human life. Perhaps it was a form of megalomania, a delusion of grandeur of the most grandiose proportions. But it was also an ultimate act of personal surrender, a martyrdom of the self in the truest sense of that word, as a witness to a creative power for justice far greater than one's own power or creativity.
In the final analysis we must recognize that it was not delusion, but vision, which animated King's career as a civil rights reformer. Commentator Gary Wills has noted that the changes which Martin Luther King Jr. brought to American society were "so large as to be almost invisible." In a few short years, King and those who worked with him swept away an entire system of American apartheid which had existed in the South for nearly a century. Men and women of my generation have had no experience of "whites only" lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains; we have been educated in integrated schools, voted for and elected black politicians, patronized black-owned businesses; and, for the most part, we have done so without giving it second thought.
This is not to say that racial prejudice and discrimination no longer exist in this country. White Sheets and cross-burnings may seem like things of the past, but we still have hate crimes in this country; the Ku Klux Klan is still alive and kicking, and has spawned numerous imitators; access to jobs, housing, justice, health care, educational opportunity is still not completely color blind, nor anywhere near equally available to all. In many ways racism has become much more subtle, even sophisticated; it has replaced its white sheets with pinstriped suits, and is fueled as much by the ignorance and the naivete of the well-intentioned (who would just as soon not think about it, and who wish that the problem would simply "go away"), as it is by the malice of those few (albeit increasingly vocal) kooks who would just as soon trot segregation (or its functional equivalent) back out of the closet, if they thought they could get away with it.
Yet King's vision of a truly pluralistic, inclusive, and democratic society, in which individuals are judged by the quality of their characters and not the color of their skins, remains a vivid beacon of our future, untarnished in the nearly half-century which has now elapsed since the bus boycott in Montgomery, which first brought this man to our national attention.
It’s a little-known fact, but my ex-wife Margaret and I were married in Atlanta: at midnight on the Summer Solstice at the Peachtree Plaza hotel during the UUA General Assembly in 1985. It was the first time either of us had ever been in that city; and while we were there we had the opportunity to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, which is located just up the street from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, "Daddy" King's church, in the neighborhood where young M.L. King spent his childhood. It was the only "touristy" thing we did while we were in Atlanta (we were much too busy being newlyweds to bother with such foolishness as art museums), but we made the most of it; we even bought each other T-shirts. And I spent an hour or so in the small museum there, which is filled with memorabilia of the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King's ministry. The one exhibit I found most fascinating was that of Dr. King's preaching robe, a robe not so different from the one I'm wearing now. It surprised me to discover that he was actually a rather short man; I had always envisioned him as some sort of giant, yet I doubt the man whom I imagined could have ever squeezed into the tiny robe I saw hanging there in that glass case. Nor would he have had to. For I realized in that moment, standing there in awe before that tiny robe, that stature is not always a function of physical size. Nor is the significance of a life extinguished by death, when all which that life stood for still burns within the hearts of others. And there is a vitality to all that Martin Luther King Jr. stood for, an immortality if you will, which still lives today beyond the grave. It is a vitality which grows from the capacity for self-sacrifice, from the willingness to stand faithfully in the presence of evil, and surrender one’s ego to the truth of a higher principle. It is an immortality born of our Strength to Love.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
WHAT UNITES UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 11th, 2004
There's a rumor that goes around every year about this time, among students completing their preparation for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, that the one question you can pretty much count on being asked by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (which is the body responsible for examining and credentialing aspiring ministers in our movement), basically goes something like this: Imagine that you are on an elevator with someone who knows nothing about Unitarian Universalism except that you are a Unitarian Universalist minister. Explain our faith in the time that it takes to travel from the 1st to the 25th floor.
It's probably a good thing that I saw the Fellowship Committee many, many years ago, because I'm not sure I could come up with a good answer to this so-called “elevator question.” For one thing, I can't even remember the last time I was in a building with 25 floors: frankly, I tend to live my live a lot closer to the ground, and typically don't spend a lot of my time in expensive hotels or high-rise office buildings. But this is a minor detail. I also have a problem in that now that I have finished my PhD and am officially The Reverend Doctor (and occasionally even Professor) Jensen, whenever I’m asked questions like this, I habitually tend to offer complex and elaborately-nuanced answers requiring footnotes -- answers which are historically accurate and precise, but which really offer very little in the way of useful information. So when somebody asks me "What is Unitarian Universalism anyway?" I might begin by asking them whether they’ve heard of the Pilgrims, and conclude fifty minutes later, after outlining four centuries worth of theological development, by saying something along the lines of “Unitarian Universalists are the direct spiritual and institutional descendants of those courageous souls who crossed the Atlantic ocean in 1620 aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in the New World, and created American democracy in the process." Or if I'm feeling a little cranky or petulant, I might just say something like "Unitarian Universalists are Enlightened Puritans" and leave it at that. Back in the 19th century Dean John Gorham Palfrey described the Unitarian students of the Harvard Divinity School as a combination of "mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics" — and, so far as I could tell, things really hadn't changed that much by the time I got there 150 years later. But none of these answers really tells a person much about contemporary Unitarian Universalism; instead, they tend to be kind of vague, arrogant, and elitist, which, for an outsider, is probably exactly the kind of impression they have formed of us already.
So today I'm going to try to improve a little upon these answers. And I want to begin by talking a little about the underlying problem that sometimes makes it difficult to explain Unitarian Universalism in 25 floors or less. Historically speaking, Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian-Universalism were and are all non-confessional faiths. What this means is that we are a Church without a Creed: there is no standard statement of belief or doctrine to which Unitarian-Universalists must assent in order to become a member of the church. And what this sometimes translates to in the popular imagination is that we are a church that has no beliefs, and where people are free to believe whatever they like.
Well, this is obviously absurd. There are lots of things I would like to believe that I can't or don't believe. I would like to believe, for example, that good will always triumph over evil, that the truth will always drive out falsehood, and that when left to their own devices, people are basically pretty decent and will inevitably do the right thing. I used to believe all of these things, but I have seen the opposite often enough now to know that they are not always true. And this is really what Freedom of Belief is all about: not an opportunity to believe whatever you like, but the liberty to believe what your reason, your conscience, and your experience tell you to be true, independent from any external, authoritarian coercion. Truth is the ultimate arbiter of belief. And the Truth it its own proof, and frankly cares little whether we believe it or not.
This brings me to another thing that is sometimes said about Unitarian Universalism that really isn't so. Critics of our movement sometimes claim that Unitarian Universalism is a subjective and relativistic faith, with little regard for objective truth or moral absolutes — that we essentially exalt human reason above the so-called "Word of God." Once again, nothing could be further from the fact. There are a lot of folks in this world who will tell you that they know exactly what God is thinking, and that if you really want to do God's Will you'd better do exactly as they tell you. Unitarian Universalists tend to be a lot more humble than this. We understand that "now we see as through a glass, darkly;" that none of us will ever know the Divine "perfectly," in its essence, but rather that we can appreciate Ultimate Reality only through our personal experience of it, however limited that may be. A lot of us aren't even sure that "God" is a concept that really does justice to our experience of the Sacred, but this is not to say that we have mistaken our subjective experience of a thing for the thing itself.
Socrates realized that he was the wisest philosopher in Athens because at least he was aware of his own ignorance. Unlike the other people with whom he spoke, he knew what he did not know. Unitarian Universalism's reputation for subjectivity and relativism grows out of a similar sense of intellectual humility. It's not that we exalt human reason above the Word of God. But how else are we to understand the Will and the Word of the Divine, if not through the use of our own human reason? And likewise, since human beings are not omnipotent, omniscient creatures, it's only natural that we should expect a certain amount of diversity of belief among us. It's not that we think we're all equally right. It's just that we recognize the possibility, that we are all probably a little wrong.
So, in a movement where there is no authoritative creed to guide us, where individual conscience and experience comprise the pathway to religious knowledge, and a wide degree of diversity of belief is considered normative, where do we look to identify the qualities that we have in common, and which unite us as a religious community? One obvious place is to the past: to the heritage and traditions that have historically defined our community, and given it its unique character. The Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur has written that there are three "controlling principles" that have historically characterized our movement since the time of the Protestant Reformation, and I think you will recognize them immediately from what we have just been talking about. They are "complete mental freedom, unrestricted reason, and the generous tolerance of differences, in religion."
So, Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance, these three abide. The first expresses our faith, our trust, that if we strip away the external barriers which restrict us from seeking Truth, we will eventually discover it. The second represents our optimistic expectation that we possess the ability to know the Truth when we see it, our hope that we will recognize Truth for its own sake, and not merely because it is vouched for by some external authority. And the last, and in many ways the greatest of these principles — tolerance — is the tangible manifestation of a community based on notions of love and mutual respect, and the realization that we can all possess different gifts and different insights, and still associate together as one body.
Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance are not, however (at least according to Wilbur) "the final goals to be aimed at in religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The ultimate ends proper to a religious movement, are two" Wilbur writes: "the elevation of the personal character, and the perfecting of the social organism, and the success of a religious body may be judged by the degree to which it attains these ends." In other words, our methodology is our content, but our success is to be measured "by its fruits" — by our ability, in Wilbur's words, "to live worthily as children of God, and to make [our] institutions worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven."
"Well, this is all fine and good" you may well be thinking, "but it's also a little abstract. I mean, Freedom, Reason and Tolerance are great, but how does someone go about putting this all into practice on a practical basis?" Think of the potential complications. Is Freedom absolute, or are there also certain responsibilities that go along with it? Does a reliance upon Reason automatically preclude intuitive or emotional approaches to religion? And what are the limits of Tolerance? — how should we hold individuals accountable to the entire community when their behavior threatens to tear it apart? These are the kinds of pragmatic considerations that must be addressed by any group of individuals attempting to bring these abstract principles to life. Yet we've been doing it more or less successfully now for hundreds of years — what is the secret of our success?
I've already spoken about how we are a church without a creed — how there is no explicit statement of belief to which the individual must subscribe in order to become a member of the community. But this does not mean that we are not accountable to one another, or that there are no implicit beliefs which we share. When I say something like "Unitarian Universalists believe that 'To Question is the Answer,' and that a Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning, unencumbered by coercive and authoritarian external restrictions, will eventually result in the discovery of both.…" I have expressed a pretty broad-reaching assumption both about the nature of Truth and the process by which we seek it. And these assumptions manifest themselves not only in high-sounding, abstract principles, but also in the very methods by which we organize our religious societies and conduct our public worship.
Unitarian Universalist religious societies are organized according to the principle of Congregational Polity. At the heart of our worship service is a doctrine known as Freedom of the Pulpit. And holding it all together at the center, in the place of an explicit, confessional creed, we lift up the notion of a Covenant: a relationship of reciprocal accountability and responsibility, of mutual trust and support, which does not require us all to think alike in order for us to act together for a common purpose.
Congregational polity is more than just "majority rule." The principle of Congregational polity essentially states that while we may all be members of the "Church Universal," here in this particular place we ourselves are responsible for carrying out the mission of the ENTIRE church, and we therefore have the authority to make the decisions that will empower us to do so. It's that simple. Local Responsibility equals Local Authority. We don't need to get permission from somewhere else in order to put our faith into action in our own front yard.
Freedom of the Pulpit is also a little different from Freedom of Speech, although obviously the two are related. Both draw their strength from the notion that the truth plainly spoken, free from fear, free from censorship, free from the threat of retaliation, has the power to expose falsehood for what it is and drive it out of the shadows of our lives. But the pulpit is not a soapbox — nor is a worship service simply another free forum in the marketplace of ideas. The Free Pulpit draws its authority from the relationship between the Preacher and the People, a relationship of trust, of service, of honesty and authenticity — and in this respect it differs dramatically from the kinds of assumptions which drive our political discourse, in which partisanship is assumed, and truth emerges from the conflagration of open debate. We expect our politicians to lie to us, and for their opponents to attempt to expose those lies. But the job of the Preacher is to expose the lies that we tell ourselves: to confront our excuses, to challenge our shortcomings, to exhort us to do better than we have done in the past.
