First Parish Cohasset

“All Things New”
A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 2, 2010

“What’s new?” we ask, not necessarily expecting an update on what’s happening in the Gulf Coast or Afghanistan or Arizona and not necessarily expecting a full update on what’s happening with the person we asked. Yet, that simple inquiry carries hope for a response that will satisfy even a glimmer of our fascination with what is new. I believe it’s our human tendency to move out of whatever we feel is the ordinary into what’s new, what is literally extra-ordinary.

It’s not surprising that our Easter hymns commonly include the hymn we sang earlier, “O Life That Maketh All Things New.” Not only does this hymn invigorate us as we begin a new day, it feels like a resurrection of spirit on a brand new day. AND, not incidental for Unitarian Universalists on Easter, it lets us bypass the challenging notion of physical resurrection.

As we moved into the third verse, we sang about “the joy of paths untrod, one in the soul’s perennial youth…” Again, the resonance of all things new. We celebrate a path not yet taken. We celebrate the idea of being “forever young,” however fleeting youth really is.

More than any other season, spring awakens all our senses to what is renewed. Nature itself breathes resurrection. Can we ever take it for granted in the aftermath of bone-chilling winters? No wonder we talk about the seasons of life, from infancy to childhood to young adulthood to middle age to old age on into death. With every death, something in each of us dies; with every birth, something in each of us is born all over again. So it is with this season. Writer Hal Borland understood the

“….temptation to say, as May spreads the leaves and opens the blossoms, that spring has come again just as it has come for untold aeons. But the fact is that no two springs are exactly alike.

….Another May, another spring, eternal but unlike any other that was or shall be.”

The ingredients of the cycle of the seasons are ever shifting, ever changing, no two seasons and no two moments ever alike. If we try to grasp a moment, if we try to hold onto it, it’s passed and we’re forced to let go.

How clearly I recall such a moment. On a seemingly ordinary day, I stood as a young child with my nose pressed up against the screen of our front door, gazing out at the gentle thoroughfare of North Adams Street….and wondering. The place was the front hall of our frame house across the street from the public school I attended in a small Iowa town. The year was 1948. There was a smoky, gently pungent scent in the air. Time stood still…..It is 1948. 1948 has never been. It will never be again. I am in it. Today has never been. It will never be again. I am in it. This very moment has never been. It will never be again. I know it. I feel it. I breathe it.

My epiphany of the “nowness” of time has lingered. It has also ripened into a consciousness of the fragility of time. It’s here and gone, briefer than a breath. All is change. Yes, there are recognizable threads of place, persons, feelings—even sights and sounds and smells and tastes. But no moment, no season, no May, no “now” is ever the same as any other. The “new” doesn’t last. In the blink of an eye, we are here and not here. In the blink of an eye, the universe shifts.

Awareness permits us to stretch the moment. Consider your most vivid memories. What allows them to be so? Immersion, full immersion into the moment you were experiencing. All your senses are heightened. Such a moment becomes a lifetime within a lifetime.

Consider the moments you’ve experienced in this religious community of First Parish. What lingers for you? Perhaps it’s not a pleasant memory. Perhaps it’s a euphoric memory. Undoubtedly it’s a transforming memory. You changed because of this moment that you’re remembering. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Breathe it in. Breathe in this memory, this moment. (Silence)

Now let it go. Exhale. That moment is gone. But you’re right next door in time to the moment in which you called it back as best you could. Like Borland’s experience of “another May, another spring, eternal but unlike any other that was or shall be.”

This moment that is now is new. (Pause) That moment that was now is past. It is an “old moment.” Which feels better to you, a new moment or an old moment? Would you prefer “all things new” or “all things old?”

What is it about our preference for the “new” when in a nanosecond, it’s not? Why is it that the Preacher of the First Testament Book of Ecclesiastes sounds like such a sourpuss in the very first chapter?

“What has been is what will be,
And what has been done is what will be done;
And there is nothing new under the sun.”

on into his claim that

“I have seen everything that is done under the sun;
And behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

Is this really a guy you’d want to have to dinner? If your instant response is, “No!” my guess is it’s because he sounds like he’s been there, done that about everything that has crossed his path. God forbid, you ask him, “What’s new?”

