First Parish Cohasset

“Another Chance”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 3, 2010

Every morning I pray, “Thank you for a new day. Thank you for another chance.” I’ve given up on perfect, so I’m not asking for another chance for perfection. Sometimes it’s another chance to feel like I’m worthwhile. Sometimes it’s another chance for someone I love dearly, another chance for their health, their happiness, their hope. Sometimes it’s another chance for us as a congregation to let go of petty disagreements and live the love. Sometimes it’s another chance for this country to live its promise of liberty and justice for all. Sometimes it’s another chance for life on our planet. Sometimes it’s simply another chance for a fresh take on the meaning of it all.

The Bible of the Old and New Testaments—some call them the First and Second Testaments—is full of stories of fresh chances given and received.

Exodus tells the tale of Moses leading his people through the wilderness after decades of enslavement in a foreign land. They came to a mountain known as Sinai and they paused. Something different was happening. God called Moses to go by himself to the mountain top; his brother Aaron was to stay behind and oversee the people in Moses’ absence. Moses went up and received from God ten commandments on how to live. It was actually a lot more than ten, as the writers of Exodus tell us. In fact, God had so much to say that it took a long time for Moses to receive it all, and the people down below grew weary and bored. So what did they do? With Aaron leading them on, they collected all the gold jewelry—who knows how these refugees from slavery had gold jewelry, but they apparently did, rings and bracelets and more—and they sculpted a golden calf, a shiny idol that they worshipped with spirited song and dance.

God being God knew what was happening down below and told Moses to go back down the mountain. So enraged was God at the people’s betrayal that he swore he would destroy them. Moses paused before heading back down; he paused and begged God not to do this. He begged God for another chance on behalf of his people. The saga continued with Moses descending from Sinai to find his people dancing around their brand new god, this golden calf. It’s as if Moses didn’t really believe it could happen, but here it was, idolatrous revelry in plain sight. Now it was Moses’ turn to rage at his people. The writers of Exodus tell us that he ordered the slaying of thousands, he who just hours earlier was begging God for leniency. Then, a second time, he climbed Sinai. A second time he received from God commandments on stone tablets. A second time Moses returned to his people, and together they were led out of the wilderness into what became known as the Promised Land.

The core story winding its way through the saga of the ten commandments is the story of another chance, begged for, received, begged for again, received again.

The story of the Old Testament prophet, Jonah, follows in kind—Jonah, the reluctant prophet drafted by God to deliver the hard truth of bad behavior to the people of the city of Nineveh. This brief gem of a tale is dear to me because it was one of the two short-story books that I waded through in Hebrew during my seminary years, and it’s a story replete with characters desperate for another chance.

Here was poor unsuspecting Jonah, a schlemiel we might call him in Yiddish, a screw-up. Called by God to go straighten out the wicked people of the city of Nineveh, Jonah thought to himself, “Who needs this?” and off to sea he went. So what happened? Bad luck haunted the voyage. The crew grew suspicious and tossed Jonah overboard, into the ready jaws of a very big fish. Most of us, I know, are accustomed to hearing that it was a whale, and whale sounds more dramatic, but the Hebrew translates as “very big fish.” Maybe it was a striper or a big blue; I don’t know. But it was big enough through the power of a myth that kept Jonah alive, begging inside this slimy tummy for another chance. So out he’s hurled, and back he goes to the city of Nineveh, where, wonder of wonders, the people do repent when they hear that God will wipe them out if they don’t mend their ways.

You would think Jonah would be thrilled, but no. Off he goes into the nearby desert, sits under a strange tree, and pouts. God has repented of his intended vengeance, just like in the story of Exodus; but Jonah picked up where God left off. I’m going to leave the story at this point. It’s enough to remind us that we who are human may say we want another chance on behalf of whomever or for our own selves when we’ve dealt poorly with others or when we’ve abused any of the countless life forms on this planet or the earth itself. But we’re slow to grant another chance, even though the most human thing in the world is to beg for one ourselves.

I’ll conclude with a recent personal story, a story of how I received another chance at understanding an aunt who died 14 years ago. This was my mother’s elder sister, my Aunt Thelma. As a child, I knew her as a woman with charisma, a woman who had been “saved” as it’s called in a mass revival meeting led by Billie Graham. My Mother explained that from that point on, Thelma was different, and in many ways, positively so. But as a child, I was downwind of what I now call a “fierce Christianity.” Aunt Thelma was relentless in seeing to it that I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior—on her terms, at her church. “Doing your best” wasn’t enough. “Doing your best,” was my own good Mother’s philosophy. For my aunt, it was all or nothing; and she scared the be-Jesus out of me.

It wasn’t that Thelma was a bad person. She didn’t dance around a golden calf. She was certainly no wicked woman of Nineveh. She wasn’t even a vengeful Moses or a pouting Jonah. And she wasn’t mean to family or friends or neighbors. She was, on all counts, a good woman. And for years of my childhood, she delighted me with an array of Christmas poems that she had written. One of them would be my “memorized piece” at the annual Christmas program of our local Presbyterian Church. Nonetheless, she really did scare the be-Jesus out of me with her do-or-die Christianity. For years, I didn’t write her. I didn’t reach out to her when her health grew frail. I was hard-hearted and unforgiving for this fear she had stoked in my fragile child of a self.

It was barely a month ago that her son, my cousin Jim, gave me a CD that held Thelma’s poetry and stories. The setting was the graveside rite of my own Mother, a rite over which I presided as daughter/minister, a rite held at the small Iowa cemetery amid the farmland where my Mother and Aunt Thelma had spent their childhoods. In this somewhat surreal setting, I suddenly held in my hands an epiphany in the form of this CD, this gift from Jim whose daughter, Faith, had gathered and organized her grandmother’s life work.

I returned home and fed it into my computer. There before me was a photograph of a young Thelma Otelia Edwards Durham. She was no longer my scary zealot of an aunt. She was a young and hopeful beauty of a woman. I scrolled through her poetry. It wasn’t all about Jesus, with all due respect to Jesus. It was about the hills and valleys of life, about springtime and romance, about nature and the storms of life, and yes, about salvation and a heart-felt testimony of how it happened for her.

My mind stretched; my heart opened. Here was another chance to understand a key figure in my life, an influential figure, an aunt human and layered.

A simple story perhaps, but for me, it was another chance to understand how layered we are, another chance to open my heart.

As we stand together on the threshold of a New Year, I don’t counsel resolutions. They’re broken as quickly as fragile ornaments on a tree. I don’t counsel promises that we can’t possibly keep. I simply wonder if each of us might not crave another chance, another chance given, another chance received, another chance to rearrange the past and find cause to be hopeful about what is to be—most of all, another chance to find a new grace in the precious moment that is, to live it, to sing it, to pray it, to breathe it, to dance it. In the spirit of my Aunt Thelma:

Dance, dance, dance:
Dance to the world’s sweet refrain;
Step lively – make haste,
Suit the next fellow’s taste;
Do not leave off,
Lose it or gait,
When you’re out with the crowd;
Be not bold – be not loud,
But dance, dance, dance;
Step lively, but dance,
Great dance to the world’s sweet refrain.

I wish us all another chance to dance, dance, dance. Amen.

Sources:

Faith G. Durham, The Poetry and Writings of Thelma Otelia Edwards Durham, 2005.

Thelma Durham, “An Untitled Poem: Dance,” from Faith G. Durham, The Poetry and Writings of Thelma Otelia Edwards Durham, 2005, p. 20.

The Books of Exodus and Jonah, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

“Grooks by Piet Hein,” http://chat.carleton.ca/~tcstewar/grooks/grooks.html.