And how do preachers do this? By opening their own lives and their own struggles to public scrutiny — and by sharing whatever truths they have found in the course of their spiritual journeys, in the hope that the people sitting in the pews will be able to recognize those truths in their own lives as well. "The true preacher can be known by this," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his Divinity School Address. "that he deals out to the people his life — life passed through the fire of thought." The relationship between pulpit and pew is not one of debate, but of dialog — and Truth resides in the places where authentic life touches authentic life.
This brings us at last to the idea of Covenant, which is essentially nothing more than a mutual promise among a group of people to be faithful, to be accountable, to be authentic to one another. It is an agreement, to quote the traditional language, "to walk together according to God's Holy Ordinances, insofar as they shall be made known to us in his Blessed Word of Truth." To walk together in Truth, according to our best understanding of it: this is the promise that makes both Congregational Polity and Freedom of the Pulpit effective tools for both the cultivation of our private character, and the reform and revitalization of our civil society.
In a way, our name says it all. The one tangible thing that Unites Unitarian Universalists is that we are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association. "Unitarian" because we have historically affirmed that God is One — and that however imperfectly we may understand it, the same standard of Truth applies to all people: rich or poor, black or white, male or female, believers and non-believers alike. "Universalist" because we are confident that ultimately All Souls will be reconciled to their Creator: that every human being has inherent worth and dignity, and that we are all sisters and brothers to one another, sons and daughters of the power that gave us life, created in the image of God. And "Association" because our relationship with one another is lateral rather than hierarchical — we are accountable to the law that is written upon our hearts, and seek the assistance of our neighbors that they might help us to discern it.
I didn't become a Unitarian Universalist because someone cornered me in an elevator and shared their succinct yet snappy testimony with me. I became UU the old fashioned way: through my family. My mother was the daughter of a Jewish Socialist and a Methodist Sunday School teacher; my father's family were Scandinavian Lutherans, who faithfully attended church every Christmas eve. When my parents decided it was time for my brothers and I to receive some religious education, they sought out a community that would honor those diverse backgrounds, and still provide us with the opportunity to think for ourselves, to find our own way in the world, to discover who we really were and what we believed and how best to put those beliefs into practice in our lives.
That was over 40 years ago now, and I still don't have it all figured out...but I've had some excellent teachers along the way, received a lot of support and nurture and guidance in my journey, and made some pretty good friends as well. There have been some tough times, and there have been some really terrific times, and there have been a lot of times when it was just kind of tedious, and a little frustrating, and I wondered whether a particular meeting, or workshop, or sermon was ever going to end. (I suspect that there may be some of you who are feeling that way right about now) But you know, that's life. And that's Church. And at the end of the day, I wouldn't want it any other way....
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 11th, 2004
There's a rumor that goes around every year about this time, among students completing their preparation for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, that the one question you can pretty much count on being asked by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (which is the body responsible for examining and credentialing aspiring ministers in our movement), basically goes something like this: Imagine that you are on an elevator with someone who knows nothing about Unitarian Universalism except that you are a Unitarian Universalist minister. Explain our faith in the time that it takes to travel from the 1st to the 25th floor.
It's probably a good thing that I saw the Fellowship Committee many, many years ago, because I'm not sure I could come up with a good answer to this so-called “elevator question.” For one thing, I can't even remember the last time I was in a building with 25 floors: frankly, I tend to live my live a lot closer to the ground, and typically don't spend a lot of my time in expensive hotels or high-rise office buildings. But this is a minor detail. I also have a problem in that now that I have finished my PhD and am officially The Reverend Doctor (and occasionally even Professor) Jensen, whenever I’m asked questions like this, I habitually tend to offer complex and elaborately-nuanced answers requiring footnotes -- answers which are historically accurate and precise, but which really offer very little in the way of useful information. So when somebody asks me "What is Unitarian Universalism anyway?" I might begin by asking them whether they’ve heard of the Pilgrims, and conclude fifty minutes later, after outlining four centuries worth of theological development, by saying something along the lines of “Unitarian Universalists are the direct spiritual and institutional descendants of those courageous souls who crossed the Atlantic ocean in 1620 aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in the New World, and created American democracy in the process." Or if I'm feeling a little cranky or petulant, I might just say something like "Unitarian Universalists are Enlightened Puritans" and leave it at that. Back in the 19th century Dean John Gorham Palfrey described the Unitarian students of the Harvard Divinity School as a combination of "mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics" — and, so far as I could tell, things really hadn't changed that much by the time I got there 150 years later. But none of these answers really tells a person much about contemporary Unitarian Universalism; instead, they tend to be kind of vague, arrogant, and elitist, which, for an outsider, is probably exactly the kind of impression they have formed of us already.
So today I'm going to try to improve a little upon these answers. And I want to begin by talking a little about the underlying problem that sometimes makes it difficult to explain Unitarian Universalism in 25 floors or less. Historically speaking, Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian-Universalism were and are all non-confessional faiths. What this means is that we are a Church without a Creed: there is no standard statement of belief or doctrine to which Unitarian-Universalists must assent in order to become a member of the church. And what this sometimes translates to in the popular imagination is that we are a church that has no beliefs, and where people are free to believe whatever they like.
Well, this is obviously absurd. There are lots of things I would like to believe that I can't or don't believe. I would like to believe, for example, that good will always triumph over evil, that the truth will always drive out falsehood, and that when left to their own devices, people are basically pretty decent and will inevitably do the right thing. I used to believe all of these things, but I have seen the opposite often enough now to know that they are not always true. And this is really what Freedom of Belief is all about: not an opportunity to believe whatever you like, but the liberty to believe what your reason, your conscience, and your experience tell you to be true, independent from any external, authoritarian coercion. Truth is the ultimate arbiter of belief. And the Truth it its own proof, and frankly cares little whether we believe it or not.
This brings me to another thing that is sometimes said about Unitarian Universalism that really isn't so. Critics of our movement sometimes claim that Unitarian Universalism is a subjective and relativistic faith, with little regard for objective truth or moral absolutes — that we essentially exalt human reason above the so-called "Word of God." Once again, nothing could be further from the fact. There are a lot of folks in this world who will tell you that they know exactly what God is thinking, and that if you really want to do God's Will you'd better do exactly as they tell you. Unitarian Universalists tend to be a lot more humble than this. We understand that "now we see as through a glass, darkly;" that none of us will ever know the Divine "perfectly," in its essence, but rather that we can appreciate Ultimate Reality only through our personal experience of it, however limited that may be. A lot of us aren't even sure that "God" is a concept that really does justice to our experience of the Sacred, but this is not to say that we have mistaken our subjective experience of a thing for the thing itself.
Socrates realized that he was the wisest philosopher in Athens because at least he was aware of his own ignorance. Unlike the other people with whom he spoke, he knew what he did not know. Unitarian Universalism's reputation for subjectivity and relativism grows out of a similar sense of intellectual humility. It's not that we exalt human reason above the Word of God. But how else are we to understand the Will and the Word of the Divine, if not through the use of our own human reason? And likewise, since human beings are not omnipotent, omniscient creatures, it's only natural that we should expect a certain amount of diversity of belief among us. It's not that we think we're all equally right. It's just that we recognize the possibility, that we are all probably a little wrong.
So, in a movement where there is no authoritative creed to guide us, where individual conscience and experience comprise the pathway to religious knowledge, and a wide degree of diversity of belief is considered normative, where do we look to identify the qualities that we have in common, and which unite us as a religious community? One obvious place is to the past: to the heritage and traditions that have historically defined our community, and given it its unique character. The Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur has written that there are three "controlling principles" that have historically characterized our movement since the time of the Protestant Reformation, and I think you will recognize them immediately from what we have just been talking about. They are "complete mental freedom, unrestricted reason, and the generous tolerance of differences, in religion."
So, Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance, these three abide. The first expresses our faith, our trust, that if we strip away the external barriers which restrict us from seeking Truth, we will eventually discover it. The second represents our optimistic expectation that we possess the ability to know the Truth when we see it, our hope that we will recognize Truth for its own sake, and not merely because it is vouched for by some external authority. And the last, and in many ways the greatest of these principles — tolerance — is the tangible manifestation of a community based on notions of love and mutual respect, and the realization that we can all possess different gifts and different insights, and still associate together as one body.
Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance are not, however (at least according to Wilbur) "the final goals to be aimed at in religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The ultimate ends proper to a religious movement, are two" Wilbur writes: "the elevation of the personal character, and the perfecting of the social organism, and the success of a religious body may be judged by the degree to which it attains these ends." In other words, our methodology is our content, but our success is to be measured "by its fruits" — by our ability, in Wilbur's words, "to live worthily as children of God, and to make [our] institutions worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven."
"Well, this is all fine and good" you may well be thinking, "but it's also a little abstract. I mean, Freedom, Reason and Tolerance are great, but how does someone go about putting this all into practice on a practical basis?" Think of the potential complications. Is Freedom absolute, or are there also certain responsibilities that go along with it? Does a reliance upon Reason automatically preclude intuitive or emotional approaches to religion? And what are the limits of Tolerance? — how should we hold individuals accountable to the entire community when their behavior threatens to tear it apart? These are the kinds of pragmatic considerations that must be addressed by any group of individuals attempting to bring these abstract principles to life. Yet we've been doing it more or less successfully now for hundreds of years — what is the secret of our success?
I've already spoken about how we are a church without a creed — how there is no explicit statement of belief to which the individual must subscribe in order to become a member of the community. But this does not mean that we are not accountable to one another, or that there are no implicit beliefs which we share. When I say something like "Unitarian Universalists believe that 'To Question is the Answer,' and that a Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning, unencumbered by coercive and authoritarian external restrictions, will eventually result in the discovery of both.…" I have expressed a pretty broad-reaching assumption both about the nature of Truth and the process by which we seek it. And these assumptions manifest themselves not only in high-sounding, abstract principles, but also in the very methods by which we organize our religious societies and conduct our public worship.
Unitarian Universalist religious societies are organized according to the principle of Congregational Polity. At the heart of our worship service is a doctrine known as Freedom of the Pulpit. And holding it all together at the center, in the place of an explicit, confessional creed, we lift up the notion of a Covenant: a relationship of reciprocal accountability and responsibility, of mutual trust and support, which does not require us all to think alike in order for us to act together for a common purpose.
Congregational polity is more than just "majority rule." The principle of Congregational polity essentially states that while we may all be members of the "Church Universal," here in this particular place we ourselves are responsible for carrying out the mission of the ENTIRE church, and we therefore have the authority to make the decisions that will empower us to do so. It's that simple. Local Responsibility equals Local Authority. We don't need to get permission from somewhere else in order to put our faith into action in our own front yard.
Freedom of the Pulpit is also a little different from Freedom of Speech, although obviously the two are related. Both draw their strength from the notion that the truth plainly spoken, free from fear, free from censorship, free from the threat of retaliation, has the power to expose falsehood for what it is and drive it out of the shadows of our lives. But the pulpit is not a soapbox — nor is a worship service simply another free forum in the marketplace of ideas. The Free Pulpit draws its authority from the relationship between the Preacher and the People, a relationship of trust, of service, of honesty and authenticity — and in this respect it differs dramatically from the kinds of assumptions which drive our political discourse, in which partisanship is assumed, and truth emerges from the conflagration of open debate. We expect our politicians to lie to us, and for their opponents to attempt to expose those lies. But the job of the Preacher is to expose the lies that we tell ourselves: to confront our excuses, to challenge our shortcomings, to exhort us to do better than we have done in the past.
And how do preachers do this? By opening their own lives and their own struggles to public scrutiny — and by sharing whatever truths they have found in the course of their spiritual journeys, in the hope that the people sitting in the pews will be able to recognize those truths in their own lives as well. "The true preacher can be known by this," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his Divinity School Address. "that he deals out to the people his life — life passed through the fire of thought." The relationship between pulpit and pew is not one of debate, but of dialog — and Truth resides in the places where authentic life touches authentic life.