Yet Hal Borland and even the little girl who is still part of me are suggesting that nothing is new and everything is new, that nothing is old and everything is old—everything, that is, except the moment we inhabit. I would guess that even the cynical sounding Preacher would accede to that. The moment we inhabit is new, BUT it’s fleeting.

So what do we make of it, this notion of the moment that is here and gone before we can take a full breath? What do we make of it?

“Bardo,” writes Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,

“is a Tibetan word that simply means a ‘transition’ or a gap between the completion of one situation and the onset of another. Bar means ‘in between’, and do means ‘suspended’ or ‘thrown.’”

There is, what Rinpoche describes, “the ‘natural’ bardo of this life,” spanning the time between our birth and our death. It is the best time to prepare for the other bardos—the bardo of dying; the bardo of dharmata, meaning “the essence of things as they are;” and the bardo of becoming.

Ask an elder among us about the transitory nature of this life. Chances are she or he will give you a knowing look and speak of how fleeting it is, how quickly it goes, as my own mother did at the age of 95, just five years before her death. We arrive as newborns. We depart, if we’re fortunate, after a long life, looking and feeling quite different than we did as that newborn, yet holding the history that includes our birth. From the moment of birth, we were growing old, yet greeting new forms of identify. Flux, transition, change all describe the fluid manner of our living. My life and each moment of my life is a bardo. So it is for each of us. So it is for the earth of which we are a part. That interconnected web is a web of flux.

Transition gives rise to uncertainty and ambiguity. If every moment is a bardo, then uncertainty is ever with us. This might sound scary, but Rinpoche explains that the very nature of this uncertainty “creates gaps, spaces in which profound chances and opportunities for transformation are continuously flowering if, that is, they can be seen and seized.”

Not knowing, living with ambiguity lends a certain humility that is core to whatever wisdom we might claim. How is it that in the cycle of the seasons, March (at least for me) gives rise to the anxious uncertainty that spring might not come; it’s simply a season I remembered from times past. What choice do I have but to go with the flow of earth-time, of earth’s bardos, and with the onset of spring declare a knowing, “Oh, of course!” A more apt response might be gratitude and wonder. Gratitude and wonder accompany awareness that every single moment of our living, every single moment of life itself, is a bardo, a transition.

It is no less so with where you as a congregation are and where I as your minister for another two months am. We’re in transition. For some this raises anxiety. But we have a choice. You do; I do. We can flail in anxious uncertainty, like a drowning person; or we can move with grace and gratitude for what has been and what is across the suspension bridge we’re on.

I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of you have come up to me and asked with a somewhat nervous tone, “How are you doing, Jan?” I believe you really want to know, and I believe you also want to be at ease with yourself. There are perhaps some things to be at ease about and others that call for reflection. Overall, I’m embracing the transition; and integral to that transition is right now, this morning, the beauty of the earth, the connections that we hold, the community that we celebrate and that is ever unfolding. The only difference between the transition to which we’re all attuned and the transition that is every single moment is our level of awareness, our readiness to awaken—in the poetic clarity of Hal Borland and the wonder of a little girl pressing her nose up against a screen door.

Are all things new? Yes, and in a heartbeat all things are as old as the first breath of life.

Might we embrace the now? Might we embrace the now in which we abide as a community of faith and practice, because this faith really does take a lot of practice? Might we embrace the now that we are each navigating? Might we embrace the now of this moment, looking into each other’s eyes, hearing each other’s voices, attuned if we will be so to each other’s rhythms of heart and mind. In the moment that is, let us be here and together and thankful. And may our memories then hold this moment, hold it dear.

Amen.

Sources:

Hal Borland, “Spring: A Reiteration,” The Progressive 36, April 1972: 22; Torrey, ed., Writings of Thoreau: Journal, 12:400.

Ecclesiastes or The Preacher in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Samuel Longfellow (words), “O life That Maketh All Things New,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 12.

