First Parish Cohasset

“Love’s Edge”
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
Standing on the Side of Love Sunday
February 14, 2010
(delivered partially extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Standing on the side of love. Which side is that? And love…there are so many kinds of love to consider. There’s the love of a parent for her children. There’s the love of a child for his parents. There the love of friendship. There’s the love of aunts and uncles and cousins. There’s the love of church. There’s the love of community. There’s the love of self, and we can’t love anybody else if we don’t love ourselves. There’s the love of the familiar, the love of home and neighborhood, maybe the love of where we grew up.

Then it gets harder. There’s the love of somebody who really feels different, the love of somebody with different features, the love of somebody with a different skin color, the love of somebody whom we might have been carefully taught to be afraid of, the love of somebody with a different sexual orientation, the love of somebody who’s fighting a war “on the other side.” There’s the love of somebody who’s in prison because they’ve been convicted of a horrible crime. There’s the love of somebody who’s hurt us or someone we love. There’s the love of somebody with whom we’ve got “issues.” There’s the love of somebody who can drive us nuts in a few seconds’ conversation. Yep, now we’re getting into muddy territory.

Standing on the Side of Love is a public advocacy campaign, launched last June by our Unitarian Universalist Association. The purpose is to “harness love’s power to stop oppression.” What does this mean? It means standing “with all who believe that no person should be dehumanized through acts of exclusion, oppression, or violence.”

“Our religious imperative is to love above all else. ….Standing on the Side of Love confronts exclusion, oppression and violence head-on. Grounded in the belief that all people deserve love and respect, the campaign pursues social change through advocacy, public witness, and speaking out in solidarity with those whose public lives are demeaned.”

It gets muddy.

I’ll bet just about everybody here has said at some point: “I just love everybody. Why do I have to think about particulars?” It’s the specific stuff of loving that makes us squirm. Yet it’s the specific stuff of loving that is the most gratifying, when we stand beside, not over, our neighbors who are hurting, who are oppressed, who are devastated by powers natural and by powers quite human.

Haiti comes to mind—hundreds of thousands dead, over a third of the population desperate for clean water and medical care. Billions of dollars have poured in, along with a host of medical caregivers and engineers and sanitation experts and military personnel and trauma counselors. This congregation has already given well over a thousand dollars to our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee/Unitarian Universalist Association Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, enabling our Service Committee to partner with indigenous groups in Haiti reaching the most marginalized of survivors. The beauty of this mode of giving is that it happens in partnership, in solidarity with—not as charity, but as compassionate justice.

To see the devastation, even on the nightly news, is mind-bending. What is needed is not restoration to the way Haiti was, but a full-blown resurrection of spirit and infrastructure toward what this island nation aspires to, this nation that won its independence from the French as a former slave colony, this nation that inspired abolitionists in our own nation to resist and rebel. To stand with our Haitian neighbors is to stand on the side of love. As members of the same human family in a faith that calls us to affirm the interdependent web of all life, we are called not to do for but to be and do with. I’m delighted that we’ve committed to giving 25% of our morning offering from now through August to this fund, whose harvest permits us to stand with.

There’s a distinctive opportunity to stand with our Haitian neighbors nearby. UU Mass Action, our Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry in Massachusetts, invites us to help Haitian residents in Massachusetts complete their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) forms. It’s a status just made possible by federal action. If you’re interested, please let me know and I’ll give you the contact information.

How else are we standing on the side of love in this parish? On a bone-chilling Saturday a few weeks ago, a dozen of you stood at the entrance to Shaw’s and Stop & Shop, handing out grocery lists to shoppers. You invited them to purchase at least one item on the list of items needed by the Cohasset Food Pantry and Wellspring and then to drop their items into the shopping carts that you stood beside at the exits. Four hours later, you had gathered the equivalent of 150 boxes of food, which you then delivered to the food pantry in Cohasset and to Wellspring. With so many of our neighbors and perhaps some of us going through tough times, this is edible love. On that chilly Saturday, you literally stood on the side of love.

Then there are some of you who flew on the side of love. Last October you headed to Guatemala, to the village of Antigua. There you set to work building a house, teaching math and computer skills, leading pre-school classes, and being with Guatemalan neighbors you had met through sponsoring their children. Through Project Common Hope, many of you have reached families and an entire village by sending funds and more to the children of Antigua. You came back and were filled with what you had learned from our Guatemalan neighbors, with the love you received and your consciousness raised about the disparity of wealth between the residents of Antigua and most of us. You worked and learned on the side of love.

There’s another way that we’re seeking to stand on love’s side. It’s sometimes tough, and not everybody agrees on how to do it and how to show it. It’s through our Welcoming Congregation process. You voted last May to become intentionally welcoming of all among us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. Some of you attended the workshops hosted by our Welcoming Congregation Committee. Many of you voted affirmatively last May, but sustaining the momentum isn’t easy. There’s disagreement about how to realize what you officially decided.

Standing on the side of love isn’t easy. It means going to love’s edge, standing right on the edge of a circle in which some are included and some are shunted to the outer rim and beyond. The very edge of the circle is the best possible view for seeing who’s in and who’s out.