This brings us at last to the idea of Covenant, which is essentially nothing more than a mutual promise among a group of people to be faithful, to be accountable, to be authentic to one another. It is an agreement, to quote the traditional language, "to walk together according to God's Holy Ordinances, insofar as they shall be made known to us in his Blessed Word of Truth." To walk together in Truth, according to our best understanding of it: this is the promise that makes both Congregational Polity and Freedom of the Pulpit effective tools for both the cultivation of our private character, and the reform and revitalization of our civil society.
In a way, our name says it all. The one tangible thing that Unites Unitarian Universalists is that we are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association. "Unitarian" because we have historically affirmed that God is One — and that however imperfectly we may understand it, the same standard of Truth applies to all people: rich or poor, black or white, male or female, believers and non-believers alike. "Universalist" because we are confident that ultimately All Souls will be reconciled to their Creator: that every human being has inherent worth and dignity, and that we are all sisters and brothers to one another, sons and daughters of the power that gave us life, created in the image of God. And "Association" because our relationship with one another is lateral rather than hierarchical — we are accountable to the law that is written upon our hearts, and seek the assistance of our neighbors that they might help us to discern it.
I didn't become a Unitarian Universalist because someone cornered me in an elevator and shared their succinct yet snappy testimony with me. I became UU the old fashioned way: through my family. My mother was the daughter of a Jewish Socialist and a Methodist Sunday School teacher; my father's family were Scandinavian Lutherans, who faithfully attended church every Christmas eve. When my parents decided it was time for my brothers and I to receive some religious education, they sought out a community that would honor those diverse backgrounds, and still provide us with the opportunity to think for ourselves, to find our own way in the world, to discover who we really were and what we believed and how best to put those beliefs into practice in our lives.
That was over 40 years ago now, and I still don't have it all figured out...but I've had some excellent teachers along the way, received a lot of support and nurture and guidance in my journey, and made some pretty good friends as well. There have been some tough times, and there have been some really terrific times, and there have been a lot of times when it was just kind of tedious, and a little frustrating, and I wondered whether a particular meeting, or workshop, or sermon was ever going to end. (I suspect that there may be some of you who are feeling that way right about now) But you know, that's life. And that's Church. And at the end of the day, I wouldn't want it any other way....
Sunday, January 4, 2004
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 4th, 2004
It was the night AFTER Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, EXCEPT for...have you figured it out? I first became suspicious when I noticed that Parker’s kibble seemed to be disappearing...but I couldn’t remember seeing her eat it. Then came the tell-tale droppings, and then finally, one morning, I came downstairs to the kitchen a little earlier than usual and caught sight of a little gray tail scurrying beneath the oven, and I knew that I had uninvited company.
Poison, of course, was out of the question. Poison is an indiscriminate Weapon of Mass Destruction; I wouldn’t want Parker to get into it by mistake, and besides, if I’m going to kill something, I want to see the body. A cat would probably be the best solution, at least over the long haul. Cats are not only efficient hunters, but their mere presence also represents a significant deterrent to future insurrections. Cats and mice have an instinctive understanding of one another -- cats are natural born predators, and mice seem to know this and try to stay out of their way. I even envisioned the mercenary surrogate I would acquire: a lean, stealthy, and appropriately bloodthirsty tiger-striped kitten whom I would name “Halliburton” (since names like “Bushie” or “Rummy” or even “Wolfie” just seemed a little too warm and fuzzy for the aggressive killing machine I had in mind). Unfortunately though, cats and dogs also sometimes have an instinctive mis-understanding of one another, and I wasn’t that certain about how well my current critter would respond to an interloper in her territory (although she hasn’t really seemed to mind the mice much). So for the time being, at least, I am left to rely upon the more traditional tactics of counter-insurgency: resource denial, superior intelligence, and the occasional well-placed and attractively-baited booby-trap, or “mechanical ambush” as they now sometimes more properly identified.
So as I shopped last week for a “better mousetrap,” I realized that it has been nearly two decades since I last confronted a situation like this. And I was a little surprised to discover that the price of the technology hasn’t changed a penny in all that time: two for 99 cents, wherever better mousetraps are sold. Back in those days, I was a young, newly-married minister living in Midland Texas, with an nine-year-old step-daughter who loved animals...especially small cute gray furry animals...and a twelve-year-old step-son who loved to torment his sister. And after I trapped the first mouse, Stephenie was so upset (and Jacob so obnoxious) that I became remorseful, and vowed I would never again take the life of another living creature (or at least not any small cute gray furry ones)....and then I made the mistake of writing about my experience in the church newsletter, which resulted in all sorts of unsolicited advice, and even letters from all over the country, some containing plans for humane “live” traps...some of which actually worked.... Except that the mice kept coming back, and inviting their friends....and that was when Margie went out and got a cat, and we never saw another living mouse again (or at least not any that lived for long).
But now I’m wondering, what ever happened to that somewhat naive, somewhat idealistic, sensitive and compassionate young father of young children, to turn him now into such a relentless, calculating, cold-blooded killer, someone who is perfectly capable of the premeditated extermination of unwanted vermin from his home with hardly a second thought or even a moment’s lost sleep. Did I just grow up? Or did I lose track of something important along the way? Or maybe it’s a little of both?
The start of a New Year is traditionally a time for reassessing the past, as well as charting a new path to a better future. We reflect upon where we’ve been and resolve to do better, to BE better, than before. People resolve to quit smoking, to lose weight, maybe to pay off their credit cards and start saving more money...they join health clubs in great numbers, and for a month or so they may actually even go. And, of course, it’s a cultural cliché that nothing ever really changes; and yet, when we look around, we see that over time, people and things DO in fact change. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not exactly the way we’d planned, but change does indeed happen, whether we want it to or not. So the issue is not really whether or not things will ever change; the issue is how aware will be be of those changes AS they happen, and how much control will we exert over them? Awareness and Control: our sense of the latter is often extremely exaggerated, since it’s such a comforting fantasy to believe that we have effective control over what happens to us; but it is actually only through the former -- through our ability to perceive accurately and understand what is happening all around us, that we truly gain any meaningful direction over our lives at all.
In any event, I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the kind of resolutions I want to make for this next year, and also reflecting upon the year just past -- which was really quite an eventful year for me: a new job in a new community, the end of an eighteen-year marriage, and two moves when you stop to think about it: a relatively short one from Nantucket to the mainland, and the other much more significant cross-country move from my old home in the Pacific Northwest here to New England. And between my learning how to let go graciously of the old, and anxiously trying to figure out all of the nuances of the new, not to mention my frequent obsession with what I saw happening around me politically in the world, I sometimes felt like I’d let myself get wound up a little more tightly than I was accustomed to beneath my otherwise ordinarily calm, collected, and perfectly controlled exterior. And I also found myself reminded of something that Winston Churchill once said, that “a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject,” and wondering how far down that path I’d wandered myself, and what in the world I was going to do about it.
I didn’t really come to any resolution on that one -- like many of you, it’s probably going to be something that I continue to wrestle with throughout 2004....and the closer we get to the election, the more difficult it is going to be for everyone in the country. But I can at least still change the subject, at least for the time being, and talk about something a lot more pleasant. This past Christmas Season really turned out to be quite delightful for me, despite the fact that I hadn’t really planned on celebrating Christmas much this year. I think it all started the weekend of the Greens Sale and the big blizzard...all that snow (which, being from Oregon, I had dreaded) actually turned out to be quite beautiful, and we had surprisingly good turnouts at all the events, especially the Sunday evening winter holidays concert, which I thought was absolutely magnificent. Likewise, the Pageant (which I had heard so much about) was even more fun than I had imagined, while the anxiety I’d been feeling about conducting three different Christmas Eve services for the first time quickly disappeared when the time at last arrived, and as the evening progressed each service seemed to build upon the others, while developing its own special personality, each one special yet slightly different. Even Margie McCormick’s memorial service last weekend, which one might ordinarily tend to think of as a sad occasion, had such a warm feeling to it, as people who knew and cared about her came together one more time simply to be with one another, and to share their memories of her remarkable life. And as I shared these moments with all of you, I felt so privileged to have been invited to become a part of all your lives, and thus that much more at home here in this new community.
And now it’s the start of yet another New Year, and time to look forward to a future that for the moment exists only in imagination. For years I used to celebrate the beginning of a New Year by stopping off at the post office and mailing in my sometimes as many as a dozen entries to the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. One of the dubious advantages of living in a household with three different last names, and reading a lot of magazines, is that we tended to get a lot of junk mail, although I'm still not certain why I ever actually bothered to send them all in, since no one I know personally has ever won anything from one of these contests. I guess it just seemed worth an hour or so of licking and pasting, and a few dollars in postage, to have the legitimate prerogative of daydreaming about what I would do with all that money if I actually won it. I know a lot of people who consider this sort of daydreaming a values clarification exercise, something along the lines of “where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” Personally though, I’ve often felt that the daydreaming itself is probably just as valuable as the actual money would be. If I actually had that much money, I would probably spend a lot of my time worrying about how to hold on to it, or even worrying about whether or not I could actually trust the people I’d hired to hold on to it for me. Money solves a lot of problems, but it also brings problems of its own. In many ways, I’ve already won the most important lottery of all -- I’m alive, and in relatively good health, and free to dream to my heart’s content about anything I please, and then to pursue those dreams that seem most “worthy” to me, and through my own efforts, make them real.
There's something about the coming of a New Year that lends itself naturally to daydreaming, to the intentional cultivation of a spirit of hope and optimism, a sense of possibility and new beginning. It's difficult to ignore it even if we try. As I hinted a little earlier, I once read that the three most common resolutions this time of year are to quit smoking, to lose weight, and to "get in shape" (whatever that means) -- but let me tell you, as someone who smoked two packs a day from the age of seventeen to the age of thirty-three, and then gained fifty pounds when I finally resolved to give them up in earnest, I’ve pretty much concluded that it’s probably best to follow the path of “all things in moderation, nothing to excess,” and to try to be content with whatever shape I am. The truly tough part was realizing that, no matter how much I work out, or how closely I watch what I eat, I'm never going to be seventeen again, or even thirty-three; that the fantasies of youth are unavoidably tempered by the realities of maturity, and that I will never, say, throw a long pass for the winning touchdown in the fourth quarter of the Rose Bowl, nor even daydream about it with the same intensity that I did when I was younger. With each New Year a little bit more of my life is behind me; with each new beginning, we mark an end to another dream that will never be.
Knowing this, I think it's important that we learn to choose our resolutions with care. Quitting smoking and losing weight are great, for as far as they go, but what kind of "shape" do you really want to be in a year from now? What WOULD you do if you won ten million dollars, and what's keeping you from having the best part of that now, if you choose? This is what I learned from my years of daydreaming about winning the lottery: that the really important things in my life have nothing to do with money itself, but rather with the illusion of freedom which money seems to buy, the ability to stop worrying about the trivial and the mundane, and to concentrate on the truly significant.
But the wisdom to concentrate on what is truly significant is not really something that you can purchase with cash. It's the product of a willingness to search your own soul, and the courage to pursue what you find there. And it's also an ability to recognize your responsibilities and confront your limitations, to affirm your commitments and the values on which they are based, to balance the demands of the present with the possibilities of the future, and to walk that narrow path from wishful thinking to knowing contentment. When you finally take the time to figure out what really matters, to move beyond dreams of eternal youth and a thirty-two inch waistline, or cars and clothes and boats and travel, and recognize your more essential hunger for a spiritual freedom which material things so often only pretend to satisfy, you discover that it takes more than a nice house to make a real home, and that the true measure of wealth lies not in what you have acquired, but in your capacity to share generously with others.