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

“God, the Movie”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
April 11, 2010

A nine-year-old boy is out playing with his dog. Tau, the dog, runs off into high grass. Matthew Berger, the boy, chases him. Matthew runs hard, and then he trips. Probably a log, he thinks; but he stops, looks down, and is suddenly wild with excitement. “Dad, I found a fossil!” he yells to his father. It was August 15, 2008. The setting was South Africa, just north of Johannesburg, in a town called Cradle of Humankind, honest! Matthew’s father is Dr. Lee Berger, an American paleoanthropologist, who had been searching for hominid bones “just a hill and a half away for two decades.” What Matthew had found was a clavicle of a new species of hominid, a prehistoric form of mammals who were erect and bipedal and yes, one of our ancestors. Dr. Berger was ecstatic. I trust that Matthew’s dog, Tau, turned around to see what all the fuss was about.

Matthew had found the partial remains of a young boy, perhaps a year older than he. Since then, Dr. Berger and his colleagues at the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, have found more of the boy’s skeleton, including his remarkably preserved skull. And they’ve found the remains of three other hominids. All lived close to two million years ago. As for the ancient child, the children of South Africa will name him.

In a report issued Friday in the journal Science,

“Dr. Berger…and a team of scientists said the fossils from the boy and a woman were a surprising and distinctive mixture of primitive and advanced anatomy and thus qualified as a new species of hominid, the ancestors and other close relatives of humans.”

In Cradle of Humankind on a sunny August morning almost two years ago, a boy chased his dog. If young Matthew could have leapt roughly two million years into the past, he may have met a strange counterpart to himself, standing upright on two legs, but with features that would have startled Matthew and his dog. Rarely do we as humans see and touch our beginnings as did Matthew. For his father, it was a moment of spiritual ecstasy.

Why call it spiritual you might wonder. Wouldn’t we more accurately describe it as a moment of scientific ecstasy? Hold this thought for a few moments. We’ll return to it.

Now imagine yourself snuggled into a seat at the Loring Theatre. You’re intrigued by a new film that’s come out—“God, the Movie.” Reviews have been mixed, but reviews on God anything have always been mixed. Popcorn in hand, you’re ready to see for yourself. The theatre darkens; you survive the previews. In a clear legible script, the film is announced with the names of producer, director, and a few of the actors. No, God is not among them. The background graphic is a scene of tall wind-blown grasses under a morning sun. Wind suffices for the initial soundtrack. The film begins. A dog appears, barking playfully. A boy appears, chasing his dog.

You get the picture. It is with this story of Matthew and Tau and their romp in the grass and what comes of it that I would begin “God, the Movie!”

Why? Because this story illustrates the notion of transcendence in the everyday. There are no miracles. There is nothing supernatural about it. It recounts the chance discovery of something extraordinary by a child at play, albeit a child who tripped over what he was savvy enough to recognize for what it was and a father whose professional passion was the search for hominid remains. Dr. Berger had even written his doctoral dissertation on “hominid shoulder bones,” of which one is the clavicle, precisely the specimen found by his son.

I suppose we could see it as an episode of “The Twilight Zone” in the light of day. But this story is no more twilight zone than God or whatever or however we imagine God to be. One doesn’t have to be an avowed deist or theist to understand that there is a life force at play in the universe. God is a name common to what much of humankind calls this life force. I like the way Forrest Church, my late friend and mentor, referred to God as “that which is greater than all but present in each.” Is this supernatural? I don’t think so. Is it extraordinarily natural? I believe it is, as natural as the extraordinary epiphanies of life, as natural as breath—“breath,” a translation for the Hebrew ruach, spoken in the second verse of the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis:

“…and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

which could also be read:

“…and the breath of God…” or “the wind of God,”

just as the wind moves through the tall grasses in the opening scene of what I’m envisioning as “God, the Movie.”

Such an opening scene perhaps confounds popular notions of God as supernatural—that is, non-natural. Such notions give rise to the definitive proclamation that there is no God, that it’s all nonsense. Nature is; God isn’t. What I can breathe and touch and smell and taste and think and feel is real; God isn’t. Theology and literature and often cinematography commonly play into this supernatural, non-natural notion of God.