Every issue of compassionate justice has an uncomfortable edge. How we work toward human rights in Haiti; how we work for full rights for all who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; how we address the gristy issues of immigration reform; how we speak about two wars now being fought in our name; how we make our voice heard in the scarred debate over health care reform. Are these religious issues? If we take our principles and purposes seriously, every issue of human rights is a religious issue. Are these political issues? If we understand that politics is simply the system through which societies structure themselves. Are these issues of power and privilege? Yes, and power is not readily shared, nor privilege readily conceded.

To stand on the side of love at love’s very edge is to share power generously and to let go of privilege. It is not charity; it’s compassionate justice.

When I seek guidance for how to do this, I turn to my lifelong standby—the Old Testament prophets and the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Prophets, we know, were not the most popular personalities of their day. They spoke what they saw, not mincing words; and their words ring for us today. I draw the heart of my ethics, the heart of my religion, most especially from the prophets Micah and Jesus:

“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) asks the prophet Micah.

The Old and New Testaments alike set forth a guideline for loving behavior in what has become known as “The Great Commandment:”

In the Gospel According to Mark, we read that a scribe came up to Jesus and posed the question, “Which commandment is the first of all?”

“Jesus answered, ‘The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:38-31, with variations in Deuteronomy 6:4, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:34-40, and Luke 10:25-27)

If God is love, then we could readily substitute the word love for God in both of these passages.

What does LOVE require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with LOVE?

and

You shall love LOVE with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Love is behavior in the particulars. It is gristy more than grand. It calls us to love the folks we feel are unlovable, the folks who are often unpopular, even people who have hurt us or hurt those we care for. We might not like them, but we’re called to love them—that is to behave with compassionate justice, with mercy, and with humility—not self-righteously but in solidarity, as one human alongside another, around potholes of perception, through often unjust policies and practices of churches and communities and nations, even through the valley of the shadow of death and the shadow sides we each harbor in soul and psyche.

Love requires courage as well as compassion, patience as well as urgency, resilience as well as resolve. Love is not a doormat but an open heart, an open mind, and a soulful community ready to stretch right out onto the margins. Together let us stand on love’s edge. Together let us stand on the side of love.

Amen

Sources:

Leviticus, Deuteronomy, The Gospel According to Mark, The Gospel According to Luke, and The Gospel According to John, The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Gospel Parallels: A Synopsis of the First Three Gospels, Edited by Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr., Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1957.

Standing on the Side of Love Congregational Toolkit, Standing on the Side of Love, 2009,

http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SSLToolkit2009.pdf.

Worship Packet for National Standing on the Side of Love Day, Standing on the Side of Love, 2009, http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/SSL-Worship-Packet1.pdf.

“Afterlife”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
February 7, 2010
(delivered extemporaneously, so much of what is written below was not spoken,
and some of what was spoken is not written below)

Afterlife….we wonder about it, imagine it, paint it, mythologize it, and construct elaborate scenarios about it. We even preach about it. We might believe in it. As for knowledge, we’re clueless. We simply don’t know. Some of us might say, “Not so! I’ve had experiences that tell me there is something on the other side of what we know as life here and now.” Well, that may be the case; I’m in no position to doubt this.

The story we heard earlier this morning from Jim, Warren Hanson’s The Next Place, sounds awfully appealing on a windy winter Sunday—“peaceful and familiar as a sleepy summer Sunday and a sweet untroubled mind.” My favorite phrase is the one that reminds us it’s a complete mystery:

     “I won’t know where I’m going, and I won’t know where I’ve been as I tumble through the always and look back toward the when.”

….echoes of Dr. Seuss, who had more than a few profound things to say about how we live our lives and how we imagine.

In the Christian tradition that so many of us grew up in, we perhaps committed to memory that verse from the Gospel According to John, what I call “the walnut verse” of Christian theology:

     “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Its appeal is intense. Our instinct for life is intense. Even when things get us down, even when we step into the biggest of potholes, even when our children hurt, wars break out, we’re diagnosed with an illness that may or may not be the way we die, our instinct for life is intense. The prospect of everlasting life holds immense appeal. No wonder it’s the focus of great works of art, music, mythology, poetry, and of course, religion.

What happens when we die? Is that it? Ker plunk into some black hole of the universe, into some nothingness? Do we who have lived suddenly become part of the void, whatever that might mean? Or is there something more? Is there life after death? Or should we be asking if there’s life after life? How we ask the question shapes the how of our imaginings.

Yes, we can go to the Bible or the Dhammapada or the I Ching. We can also turn to our own experiences of having lost someone dear and wondering where they are, if they are, how they are and whether we will ever connect with them in any way that will salve the grief of not having seen them since what we call death happened.

In early February of 1968, Russ Flesher, my first husband, was killed in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. He was 27; I was 25. After calling my family and closest friends, I phoned Michael Allen. Michael was the priest at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church-in-the-Bowerie on New York City’s lower east side. It was where I had done my field work as a student at Union Theological Seminary, the seminary where I had met Russ and where we had married. I was living the following February in the East Village, a few short blocks from St. Mark’s. Michael responded immediately to my call. Within the hour he was sitting with me at my kitchen table.