I also want you to know that it gives me no real joy to be winning my war against the mice. I’d gladly negotiate with them, if I could only figure out a way to understand them, and to make them understand me. I’d be happy to feed them, and give them shelter from the elements, even protect them from cats, if they would just mind their own business, and stay out of my stuff, and occasionally clean up after themselves. But I also know that’s not going to happen, and unless I do something about it, the problem is only going to get worse. But it gives me no pleasure to take their lives, nor do I feel especially superior to them because I can trick them into sticking their heads into a fatal trap with just a little daub of strategically-placed peanut butter. I do it because I have to, and that makes me a grown-up. But I wish it were otherwise every time I put one of their warm, furry, broken little bodies into an old plastic bag and throw it in the trash. And while it might seem a lot easier just to pay someone to do all this for me, at the end of the day I don’t think it would make me any better a person. If I’m going to kill something, I want to see the body.
Our lives can often seem like a series of compromises between the material demands of physical survival and frustrated aspirations of a more intangible nature, which we often but dimly understand. We look at our lives, we feel that something is missing, we hunger for something more, and then we try to fill that empty space as best we can, sometimes with money and the things money can buy, and sometimes with things far more valuable. But however you may resolve this year to change your lives for the better, I hope that some of you, at least, as you're evaluating your priorities for the next twelve months, will chose to bump up your participation in the life and activities of this church just a few notches higher on the scale. It doesn’t have to be a lot -- just find some new, small thing that captures your interest, and then maybe invite a friend along to share the experience with you. I can attest from personal experience that it really is a lot easier than either quitting smoking or losing weight. And it really can help you get in shape for whatever it is you dream of doing in the years ahead. Within this community of memory and hope, we strive together to create from our dreams a sacred space of wisdom and renewal. Resolve, this year, to take a little more time to more fully become a part of it, so that it, in turn, may more fully become a part of you.
ANN LANDERS’ PERPETUAL NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t find the time.
Call up a forgotten friend. Drop an old grudge, and replace it with some pleasant memories. Share a funny story with someone whose spirits are dragging. A good laugh can be very good medicine.
Vow not to make a promise you don’t think you can keep. Pay a debt. Give a soft answer. Free yourself of envy and malice. Encourage some youth to do his or her best. Share your experience, and offer support. Young people need role models.
Make a genuine effort to stay in closer touch with family and good friends. Resolve to stop magnifying small problems and shooting from the lip. Words that you have to eat can be hard to digest.
Find the time to be kind and thoughtful. All of us have the same allotment” 24 hours a day. Give a compliment. It might give someone a badly needed lift.
Think things through. Forgive an injustice. Listen more. Be kind.
Apologize when you realize you are wrong. An apology never diminishes a person. It elevates him. Don’t blow your own horn. If you’ve done something praiseworthy, someone will notice eventually.
Try to understand a point of view that is different from your own. Few things are 100 per cent one way or another. Examine the demands you make on others.
Lighten up. When you feel like blowing your top, ask yourself “Will it matter a week from today?” Laugh the loudest when the joke is one you.
The sure way to have a friend is to be one. We are all connected by our humanity, and we need each other. Avoid malcontents and pessimists. They drag you down and contribute nothing.
Don’t discourage a beginner from trying something risky. Nothing ventured means nothing gained. Be optimistic. The can-do spirit is the fuel that makes things go.
Read something uplifting. Deep-six the trash. You won’t eat garbage -- why put it into your head? Don’t abandon your old-fashioned principles. They never go out of style. When courage is needed, ask yourself, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
Walk tall, and smile more. You’ll look 10 years younger. Don’t be afraid to say, “I love you.” Say it again. They are the sweetest words in the world.
Recipe for a Prosperous, Peaceful Year-Round Year!
Take twelve, fine, full-grown months,
see that these are thoroughly free
from all old memories of bitterness,
rancor, hate and jealousy;
cleanse them completely from
every clinging spite:
pick off all specks of pettiness and littleness;
in short , see that these months are freed from all the past;
have them as fresh and clean
as when they first came from the great storehouse of Time.
Cut these months into thirty or thirty-one equal parts.
This batch will keep for just one year.
Do not attempt to make up the whole batch at one time
(so many persons spoil the entire lot in this way),
but prepare one day at a time, as follows:
Into each day put twelve parts of faith,
eleven of patience,
ten of courage,
nine of of work (some people omit this ingredient and so spoil the flavor of the rest),
eight of hope,
seven of fidelity,
six of liberality,
five of kindness,
four of rest (leaving this out is like leaving the oil out of the salad, don't do it),
three of prayer,
two of meditation,
and one well selected resolution.
If you have no conscientious scruples,
put in about a teaspoonful of good spirits,
a dash of fun, a pinch of folly,
a sprinkling of play, and a heaping cupful of good humor.
Pour into the whole love ad libitum and mix with a vim.
Cook thoroughly in a fervent heat;
garnish with a few smiles and a sprig of joy;
then serve with quietness, unselfishness, and cheerfulness,
and a Happy New Year is certain.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 4th, 2004
It was the night AFTER Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, EXCEPT for...have you figured it out? I first became suspicious when I noticed that Parker’s kibble seemed to be disappearing...but I couldn’t remember seeing her eat it. Then came the tell-tale droppings, and then finally, one morning, I came downstairs to the kitchen a little earlier than usual and caught sight of a little gray tail scurrying beneath the oven, and I knew that I had uninvited company.
Poison, of course, was out of the question. Poison is an indiscriminate Weapon of Mass Destruction; I wouldn’t want Parker to get into it by mistake, and besides, if I’m going to kill something, I want to see the body. A cat would probably be the best solution, at least over the long haul. Cats are not only efficient hunters, but their mere presence also represents a significant deterrent to future insurrections. Cats and mice have an instinctive understanding of one another -- cats are natural born predators, and mice seem to know this and try to stay out of their way. I even envisioned the mercenary surrogate I would acquire: a lean, stealthy, and appropriately bloodthirsty tiger-striped kitten whom I would name “Halliburton” (since names like “Bushie” or “Rummy” or even “Wolfie” just seemed a little too warm and fuzzy for the aggressive killing machine I had in mind). Unfortunately though, cats and dogs also sometimes have an instinctive mis-understanding of one another, and I wasn’t that certain about how well my current critter would respond to an interloper in her territory (although she hasn’t really seemed to mind the mice much). So for the time being, at least, I am left to rely upon the more traditional tactics of counter-insurgency: resource denial, superior intelligence, and the occasional well-placed and attractively-baited booby-trap, or “mechanical ambush” as they now sometimes more properly identified.
So as I shopped last week for a “better mousetrap,” I realized that it has been nearly two decades since I last confronted a situation like this. And I was a little surprised to discover that the price of the technology hasn’t changed a penny in all that time: two for 99 cents, wherever better mousetraps are sold. Back in those days, I was a young, newly-married minister living in Midland Texas, with an nine-year-old step-daughter who loved animals...especially small cute gray furry animals...and a twelve-year-old step-son who loved to torment his sister. And after I trapped the first mouse, Stephenie was so upset (and Jacob so obnoxious) that I became remorseful, and vowed I would never again take the life of another living creature (or at least not any small cute gray furry ones)....and then I made the mistake of writing about my experience in the church newsletter, which resulted in all sorts of unsolicited advice, and even letters from all over the country, some containing plans for humane “live” traps...some of which actually worked.... Except that the mice kept coming back, and inviting their friends....and that was when Margie went out and got a cat, and we never saw another living mouse again (or at least not any that lived for long).
But now I’m wondering, what ever happened to that somewhat naive, somewhat idealistic, sensitive and compassionate young father of young children, to turn him now into such a relentless, calculating, cold-blooded killer, someone who is perfectly capable of the premeditated extermination of unwanted vermin from his home with hardly a second thought or even a moment’s lost sleep. Did I just grow up? Or did I lose track of something important along the way? Or maybe it’s a little of both?
The start of a New Year is traditionally a time for reassessing the past, as well as charting a new path to a better future. We reflect upon where we’ve been and resolve to do better, to BE better, than before. People resolve to quit smoking, to lose weight, maybe to pay off their credit cards and start saving more money...they join health clubs in great numbers, and for a month or so they may actually even go. And, of course, it’s a cultural cliché that nothing ever really changes; and yet, when we look around, we see that over time, people and things DO in fact change. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not exactly the way we’d planned, but change does indeed happen, whether we want it to or not. So the issue is not really whether or not things will ever change; the issue is how aware will be be of those changes AS they happen, and how much control will we exert over them? Awareness and Control: our sense of the latter is often extremely exaggerated, since it’s such a comforting fantasy to believe that we have effective control over what happens to us; but it is actually only through the former -- through our ability to perceive accurately and understand what is happening all around us, that we truly gain any meaningful direction over our lives at all.
In any event, I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the kind of resolutions I want to make for this next year, and also reflecting upon the year just past -- which was really quite an eventful year for me: a new job in a new community, the end of an eighteen-year marriage, and two moves when you stop to think about it: a relatively short one from Nantucket to the mainland, and the other much more significant cross-country move from my old home in the Pacific Northwest here to New England. And between my learning how to let go graciously of the old, and anxiously trying to figure out all of the nuances of the new, not to mention my frequent obsession with what I saw happening around me politically in the world, I sometimes felt like I’d let myself get wound up a little more tightly than I was accustomed to beneath my otherwise ordinarily calm, collected, and perfectly controlled exterior. And I also found myself reminded of something that Winston Churchill once said, that “a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject,” and wondering how far down that path I’d wandered myself, and what in the world I was going to do about it.
I didn’t really come to any resolution on that one -- like many of you, it’s probably going to be something that I continue to wrestle with throughout 2004....and the closer we get to the election, the more difficult it is going to be for everyone in the country. But I can at least still change the subject, at least for the time being, and talk about something a lot more pleasant. This past Christmas Season really turned out to be quite delightful for me, despite the fact that I hadn’t really planned on celebrating Christmas much this year. I think it all started the weekend of the Greens Sale and the big blizzard...all that snow (which, being from Oregon, I had dreaded) actually turned out to be quite beautiful, and we had surprisingly good turnouts at all the events, especially the Sunday evening winter holidays concert, which I thought was absolutely magnificent. Likewise, the Pageant (which I had heard so much about) was even more fun than I had imagined, while the anxiety I’d been feeling about conducting three different Christmas Eve services for the first time quickly disappeared when the time at last arrived, and as the evening progressed each service seemed to build upon the others, while developing its own special personality, each one special yet slightly different. Even Margie McCormick’s memorial service last weekend, which one might ordinarily tend to think of as a sad occasion, had such a warm feeling to it, as people who knew and cared about her came together one more time simply to be with one another, and to share their memories of her remarkable life. And as I shared these moments with all of you, I felt so privileged to have been invited to become a part of all your lives, and thus that much more at home here in this new community.
And now it’s the start of yet another New Year, and time to look forward to a future that for the moment exists only in imagination. For years I used to celebrate the beginning of a New Year by stopping off at the post office and mailing in my sometimes as many as a dozen entries to the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. One of the dubious advantages of living in a household with three different last names, and reading a lot of magazines, is that we tended to get a lot of junk mail, although I'm still not certain why I ever actually bothered to send them all in, since no one I know personally has ever won anything from one of these contests. I guess it just seemed worth an hour or so of licking and pasting, and a few dollars in postage, to have the legitimate prerogative of daydreaming about what I would do with all that money if I actually won it. I know a lot of people who consider this sort of daydreaming a values clarification exercise, something along the lines of “where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” Personally though, I’ve often felt that the daydreaming itself is probably just as valuable as the actual money would be. If I actually had that much money, I would probably spend a lot of my time worrying about how to hold on to it, or even worrying about whether or not I could actually trust the people I’d hired to hold on to it for me. Money solves a lot of problems, but it also brings problems of its own. In many ways, I’ve already won the most important lottery of all -- I’m alive, and in relatively good health, and free to dream to my heart’s content about anything I please, and then to pursue those dreams that seem most “worthy” to me, and through my own efforts, make them real.