According to the late Unitarian preacher, A. Powell Davies, such a notion is resisted because the wrong question is asked, implicitly or explicitly—that is, “Is there a God?” And in Davies’ words, folks who ask it “bring before their minds the image of a majestic personage….an image…which prevents them from seeing the reality at which they should be looking.” Such an image suggests a far different “God, the Movie,” but indeed one that is a projection of an image wrought by the mind, though a quite different image than that of a boy chasing his dog amid wind-blown grasses.

Davies claimed that thinking of God as outside “ordinary experience” assumes an external reality that we could not possibly know anything about, because our minds function within the reality that is nature. “…how can we imagine,” he asked, “anything that is not known to us in the natural world?” What we should be asking, he contended, “is not whether there is a God, as though God could be something outside everything else, but what it is of which we have experience when we feel the power of truth, or the claim of justice, or the sense of beauty.”

Now let’s return to what I promised we would get back to…Matthew’s father in his moment of recognition, the moment that he knew the import of what his son had discovered, a moment of spiritual ecstasy and yes, a moment of scientific ecstasy. Do we doubt that Dr. Berger might have cried an instinctive, “Oh my God!”—not in deference to some “majestic personage,” but in wonder, in awe, in over-the-top delight. His spirit was moved within the embrace of his mind. His mind was moved within the embrace of his spirit.

“The spiritual,” proclaimed Davies, “is completely real.”

Of course there are countless notions of God and spirit, countless notions that counter what I’m suggesting, what Davies suggested, and what my dear friend Forrest suggested. “God, the Movie” holds the possibility of every imaginable projection humans have cast onto the particular screens of our thought and imagination since we could think and imagine.

Karen Armstrong, one of the most original scholars of our time, challenges assumptions of all kinds, including the religious. In her arresting work, A History of God, she remarks, in the same tenor as Davies, that

“the statement ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community.”

The notion of “God” varies across communities and changes across history. Without this “flexibility,” observed Armstrong, “it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.” She continues:

“….throughout history, men and women have experienced a dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world. Indeed, it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way.”

Transcendence is a human notion, a natural notion. It is our experience of the extraordinary, fully within the scope of the real, the natural. Some call it God, but even in the Judeo-Christian Bible there are many names, so many names. In the lyrics of Brian Wren that we sang earlier, we “bring many names.” In the poetry of Nancy Shaffer that we spoke earlier, she who prayed

“wanted everyone to feel included in her prayer,” so “she said right at the beginning several names for the Holy: Spirit…Holy One, Mystery, God…Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love, Ancient Holy One, ..and also Spirit of This Earth…” and my favorite, “One Who Is an Entire Ocean of Compassion.”

Onto the screens of our wonder, our imagination, our hopes and fears, our dreams, our beliefs and our disbeliefs, we each project our very own version of “God, the Movie.” Netflix couldn’t possibly carry them all. The Loring would perhaps feature one or two.

Imagine that you’re back at the Loring, watching my version. You know the opening scene, but a couple of hours have passed. You’ve long since forgotten your popcorn. Up on the screen you’re watching what might be a young child running through tall grasses, chasing what might be a dog. But this child doesn’t look any more like the young boy we met in the opening scene than the young boy of the opening scene looked like the child who was once far more than a clavicle. After all, two million years have passed. As this new boy-form runs through tall grasses in pursuit of something resembling a dog, he suddenly trips. On the screen, you read: “Intermission…..a very long Intermission.”

May the wind, the breath, the spirit of life, the God of many names never cease to astound us in the endless bounty that is Nature.

Amen.

Sources:

Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
Ballantine Books, New York, 1993, xx-xxi.

Rev. A. Powell Davies, “People Ask About God,” January 13, 1957, http://www.dmuuc.org/Davies/PeopleAskAboutGod.Sermon.html.

Celia W. Dugger and John Noble Wilford (New York Times), “Fossil find may link humans with apes,” The Boston Globe, April 9, 2010, A10.