“Michael, what do you think? Do we live and then one day just stop cold? Is death the end of it all? Will we ever see and hold the person we’ve loved so much?” Here was this Episcopal priest, filled with all the John 3:16’s you can imagine, looking me in the eye and saying, “I had a friend. We were so close. I couldn’t imagine life without him. Then he died. He was so young, and he died. I want to believe that he’s somewhere happy and healthy, but all I know for sure is that I haven’t seen him for a long time. I still miss him. I still love him.”

What do we know? What do we believe? What do we experience? What do we learn?

I’ll never stop learning from children. They’re little philosophers with no axes to grind, no belief bones to pick. Shana, my firstborn, was about six years old when her granddad, my father, died. Shana adored him. He would tease and tell stories and imitate animals and take her for rides on his golf cart. He was a great granddad. As I was preparing to fly to the Midwest for his memorial service, Shana brought me a book from her room. It was Eugene Field’s lullaby poem, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

     “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
     Sailed off in a wooden shoe–
     Sailed on a river of crystal light,
     Into a sea of dew…”

Shana loved it and so had my father. “Here, Mommy, take this for Granddaddy. It will make him feel good.”

My darling daughter was convinced that her darling granddad would need something comforting to read on his journey, in his new home, whatever. It was no less a gift than what the ancient Egyptians prepared for the pharaohs in the form of food and artifacts nestled into the Great Pyramids. Here was a lullaby intended to accompany my father on his trip to wherever.

Now there’s a second piece to this story. My little daughter and I continued our conversation about how we feel when somebody dies. “Will I die? Will you die? What will it be like?” she asked. “I don’t know, honey. I’ve never died. But think of it this way. We don’t know where we were before we were born.” With a gleam in her eye, Shana exclaimed, “Well I know. I know just where I was before I was born!” “You do?” I asked. “Yes, I was in Daddy’s penis!”

Well, there you have it, Shana’s philosophy of the “beforelife.”

Our children tend to be concrete, but no less so than how we construct our images of what might be an afterlife, of what might be heaven. How many times have you heard that you’ll become an angel? That you’ll have wings and lie on clouds and be at peace? It’s a beatific vision of what might be, a never-ending vacation but in a fluffy celestial resort. When my dear friend and mentor Forrest Church discussed the matter in his final book, Love and Death, he suggested that a heaven defined as “an eternity of harps, halos, and hymnals….might best be described as punishment for good behavior.”

So let’s bring our imaginations back to this realm that we can perhaps all agree we inhabit—the realm of life. We re here and now alive. What an extraordinary state. If any of us could go back to the moment before birth and imagine, just imagine what we might be getting into when the lights went on and we took our first breath and let out our first cry, it would be downright traumatizing. We do, after all, speak of the birth trauma. Ka-boom, we’re here! We graduate into the miracle of life most quickly during our first year—the stimuli of tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, smelling, sensing all draw us into the miracle of life. The fortunate among us grow up and grow old. All of us die. Can what follows be any more extraordinary than what we’re experiencing right now? Could it possibly be any more mind-blowing that what we experienced at birth? Could we even have imagined the “right now” before we were born?

I hold comfort as I long for all the dear ones I’ve lost in knowing not that they might be in some tangible, harmonious, peaceful heaven—although who knows—but in trusting that the love they gave and the love we gave them holds. I take comfort and reassurance in knowing that the love that you and I give to each other, the love that we send out into our larger world in acts of caring and compassionate justice continues from life to life and that it extends from life across the bridge of death into the mystery that awaits us all, unites us all. Where it begins, this love that holds, this love that lasts, is here, right here in this world, on this earth.

“Spiritual awakening,” writes the Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, “is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.” In journeying to a mountaintop, we leave everybody else far below; we escape. Such is not the way of bodhichitta, “awakened heart.” The way is down, earthward, down into the thick of where life is lived. “Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.”

When we memorialize someone, what do we hold up—the afterlife that we imagine, that we believe, that we hope for? Perhaps, but above all, we hold up the exchanges of love—the stories of summer days on a beach, the chapters of growing up and growing with, the tales of tabletops laden with food shared and laughter rising. When we memorialize someone and when we miss someone and when we wonder what will become of us when we too shall die, the stronghold of our trust lies above all in the love we give, the love we have given, the love we have shared.

Is there life after death? I don’t know. My imagination can’t stretch that wide. Is there love after death? It is an act of love that brings us here in the first place. It is love that sustains us. It is love that accompanies us into what I can only imagine as ultimate family.

In the fullness of life that is, let us love one another. I love you each and all. Amen.

Sources:

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Shambhala, Boston & London, 1997.

Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Beacon Press, Boston, 2008.

Eugene W. Field, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, first published 1889.

The Gospel According to John, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Warren Hanson, The Next Place, Waldman House Press, 1997.