There's something about the coming of a New Year that lends itself naturally to daydreaming, to the intentional cultivation of a spirit of hope and optimism, a sense of possibility and new beginning. It's difficult to ignore it even if we try. As I hinted a little earlier, I once read that the three most common resolutions this time of year are to quit smoking, to lose weight, and to "get in shape" (whatever that means) -- but let me tell you, as someone who smoked two packs a day from the age of seventeen to the age of thirty-three, and then gained fifty pounds when I finally resolved to give them up in earnest, I’ve pretty much concluded that it’s probably best to follow the path of “all things in moderation, nothing to excess,” and to try to be content with whatever shape I am. The truly tough part was realizing that, no matter how much I work out, or how closely I watch what I eat, I'm never going to be seventeen again, or even thirty-three; that the fantasies of youth are unavoidably tempered by the realities of maturity, and that I will never, say, throw a long pass for the winning touchdown in the fourth quarter of the Rose Bowl, nor even daydream about it with the same intensity that I did when I was younger. With each New Year a little bit more of my life is behind me; with each new beginning, we mark an end to another dream that will never be.
Knowing this, I think it's important that we learn to choose our resolutions with care. Quitting smoking and losing weight are great, for as far as they go, but what kind of "shape" do you really want to be in a year from now? What WOULD you do if you won ten million dollars, and what's keeping you from having the best part of that now, if you choose? This is what I learned from my years of daydreaming about winning the lottery: that the really important things in my life have nothing to do with money itself, but rather with the illusion of freedom which money seems to buy, the ability to stop worrying about the trivial and the mundane, and to concentrate on the truly significant.
But the wisdom to concentrate on what is truly significant is not really something that you can purchase with cash. It's the product of a willingness to search your own soul, and the courage to pursue what you find there. And it's also an ability to recognize your responsibilities and confront your limitations, to affirm your commitments and the values on which they are based, to balance the demands of the present with the possibilities of the future, and to walk that narrow path from wishful thinking to knowing contentment. When you finally take the time to figure out what really matters, to move beyond dreams of eternal youth and a thirty-two inch waistline, or cars and clothes and boats and travel, and recognize your more essential hunger for a spiritual freedom which material things so often only pretend to satisfy, you discover that it takes more than a nice house to make a real home, and that the true measure of wealth lies not in what you have acquired, but in your capacity to share generously with others.
I also want you to know that it gives me no real joy to be winning my war against the mice. I’d gladly negotiate with them, if I could only figure out a way to understand them, and to make them understand me. I’d be happy to feed them, and give them shelter from the elements, even protect them from cats, if they would just mind their own business, and stay out of my stuff, and occasionally clean up after themselves. But I also know that’s not going to happen, and unless I do something about it, the problem is only going to get worse. But it gives me no pleasure to take their lives, nor do I feel especially superior to them because I can trick them into sticking their heads into a fatal trap with just a little daub of strategically-placed peanut butter. I do it because I have to, and that makes me a grown-up. But I wish it were otherwise every time I put one of their warm, furry, broken little bodies into an old plastic bag and throw it in the trash. And while it might seem a lot easier just to pay someone to do all this for me, at the end of the day I don’t think it would make me any better a person. If I’m going to kill something, I want to see the body.
Our lives can often seem like a series of compromises between the material demands of physical survival and frustrated aspirations of a more intangible nature, which we often but dimly understand. We look at our lives, we feel that something is missing, we hunger for something more, and then we try to fill that empty space as best we can, sometimes with money and the things money can buy, and sometimes with things far more valuable. But however you may resolve this year to change your lives for the better, I hope that some of you, at least, as you're evaluating your priorities for the next twelve months, will chose to bump up your participation in the life and activities of this church just a few notches higher on the scale. It doesn’t have to be a lot -- just find some new, small thing that captures your interest, and then maybe invite a friend along to share the experience with you. I can attest from personal experience that it really is a lot easier than either quitting smoking or losing weight. And it really can help you get in shape for whatever it is you dream of doing in the years ahead. Within this community of memory and hope, we strive together to create from our dreams a sacred space of wisdom and renewal. Resolve, this year, to take a little more time to more fully become a part of it, so that it, in turn, may more fully become a part of you.
ANN LANDERS’ PERPETUAL NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t find the time.
Call up a forgotten friend. Drop an old grudge, and replace it with some pleasant memories. Share a funny story with someone whose spirits are dragging. A good laugh can be very good medicine.
Vow not to make a promise you don’t think you can keep. Pay a debt. Give a soft answer. Free yourself of envy and malice. Encourage some youth to do his or her best. Share your experience, and offer support. Young people need role models.
Make a genuine effort to stay in closer touch with family and good friends. Resolve to stop magnifying small problems and shooting from the lip. Words that you have to eat can be hard to digest.
Find the time to be kind and thoughtful. All of us have the same allotment” 24 hours a day. Give a compliment. It might give someone a badly needed lift.
Think things through. Forgive an injustice. Listen more. Be kind.
Apologize when you realize you are wrong. An apology never diminishes a person. It elevates him. Don’t blow your own horn. If you’ve done something praiseworthy, someone will notice eventually.
Try to understand a point of view that is different from your own. Few things are 100 per cent one way or another. Examine the demands you make on others.
Lighten up. When you feel like blowing your top, ask yourself “Will it matter a week from today?” Laugh the loudest when the joke is one you.
The sure way to have a friend is to be one. We are all connected by our humanity, and we need each other. Avoid malcontents and pessimists. They drag you down and contribute nothing.
Don’t discourage a beginner from trying something risky. Nothing ventured means nothing gained. Be optimistic. The can-do spirit is the fuel that makes things go.
Read something uplifting. Deep-six the trash. You won’t eat garbage -- why put it into your head? Don’t abandon your old-fashioned principles. They never go out of style. When courage is needed, ask yourself, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
Walk tall, and smile more. You’ll look 10 years younger. Don’t be afraid to say, “I love you.” Say it again. They are the sweetest words in the world.
Recipe for a Prosperous, Peaceful Year-Round Year!
Take twelve, fine, full-grown months,
see that these are thoroughly free
from all old memories of bitterness,
rancor, hate and jealousy;
cleanse them completely from
every clinging spite:
pick off all specks of pettiness and littleness;
in short , see that these months are freed from all the past;
have them as fresh and clean
as when they first came from the great storehouse of Time.
Cut these months into thirty or thirty-one equal parts.
This batch will keep for just one year.
Do not attempt to make up the whole batch at one time
(so many persons spoil the entire lot in this way),
but prepare one day at a time, as follows:
Into each day put twelve parts of faith,
eleven of patience,
ten of courage,
nine of of work (some people omit this ingredient and so spoil the flavor of the rest),
eight of hope,
seven of fidelity,
six of liberality,
five of kindness,
four of rest (leaving this out is like leaving the oil out of the salad, don't do it),
three of prayer,
two of meditation,
and one well selected resolution.
If you have no conscientious scruples,
put in about a teaspoonful of good spirits,
a dash of fun, a pinch of folly,
a sprinkling of play, and a heaping cupful of good humor.
Pour into the whole love ad libitum and mix with a vim.
Cook thoroughly in a fervent heat;
garnish with a few smiles and a sprig of joy;
then serve with quietness, unselfishness, and cheerfulness,
and a Happy New Year is certain.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
A NEW-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday December 14th, 2003
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
Last week I mentioned that my favorite holiday movie of all time is Frank Capra's classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." And I have to confess, I always cry during the final scene of that movie; in fact, I've done it so often now, I'm beginning to feel a little like Pavlov's Dog: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed embrace, the bell rings, and tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes. It's not as if I don't know what's coming; I must have seen the movie dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. But it still hasn't lost its power to effect me; I still turn on the waterworks every time.
For those of you who have been living on a desert island for the last 50 years, and are therefore not familiar with the story, in this movie Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, the good-hearted, self-sacrificing President of the Bailey Building and Loan in the sleepy little town of Bedford Falls. The only other financial institution in town is a bank owned by a greedy, unethical man named Potter, who would like nothing more than to put the Building and Loan out of business. Then one Christmas Eve, in the excitement of season, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces an $8000 bank deposit. Potter finds it, but keeps it for himself, knowing that the Building and Loan is about to be audited. George discovers the shortfall, and, anticipating scandal and ruin, contemplates suicide in the belief that his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. So Clarence Oddbody, a rather bumbling Angel Second Class, is sent to earth to earn his wings by showing Jimmy Stewart what life would have been like in the town of "Pottersville" had George Bailey never been born. The climactic final scene, the one that always brings tears to my eyes, is when the citizens of Bedford Falls rise up in support of George, pledging their personal savings in order to make up the $8000 deficit. And maybe it is a corny story: honesty and virtue triumph over greed and opportunism, Clarence earns his wings, and everyone in Bedford Falls lives happily ever after, with the possible exception of Potter the banker (who, so far as I know, still has the eight grand). But corny or not, it still makes me cry, every time; in fact, sometimes just thinking about it is enough to start me sniffling with sentimentality.
A somewhat cynical ministerial colleague of mine once insinuated that the REAL reason I always cry at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" is because I wish that MY Curch Fund Raising efforts would always be so serendipitously successful. And I thought that was a rather a cheap shot, actually; there I was, all choked up, daubing my red eyes with my shirt sleeve, while my colleague sat comfortably in an overstuffed chair, sipping egg nog and impugning my sincerity. And I honestly don't know why "It's a Wonderful Life" affects me the way it does. I often cry at the end of movies -- the first time I see them -- but after awhile I generally get over it. I no longer weep at the end of "Terms of Endearment," for example, and it’s all I can do now to keep from snickering out loud when Ali McGraw dies at the end of "Love Story." But for some reason, "It’s a Wonderful Life" gets me every time. And maybe it is just the corny plot. Because I WANT very much to believe that virtue always triumphs over greed, that honesty inevitably triumphs over opportunism; that the life of one truly good-hearted, self-sacrificing individual human being really does make a difference in the world, and is appreciated by those who have benefited from that difference. And maybe it’s also because I also want to become a little bit more like George Bailey myself, want to be able to look back at everything I’ve done someday and say "It truly was a Wonderful Life!"
The plain fact of the matter though, is that I'm not really feeling all that keen on Christmas this year. Oh, I'm sure the season will eventually have its moments --Christmas generally surprises me that way at some point -- but on the whole, to my way of thinking, the best thing about Christmas will be December 26th, when the hassle of the holiday will finally over, and there are 364 days before I have to go through it again. My problem is not so much with the holiday itself, as it is with the expectations we set for it. Every year I start out with such good intentions, and every year it seems as though I’m scrambling to catch up: I can’t get my Christmas letter finished on time, or I'm still shopping at the very last minute, and of course I invariably end up feeling a little awkward and embarrassed about receiving presents I don't really want or need. I generally enjoy giving gifts, but I resent trying to find something "perfect" for everyone I know; I would much rather shop thoughtfully for one or two people than worry about forgetting someone who hasn't forgotten me. I’m also not really that keen on red and green; they are OK by themselves, but together they are incredibly garish colors, particularly for socks, or a necktie. Not that my personal favorites, Purple and Crimson, would look any better. But at least no one is going to be disappointed if I decide its not the sort of thing I want to wear to church on Sunday morning.
The one thing I don't really fret that much about is the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. I find that sort of thing fairly easy to ignore. What I can't ignore is that nagging feeling that somehow I ought to be enjoying myself more than I am, or that it's somehow all my fault if everyone around me isn't full of the holiday spirit, or that I have some sort of serious, pathological personality disorder because I'm saying "Merry Christmas" and feeling "Bah, Humbug." We do expect an awful lot out of ourselves this time of year. It's no wonder that so many of us come to feel disappointed, or even seriously depressed, in this supposed season of Peace and Good Will.
I personally find far more joy in the memories of Christmas Past than I do in the anticipation of Christmas Yet to Come. Memory is thankfully a selective thing, a fact which can in itself make memory a double edged sword. Were those old-fashioned Christmases really as good as we remember them to be? And ironically, the more fondly we recall them, the more pressure we put upon ourselves to make this year's Christmas "the best Christmas ever" -- to out-do years of accumulated recollections in one huge orgy of holiday merriment. Or in some cases, I suppose, to make up for them; for although it is in the nature of things to remember best the good times while gradually forgetting the bad, there are certain times that are just so terrible there's no forgetting them, no matter how hard one tries. Every one of us, I suspect, harbors memories of both kinds: the Christmas we endeavor to recreate, and the one we hope we'll never see again. And both influence our expectations of the current holiday season, the Spirit of Christmas Present.
And then, just beyond our personal holiday ghosts, lurk our cultural Christmas traditions: sleigh bells and mistletoe, stockings hung by the chimney with care, Jack Frost nipping at your nose -- things which make perfect sense if you lived in this part of the world a century ago, but which can be awfully confusing for a small child growing up on a ranch in West Texas, or a condominium in Southern California. Over the Freeway and to the Beach to Grandmother's house we go? Throw another Mesquite Chip on the Barbecue? The first year I lived in Texas I received a card from my brother asking me whether I was going to decorate a cactus for Christmas. But it didn’t take me too long to appreciate the advantages of being able to draw upon Mexican Christmas traditions as well as those of Northern Europe. To my way of thinking, Piñatas filled with candy and candle-lit Luminarios lining the sidewalk beat the heck out of having to shovel a foot of snow just to get to the firewood. I love looking at pictures of a one-horse open sleigh dashing through the snow dragging a freshly-cut Christmas tree back to grandmother’s house, but it’s not really something I feel compelled to do personally.
There is, of course, a symbolic quality to Tradition as well, in that Tradition often points to meanings which lie beyond itself. But traditions also tend to take on meanings all their own, through repetition if nothing else, as our personal experiences intersect with it and are shaped and influenced by it. A child who has grown up with an expectation of a "White Christmas" is going to be disappointed if it doesn't snow, just as children who have always smashed a piñata won't feel as though Christmas is really Christmas unless they go home with a pocket full of candy.
But whatever traditions we chose to observe, the one thing we must never allow ourselves to forget is that this is a religious holiday we celebrate here in the shadow of the winter solstice. And the thing we celebrate is not so much the miraculous birth of a special infant some two millennia ago, as it is the knowledge that, indeed, the life of one good-hearted, self-sacrificing, honest, virtuous, compassionate individual can make a difference, has made a difference, and still continues to make a difference, here in the here and now; and that this difference is appreciated by those of us who have benefited from it, who still believe in Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All. Call him George Bailey of Bedford Falls; call him Y'shua ben Joseph of Nazareth, the Anointed Messiah, the Christ: call it whatever you like, It's a Wonderful Life. It's the life we celebrate at Christmas, the miracle of a new light come into the world.
A living tradition can be a bridge to our appreciation of that miracle, while empty traditions are often barriers to our ever experiencing it for ourselves. And we bring our traditions to life not through the futile attempt to resurrect the Spirit of Christmas Past, but by our openness to life in the here and now, our willingness to let honesty and virtue, good-heartedness and self-sacrifice, live within us, take vitality from our laughter, and courage from our tears.
I used to feel kind of embarrassed about always crying at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life." After all, it's not a very manly thing to do -- you'd think I was still a small child or something. Lately I find that I don't worry about that kind of thing too much, at least not among my friends. Because Christmas truly is a holiday for children, mostly. For those still young enough to believe in Santa, still naive enough to believe that the world can be saved by a child, and for the child in us all who wants to believe in George Bailey, and in Clarence, an Angel Second Class, who is counting on the likes of us to help him earn his wings.
READINGS: Two Christmas poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
BC : AD
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect.
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
What The Donkey Saw
No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host -
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.
Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday December 14th, 2003
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
Last week I mentioned that my favorite holiday movie of all time is Frank Capra's classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." And I have to confess, I always cry during the final scene of that movie; in fact, I've done it so often now, I'm beginning to feel a little like Pavlov's Dog: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed embrace, the bell rings, and tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes. It's not as if I don't know what's coming; I must have seen the movie dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. But it still hasn't lost its power to effect me; I still turn on the waterworks every time.
For those of you who have been living on a desert island for the last 50 years, and are therefore not familiar with the story, in this movie Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, the good-hearted, self-sacrificing President of the Bailey Building and Loan in the sleepy little town of Bedford Falls. The only other financial institution in town is a bank owned by a greedy, unethical man named Potter, who would like nothing more than to put the Building and Loan out of business. Then one Christmas Eve, in the excitement of season, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces an $8000 bank deposit. Potter finds it, but keeps it for himself, knowing that the Building and Loan is about to be audited. George discovers the shortfall, and, anticipating scandal and ruin, contemplates suicide in the belief that his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. So Clarence Oddbody, a rather bumbling Angel Second Class, is sent to earth to earn his wings by showing Jimmy Stewart what life would have been like in the town of "Pottersville" had George Bailey never been born. The climactic final scene, the one that always brings tears to my eyes, is when the citizens of Bedford Falls rise up in support of George, pledging their personal savings in order to make up the $8000 deficit. And maybe it is a corny story: honesty and virtue triumph over greed and opportunism, Clarence earns his wings, and everyone in Bedford Falls lives happily ever after, with the possible exception of Potter the banker (who, so far as I know, still has the eight grand). But corny or not, it still makes me cry, every time; in fact, sometimes just thinking about it is enough to start me sniffling with sentimentality.
A somewhat cynical ministerial colleague of mine once insinuated that the REAL reason I always cry at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" is because I wish that MY Curch Fund Raising efforts would always be so serendipitously successful. And I thought that was a rather a cheap shot, actually; there I was, all choked up, daubing my red eyes with my shirt sleeve, while my colleague sat comfortably in an overstuffed chair, sipping egg nog and impugning my sincerity. And I honestly don't know why "It's a Wonderful Life" affects me the way it does. I often cry at the end of movies -- the first time I see them -- but after awhile I generally get over it. I no longer weep at the end of "Terms of Endearment," for example, and it’s all I can do now to keep from snickering out loud when Ali McGraw dies at the end of "Love Story." But for some reason, "It’s a Wonderful Life" gets me every time. And maybe it is just the corny plot. Because I WANT very much to believe that virtue always triumphs over greed, that honesty inevitably triumphs over opportunism; that the life of one truly good-hearted, self-sacrificing individual human being really does make a difference in the world, and is appreciated by those who have benefited from that difference. And maybe it’s also because I also want to become a little bit more like George Bailey myself, want to be able to look back at everything I’ve done someday and say "It truly was a Wonderful Life!"
The plain fact of the matter though, is that I'm not really feeling all that keen on Christmas this year. Oh, I'm sure the season will eventually have its moments --Christmas generally surprises me that way at some point -- but on the whole, to my way of thinking, the best thing about Christmas will be December 26th, when the hassle of the holiday will finally over, and there are 364 days before I have to go through it again. My problem is not so much with the holiday itself, as it is with the expectations we set for it. Every year I start out with such good intentions, and every year it seems as though I’m scrambling to catch up: I can’t get my Christmas letter finished on time, or I'm still shopping at the very last minute, and of course I invariably end up feeling a little awkward and embarrassed about receiving presents I don't really want or need. I generally enjoy giving gifts, but I resent trying to find something "perfect" for everyone I know; I would much rather shop thoughtfully for one or two people than worry about forgetting someone who hasn't forgotten me. I’m also not really that keen on red and green; they are OK by themselves, but together they are incredibly garish colors, particularly for socks, or a necktie. Not that my personal favorites, Purple and Crimson, would look any better. But at least no one is going to be disappointed if I decide its not the sort of thing I want to wear to church on Sunday morning.
The one thing I don't really fret that much about is the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. I find that sort of thing fairly easy to ignore. What I can't ignore is that nagging feeling that somehow I ought to be enjoying myself more than I am, or that it's somehow all my fault if everyone around me isn't full of the holiday spirit, or that I have some sort of serious, pathological personality disorder because I'm saying "Merry Christmas" and feeling "Bah, Humbug." We do expect an awful lot out of ourselves this time of year. It's no wonder that so many of us come to feel disappointed, or even seriously depressed, in this supposed season of Peace and Good Will.
I personally find far more joy in the memories of Christmas Past than I do in the anticipation of Christmas Yet to Come. Memory is thankfully a selective thing, a fact which can in itself make memory a double edged sword. Were those old-fashioned Christmases really as good as we remember them to be? And ironically, the more fondly we recall them, the more pressure we put upon ourselves to make this year's Christmas "the best Christmas ever" -- to out-do years of accumulated recollections in one huge orgy of holiday merriment. Or in some cases, I suppose, to make up for them; for although it is in the nature of things to remember best the good times while gradually forgetting the bad, there are certain times that are just so terrible there's no forgetting them, no matter how hard one tries. Every one of us, I suspect, harbors memories of both kinds: the Christmas we endeavor to recreate, and the one we hope we'll never see again. And both influence our expectations of the current holiday season, the Spirit of Christmas Present.
And then, just beyond our personal holiday ghosts, lurk our cultural Christmas traditions: sleigh bells and mistletoe, stockings hung by the chimney with care, Jack Frost nipping at your nose -- things which make perfect sense if you lived in this part of the world a century ago, but which can be awfully confusing for a small child growing up on a ranch in West Texas, or a condominium in Southern California. Over the Freeway and to the Beach to Grandmother's house we go? Throw another Mesquite Chip on the Barbecue? The first year I lived in Texas I received a card from my brother asking me whether I was going to decorate a cactus for Christmas. But it didn’t take me too long to appreciate the advantages of being able to draw upon Mexican Christmas traditions as well as those of Northern Europe. To my way of thinking, Piñatas filled with candy and candle-lit Luminarios lining the sidewalk beat the heck out of having to shovel a foot of snow just to get to the firewood. I love looking at pictures of a one-horse open sleigh dashing through the snow dragging a freshly-cut Christmas tree back to grandmother’s house, but it’s not really something I feel compelled to do personally.
There is, of course, a symbolic quality to Tradition as well, in that Tradition often points to meanings which lie beyond itself. But traditions also tend to take on meanings all their own, through repetition if nothing else, as our personal experiences intersect with it and are shaped and influenced by it. A child who has grown up with an expectation of a "White Christmas" is going to be disappointed if it doesn't snow, just as children who have always smashed a piñata won't feel as though Christmas is really Christmas unless they go home with a pocket full of candy.
But whatever traditions we chose to observe, the one thing we must never allow ourselves to forget is that this is a religious holiday we celebrate here in the shadow of the winter solstice. And the thing we celebrate is not so much the miraculous birth of a special infant some two millennia ago, as it is the knowledge that, indeed, the life of one good-hearted, self-sacrificing, honest, virtuous, compassionate individual can make a difference, has made a difference, and still continues to make a difference, here in the here and now; and that this difference is appreciated by those of us who have benefited from it, who still believe in Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All. Call him George Bailey of Bedford Falls; call him Y'shua ben Joseph of Nazareth, the Anointed Messiah, the Christ: call it whatever you like, It's a Wonderful Life. It's the life we celebrate at Christmas, the miracle of a new light come into the world.
A living tradition can be a bridge to our appreciation of that miracle, while empty traditions are often barriers to our ever experiencing it for ourselves. And we bring our traditions to life not through the futile attempt to resurrect the Spirit of Christmas Past, but by our openness to life in the here and now, our willingness to let honesty and virtue, good-heartedness and self-sacrifice, live within us, take vitality from our laughter, and courage from our tears.
I used to feel kind of embarrassed about always crying at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life." After all, it's not a very manly thing to do -- you'd think I was still a small child or something. Lately I find that I don't worry about that kind of thing too much, at least not among my friends. Because Christmas truly is a holiday for children, mostly. For those still young enough to believe in Santa, still naive enough to believe that the world can be saved by a child, and for the child in us all who wants to believe in George Bailey, and in Clarence, an Angel Second Class, who is counting on the likes of us to help him earn his wings.
READINGS: Two Christmas poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
BC : AD
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect.
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
What The Donkey Saw
No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host -
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.
Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
Sunday, December 7, 2003
HOME FOR THE HOLY DAYS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 7th, 2003
[extemporaneous introduction]
When I was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, my family lived in what I suppose might be thought of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of fish (or, more often, macaroni and cheese) wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business -- there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these were the perceptions of a twelve year old child some thirty-five odd years ago. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (since that was when my Dad, who traveled all week for work, was home for dinner), and no strangely-dressed little Priest in a Box was ever privy to my innermost secrets. But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their three purple candles and the solitary white one; and the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows: one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window: and each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! -- what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents finally gave in and brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did) -- but it didn't make any difference: the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway; the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose, had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, with shame, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalists we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light”...it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well: a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would WE have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school: the holiday season was basically defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular spiritual or religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course the big Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days." And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last. But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Unabridged Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforeseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are both a time of joyous anticipation for the coming birth of the child Christ, and also a time of solemn preparation for the unforeseen "Second Coming" at the end of Time, when all the world shall be judged. In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism discourages the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgment, which gives this season its peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared.
In her poem "Feast Days," found in her collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Annie Dillard writes:
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his own ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. At the critical turning point of the film, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this sleepy little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence -- and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the despair, he truly did have a Wonderful Life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, preferring to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little queasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight particularly is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, and discover that we finally understand it. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation... but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a manger -- a feed trough! -- in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the good news that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforeseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 7th, 2003
[extemporaneous introduction]
When I was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, my family lived in what I suppose might be thought of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of fish (or, more often, macaroni and cheese) wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business -- there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these were the perceptions of a twelve year old child some thirty-five odd years ago. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (since that was when my Dad, who traveled all week for work, was home for dinner), and no strangely-dressed little Priest in a Box was ever privy to my innermost secrets. But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their three purple candles and the solitary white one; and the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows: one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window: and each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! -- what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents finally gave in and brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did) -- but it didn't make any difference: the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway; the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose, had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, with shame, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalists we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light”...it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well: a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would WE have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school: the holiday season was basically defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular spiritual or religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course the big Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days." And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last. But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Unabridged Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforeseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are both a time of joyous anticipation for the coming birth of the child Christ, and also a time of solemn preparation for the unforeseen "Second Coming" at the end of Time, when all the world shall be judged. In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism discourages the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgment, which gives this season its peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared.
In her poem "Feast Days," found in her collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Annie Dillard writes:
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his own ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. At the critical turning point of the film, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this sleepy little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence -- and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the despair, he truly did have a Wonderful Life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, preferring to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little queasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight particularly is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, and discover that we finally understand it. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation... but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a manger -- a feed trough! -- in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the good news that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforeseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
NÅR VANDET STÅR I MUNDEN... [Lærer man vel at svømme]
(“when the water is up to the mouth....[one learns to swim well]”)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 23rd, 2003
I would have to be the first to admit that I don’t really know all that much about the scientific basis of Global Warming. I believe that it’s happening because so many people who do seem to know what they’re talking about tell me that it’s happening, and I also know that there is still some dispute (although not much) about whether or not it is being caused by the emission of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) by our fossil fuel-driven industrial society, or rather reflects some sort of “normal” geological climate change. I realize there are still some questions about what it really means to our society and the environment. Mostly, though, I’m just not really sure about what I ought to be doing about it. Like most members of my generation, I’m familiar with the notion of “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.” But when confronted with a problem on the scale of Global Climactic Change, what does one do in one’s own neighborhood to make things right again? I’ve been so concerned about this I even went out and bought a book, written by two PhD’s -- Paul and Hazel Delcourt -- entitled Living Well in the Age of Global Warming: 10 Strategies for Boomers, Bobos, and Cultural Creatives. I’m a Boomer, and I share many of the qualities of a “Bourgeois Bohemian” (which is what the acronym “Bobo” stands for), and I certainly fit the demographic profile of a “Cultural Creative,” so when this title popped up on my Amazon “Recommended Picks” list I clicked with my mouse and waited for enlightenment to arrive on my doorstep.
The problem is, when the book finally did arrive it wasn’t at all what I had expected. Rather than telling me anything useful about what I might do to help stop global warming, it basically offered meaningless advice about how to end up a “Greenhouse Winner” rather than a “Greenhouse Loser,”while its “10 strategies” essentially boiled down to two. Strategy number one: move to the mountains (actually, there were several variations on this particular theme). And Strategy number two? -- buy a boat. So, needless to say, I was more than a little disappointed (even though I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a boat for years); since when all was said and done, this book might have done a lot more good in the fight against global warming if it had remained in the form of a tree.
But the experience did get me thinking again about my feelings of helplessness in the face of the prospect of catastrophic global climate change. Growing up under the shadow of the Cold War, I’d always sorta assumed that the end of the world, when it came, would be in the form of a nuclear holocaust: one big Armageddon-like blow-out, followed by (at least for anyone who managed to survive) a long, nuclear winter -- or as Jonathan Schell once described it, a Republic of Insects and Grass. Little did I dream that our actual situation would more closely resemble that of the Frog in the Teakettle -- the temperature around us slowly increasing over time, but we never really notice because the change is so gradual...until the next thing we know the kettle is boiling and our goose is cooked. It’s difficult even to talk about it without sounding alarmist, like Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But just because a problem is so big that it’s hard to conceptualize doesn’t mean that it’s a fairy tale, or that we can safely ignore it. Because if we wait until the problem is so obvious that it is undeniable (and in the opinion of many, we are there already), it may also be too late for us to do anything about it.
Some of you may remember from Neighborhood Sunday the Danish proverb I allude to in the title of my sermon: “ Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme” -- “When the water is up to one’s mouth, one learns to swim well.” The Danes seem to be taking global warming a lot more seriously than we do here in the United States...perhaps because despite being among the world’s leaders in per capita boat ownership, they also recognize that they live in a country surrounded by water -- 406 islands and one low, sandy peninsula, on which the highest point is less than 200 meters above sea level. And thus they are also among the world’s leaders in things like wind turbine technology (Denmark currently generates approximately 27% of its electricity this way) and other sustainable and efficient “green” technologies, and are using this technology not only to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, but are also exporting it to Eastern Europe in order to generate even greater offsets under the terms of the Kyoto accords. 80% of the wind generation capacity in Denmark is owned either by private citizens or through small, neighborhood collectives, while government subsidies for this form of energy are scheduled for elimination in 2004, since the cost is now competitive with that of other new energy sources. Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme....
On a slightly different note, as most of you probably know (since the media coverage has been overwhelming, at least in the media sources I routinely view), yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination, in Dallas, Texas, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And I was a little surprised to learn that not only am I now among the minority of living Americans who can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Kennedy had been shot, but that also (as of my last birthday), I am now myself older than JFK was at the time of his death. So the torch has indeed passed to a new generation once again. And as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve also been reflecting upon some of the better- (and lesser-) known aspects of Kennedy’s political career: his legendary “charisma” and clever, charming wit; his reputation as a legitimate war hero, and the near-crippling physical disabilities he kept secret from the public; his now well-publicized sexual peccadilloes with women like Marilyn Monroe; the closely-contested (some might even say stolen) media-driven election which elevated him to the Oval Office, and which, in many ways, sowed the seeds of his defeated opponent Richard Nixon’s subsequent Watergate paranoia, and thus might even be said to be at the root of our nation’s present polarized political acrimony; his Keynesian-inspired tax-cuts (which many conservatives now point to as justification for their own supply-side economic theories); the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his subsequent interest in counter-insurgency in places like Vietnam; his trip to Berlin; the Cuban Missile crisis; his mixed-record on Civil Rights; the creation of the Peace Corps, and his visionary support of the Space Program. Academic historians generally rate Kennedy as a somewhat mediocre President -- not the best or the brightest, but certainly not one of the worst either. Yet his death continues to maintain a powerful hold on the American imagination, like an icon of the end of an earlier, more optimistic era.
What I’ve found myself thinking about mostly though is what things might be like if the American people embraced the problem of Global Warming with the same spirit of optimism, and service, and idealistic self-sacrifice characteristic of the early days of the Peace Corps and the race to the Moon. We are, after all, still the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world; we represent approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet produce 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and given our legendary “Yankee ingenuity,” are no doubt perfectly capable of achieving an annual 5% reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten years with little or no loss of productivity, simply through increased efficiencies, the intentional development of alternative, renewable energy sources, and the widespread adoption of a handful of lifestyle changes, many of which would actually lead to better health and an improved quality of life for the majority of American citizens.
But these things aren’t going to happen if they are simply left to “the invisible hand” of the marketplace, especially a marketplace where we continue to subsidize old, inefficient “dirty” technologies, while compelling new and innovative. sustainable “green” ones to sink or swim on their own merits, even while still in their infancy. Moreover, by producing and perfecting these sustainable technologies now, we may be able to export them to the developing world in time to head off the uncontrolled production of greenhouse gasses in those countries, while at the same time demonstrating that it is indeed possible for them to enjoy a much higher standard of living at a much more modest environmental cost.
The problem of Global Warming is a lot more complicated than merely higher mean temperatures and rising sea levels. Even the rosy scenarios anticipate significant changes in weather patterns, agricultural productivity, flooding and the like, while the worst-case scenarios predict catastrophes of near-Biblical proportions. Furthermore, even a sustained, systematic, unified global effort to ameliorate the problem may not be sufficient to reverse the trend for another 100 years or more. But rather than merely throwing our hands in the air, closing our eyes, and holding our noses, there are some practical steps we can all take in order to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The first of these steps is self-education. There’s a lot more that we all can learn about Global Warming, both with regard to the big picture, and also in terms of the hands-on things we can do in order to avoid contributing further to the problem ourselves. Unitarians are sometimes teased about believing in “salvation by bibliography,” but in this case in particular, knowledge really is power, and is the foundation for meaningful action. Here are two book that I feel ARE worth the paper they are printed on. The first is High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. This is a relatively new book, written by J.F. Rischard, a vice-president at the World Bank (so it’s not exactly the kind of tree-hugging liberal pabulum I ordinarily like to read). The second is Jon Naar’s Design for a Livable Planet, which is filled with all sorts of practical ideas about things you can do to reduce your environmental impact on the earth. This is a fairly old book, but the good news is that there are lots of used copies available for about a buck plus postage at Amazon. Increased awareness leads naturally to the second step, which is making as many of these lifestyle changes as we can, and then committing ourselves to making even more. I don’t want you to think that simply turning out the lights when you leave the room and driving a more fuel-efficient car is going to make all the difference in the world. But it’s a start, and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
The third step involves participating in the education of others, as well as creating networks of mutual encouragement and support...so that as communities we can begin better to understand the full dimensions of our involvement in the problem, and can help one another in our efforts to make more comprehensive changes to address it. This is one of the places where churches like ours, as learning and teaching organizations, can make an important contribution. And finally there is the step of Activism and Advocacy: working to create changes on the level of public policy, which in this particular case is going to be essential if we hope to have any kind of meaningful impact on the overall situation in the long term.
Of course, there are some who believe that because the problem of Global Warming is so complex, only a solution which relies upon “the invisible hand of the marketplace” can possibly be effective. And I agree with this view...to a point. But because the problem of Global Warming is likewise one of those instances where “Bad money drives out Good,” so long as “bad actors” are allowed to avoid paying the true environmental costs of their activities, skimming off the profits while compelling the rest of us to pay for cleaning up their mess, well-intentioned competitors are always going to be at a disadvantage. If we wish to see some sort of workable, “market-based” solution to the problem of global warming, we need to make it profitable to do the right thing, while taking the profitability out of doing wrong. And we do this through rational regulation, backed by the authority of law.
Moreover, as the World’s Leader in the production of greenhouse gasses, it only stands to reason that the United States should take the lead in working toward their reduction and eventual elimination. For America to opt-out of the Kyoto accords because we claim that compliance would put our industries at a competitive disadvantage against those of countries like Bangladesh is absurd. America ought to be showing the world a better way of doing things, rather than throwing our weight around in a vain attempt to keep things just the way they are. So long as the “invisible hand” is seen to be thumbing its nose at the rest of the world, holding down the less-fortunate while propping up the fortunes of a privileged few, it will only work to divide the world further between the “Greenhouse winners” and the “Greenhouse losers.” A rising tide may well float all boats, but that only matters if people can afford to buy a boat. The alternative of throwing the weak to the sharks is morally acceptable only in some sort of alternative universe where the fundamental laws of human decency no longer apply.
And finally, I think it is essential for us to remember that as part of that “four per cent,” ALL Americans are seen by the rest of the world as belonging to that privileged few. It may well be true that our freedom, our economic prosperity, our so-called “opportunity society” in general, are the envy of the world, so long as that prosperity is perceived as denying opportunities to others, we will be despised as selfish, short-sighted bullies rather than admired as the generous, compassionate, creative and innovative hard-working human beings we all like to imagine ourselves to be. The time has come, and indeed may be long overdue, for Americans to live up to our flattering self-image, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival...” not only of liberty, but of the planet itself. And “the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor...can truly light the world,” not just metaphorically, but literally as well.
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 23rd, 2003
I would have to be the first to admit that I don’t really know all that much about the scientific basis of Global Warming. I believe that it’s happening because so many people who do seem to know what they’re talking about tell me that it’s happening, and I also know that there is still some dispute (although not much) about whether or not it is being caused by the emission of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) by our fossil fuel-driven industrial society, or rather reflects some sort of “normal” geological climate change. I realize there are still some questions about what it really means to our society and the environment. Mostly, though, I’m just not really sure about what I ought to be doing about it. Like most members of my generation, I’m familiar with the notion of “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.” But when confronted with a problem on the scale of Global Climactic Change, what does one do in one’s own neighborhood to make things right again? I’ve been so concerned about this I even went out and bought a book, written by two PhD’s -- Paul and Hazel Delcourt -- entitled Living Well in the Age of Global Warming: 10 Strategies for Boomers, Bobos, and Cultural Creatives. I’m a Boomer, and I share many of the qualities of a “Bourgeois Bohemian” (which is what the acronym “Bobo” stands for), and I certainly fit the demographic profile of a “Cultural Creative,” so when this title popped up on my Amazon “Recommended Picks” list I clicked with my mouse and waited for enlightenment to arrive on my doorstep.
The problem is, when the book finally did arrive it wasn’t at all what I had expected. Rather than telling me anything useful about what I might do to help stop global warming, it basically offered meaningless advice about how to end up a “Greenhouse Winner” rather than a “Greenhouse Loser,”while its “10 strategies” essentially boiled down to two. Strategy number one: move to the mountains (actually, there were several variations on this particular theme). And Strategy number two? -- buy a boat. So, needless to say, I was more than a little disappointed (even though I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a boat for years); since when all was said and done, this book might have done a lot more good in the fight against global warming if it had remained in the form of a tree.
But the experience did get me thinking again about my feelings of helplessness in the face of the prospect of catastrophic global climate change. Growing up under the shadow of the Cold War, I’d always sorta assumed that the end of the world, when it came, would be in the form of a nuclear holocaust: one big Armageddon-like blow-out, followed by (at least for anyone who managed to survive) a long, nuclear winter -- or as Jonathan Schell once described it, a Republic of Insects and Grass. Little did I dream that our actual situation would more closely resemble that of the Frog in the Teakettle -- the temperature around us slowly increasing over time, but we never really notice because the change is so gradual...until the next thing we know the kettle is boiling and our goose is cooked. It’s difficult even to talk about it without sounding alarmist, like Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But just because a problem is so big that it’s hard to conceptualize doesn’t mean that it’s a fairy tale, or that we can safely ignore it. Because if we wait until the problem is so obvious that it is undeniable (and in the opinion of many, we are there already), it may also be too late for us to do anything about it.
Some of you may remember from Neighborhood Sunday the Danish proverb I allude to in the title of my sermon: “ Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme” -- “When the water is up to one’s mouth, one learns to swim well.” The Danes seem to be taking global warming a lot more seriously than we do here in the United States...perhaps because despite being among the world’s leaders in per capita boat ownership, they also recognize that they live in a country surrounded by water -- 406 islands and one low, sandy peninsula, on which the highest point is less than 200 meters above sea level. And thus they are also among the world’s leaders in things like wind turbine technology (Denmark currently generates approximately 27% of its electricity this way) and other sustainable and efficient “green” technologies, and are using this technology not only to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, but are also exporting it to Eastern Europe in order to generate even greater offsets under the terms of the Kyoto accords. 80% of the wind generation capacity in Denmark is owned either by private citizens or through small, neighborhood collectives, while government subsidies for this form of energy are scheduled for elimination in 2004, since the cost is now competitive with that of other new energy sources. Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme....
On a slightly different note, as most of you probably know (since the media coverage has been overwhelming, at least in the media sources I routinely view), yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination, in Dallas, Texas, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And I was a little surprised to learn that not only am I now among the minority of living Americans who can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Kennedy had been shot, but that also (as of my last birthday), I am now myself older than JFK was at the time of his death. So the torch has indeed passed to a new generation once again. And as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve also been reflecting upon some of the better- (and lesser-) known aspects of Kennedy’s political career: his legendary “charisma” and clever, charming wit; his reputation as a legitimate war hero, and the near-crippling physical disabilities he kept secret from the public; his now well-publicized sexual peccadilloes with women like Marilyn Monroe; the closely-contested (some might even say stolen) media-driven election which elevated him to the Oval Office, and which, in many ways, sowed the seeds of his defeated opponent Richard Nixon’s subsequent Watergate paranoia, and thus might even be said to be at the root of our nation’s present polarized political acrimony; his Keynesian-inspired tax-cuts (which many conservatives now point to as justification for their own supply-side economic theories); the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his subsequent interest in counter-insurgency in places like Vietnam; his trip to Berlin; the Cuban Missile crisis; his mixed-record on Civil Rights; the creation of the Peace Corps, and his visionary support of the Space Program. Academic historians generally rate Kennedy as a somewhat mediocre President -- not the best or the brightest, but certainly not one of the worst either. Yet his death continues to maintain a powerful hold on the American imagination, like an icon of the end of an earlier, more optimistic era.
What I’ve found myself thinking about mostly though is what things might be like if the American people embraced the problem of Global Warming with the same spirit of optimism, and service, and idealistic self-sacrifice characteristic of the early days of the Peace Corps and the race to the Moon. We are, after all, still the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world; we represent approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet produce 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and given our legendary “Yankee ingenuity,” are no doubt perfectly capable of achieving an annual 5% reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten years with little or no loss of productivity, simply through increased efficiencies, the intentional development of alternative, renewable energy sources, and the widespread adoption of a handful of lifestyle changes, many of which would actually lead to better health and an improved quality of life for the majority of American citizens.
But these things aren’t going to happen if they are simply left to “the invisible hand” of the marketplace, especially a marketplace where we continue to subsidize old, inefficient “dirty” technologies, while compelling new and innovative. sustainable “green” ones to sink or swim on their own merits, even while still in their infancy. Moreover, by producing and perfecting these sustainable technologies now, we may be able to export them to the developing world in time to head off the uncontrolled production of greenhouse gasses in those countries, while at the same time demonstrating that it is indeed possible for them to enjoy a much higher standard of living at a much more modest environmental cost.
The problem of Global Warming is a lot more complicated than merely higher mean temperatures and rising sea levels. Even the rosy scenarios anticipate significant changes in weather patterns, agricultural productivity, flooding and the like, while the worst-case scenarios predict catastrophes of near-Biblical proportions. Furthermore, even a sustained, systematic, unified global effort to ameliorate the problem may not be sufficient to reverse the trend for another 100 years or more. But rather than merely throwing our hands in the air, closing our eyes, and holding our noses, there are some practical steps we can all take in order to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The first of these steps is self-education. There’s a lot more that we all can learn about Global Warming, both with regard to the big picture, and also in terms of the hands-on things we can do in order to avoid contributing further to the problem ourselves. Unitarians are sometimes teased about believing in “salvation by bibliography,” but in this case in particular, knowledge really is power, and is the foundation for meaningful action. Here are two book that I feel ARE worth the paper they are printed on. The first is High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. This is a relatively new book, written by J.F. Rischard, a vice-president at the World Bank (so it’s not exactly the kind of tree-hugging liberal pabulum I ordinarily like to read). The second is Jon Naar’s Design for a Livable Planet, which is filled with all sorts of practical ideas about things you can do to reduce your environmental impact on the earth. This is a fairly old book, but the good news is that there are lots of used copies available for about a buck plus postage at Amazon. Increased awareness leads naturally to the second step, which is making as many of these lifestyle changes as we can, and then committing ourselves to making even more. I don’t want you to think that simply turning out the lights when you leave the room and driving a more fuel-efficient car is going to make all the difference in the world. But it’s a start, and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
The third step involves participating in the education of others, as well as creating networks of mutual encouragement and support...so that as communities we can begin better to understand the full dimensions of our involvement in the problem, and can help one another in our efforts to make more comprehensive changes to address it. This is one of the places where churches like ours, as learning and teaching organizations, can make an important contribution. And finally there is the step of Activism and Advocacy: working to create changes on the level of public policy, which in this particular case is going to be essential if we hope to have any kind of meaningful impact on the overall situation in the long term.
Of course, there are some who believe that because the problem of Global Warming is so complex, only a solution which relies upon “the invisible hand of the marketplace” can possibly be effective. And I agree with this view...to a point. But because the problem of Global Warming is likewise one of those instances where “Bad money drives out Good,” so long as “bad actors” are allowed to avoid paying the true environmental costs of their activities, skimming off the profits while compelling the rest of us to pay for cleaning up their mess, well-intentioned competitors are always going to be at a disadvantage. If we wish to see some sort of workable, “market-based” solution to the problem of global warming, we need to make it profitable to do the right thing, while taking the profitability out of doing wrong. And we do this through rational regulation, backed by the authority of law.
Moreover, as the World’s Leader in the production of greenhouse gasses, it only stands to reason that the United States should take the lead in working toward their reduction and eventual elimination. For America to opt-out of the Kyoto accords because we claim that compliance would put our industries at a competitive disadvantage against those of countries like Bangladesh is absurd. America ought to be showing the world a better way of doing things, rather than throwing our weight around in a vain attempt to keep things just the way they are. So long as the “invisible hand” is seen to be thumbing its nose at the rest of the world, holding down the less-fortunate while propping up the fortunes of a privileged few, it will only work to divide the world further between the “Greenhouse winners” and the “Greenhouse losers.” A rising tide may well float all boats, but that only matters if people can afford to buy a boat. The alternative of throwing the weak to the sharks is morally acceptable only in some sort of alternative universe where the fundamental laws of human decency no longer apply.
And finally, I think it is essential for us to remember that as part of that “four per cent,” ALL Americans are seen by the rest of the world as belonging to that privileged few. It may well be true that our freedom, our economic prosperity, our so-called “opportunity society” in general, are the envy of the world, so long as that prosperity is perceived as denying opportunities to others, we will be despised as selfish, short-sighted bullies rather than admired as the generous, compassionate, creative and innovative hard-working human beings we all like to imagine ourselves to be. The time has come, and indeed may be long overdue, for Americans to live up to our flattering self-image, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival...” not only of liberty, but of the planet itself. And “the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor...can truly light the world,” not just metaphorically, but literally as well.
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