Celia W. Dugger and John Noble Wilford, “New Hominoid Species Discovered in South Africa,” The New York Times, April 9, 2010, A1, 10.

Nancy Shaffer, “That Which Holds All,” in Instructions in Joy: Meditations, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2002.

The Book of Genesis in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Brian Wren, “Bring Many Names,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 23.

Chalice Reflection
of
Beverley Burgess
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010

Good beautiful and glorious morning. My name is Beverley Burgess and the morning’s Chalice reflection is a symbol of this Easter and Spring season.  In my ever more frequent walks these past weeks, my thoughts kept turning toward this chalice lighting.

I considered writing about a movie I saw that moved me to jot down some notes, and then there was the jarring change in weather with this most amazing transformation of browns, tans and grays into nearly neon blues, greens, purples, yellows. But overriding those ideas were 3 R words (possibly redundant this morning) which prompted these thoughts:

Of Rising Rivers
Of morning’s Rising sun
And of Rising flowers in all their brilliance

Of Raising pledges
Of Raising Cell towers
And of raising expectations (and maybe a few eyebrows)

Of Raising voices
Of Raising healthy, happy children
Of Raising awareness and consciousness

Of the Resurrection each day of Jesus’ teachings:
Compassion, understanding, caring, selflessness and love.
Have a most joyous Easter.

The Amazing Daffodil Story
of
Jim FitzGerald
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010

When Ryan and Katie lost their grandmother in early autumn, their parents told them the story of special flowers — the Amazing Daffodils.

“Plant the amazing daffodil bulbs in the ground – and when the daffodils bloom, you’ll know grandma’s spirit will still be here with us – blooming happily in the sun!” said their mom.

With hope and anticipation, Ryan and Katie rushed out into their backyard with three bulbs and a special tool for planting them. With great care, they dug a hole into the soil next to the garage and one by one, placed the daffodil bulbs into the earth.

They filled the hole and looked at one another with excitement.

The following morning, they rushed out to see if a flower had yet appeared — but there was nothing.

“Maybe tomorrow,” said Ryan.

The next morning before breakfast, Ryan and Katie ran out to the side of the garage despite the gray rain and the chill in the air. Their faces couldn’t hide their disappointment from their dad as they returned to the house.

“Be patient, this will take a lot more time,” their dad said gently.

Weeks passed with no sign of a flower.

Halloween came and went.

Thanksgiving came and went.

Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa came and went.

They missed their grandmother who had celebrated these special times with them. And there were still no flowers, not even a speck of blossom!

Ryan and Katie now believed that those bulbs weren’t so amazing after all. Surely the flowers that promised to bloom with such radiance was just a story their parents told to make them feel better about losing their grandma, something adults say to kids to get them through difficult times.

More weeks passed. Snow flew throughout the winter.

Valentine’s Day came and went, and they missed not exchanging valentines with their grandmother.

Ryan and Katie got involved in other things and for the most part forgot about the amazing daffodils.

The early spring rains kept them inside for most of the Easter school vacation. From Tuesday through Saturday – dreary rain forced them to come up with fun activities to do indoors.

But Sunday morning, the temperatures soared to create an unseasonably warm day –

Bright sunshine filled the day, no need for a coat. It felt as if the world had been set free of its rainy sadness.

It felt so good to run through the bright warmth that soaked the backyard that both Ryan and Katie ran right past it. How could they miss it?

The sun made the flower’s yellow color beam like the sun itself – as if it were trying to scream to the children – HERE I AM!

Hours passed on that Sunday from morning to early afternoon. Ryan and Katie’s playing in the backyard was interrupted only by their mother’s repeated calls to come in for lunch.

Katie was the first one to see her Mom out of the corner of her eye. She immediately thought her presence in the backyard was because she and Ryan hadn’t come quick enough when called. But when she saw her Mom’s smile, she knew her Mom was there for a different reason.

“RYAN!!!” Katie screamed in excitement. “LOOK!”

At their mother’s feet, standing as majestic as their parents said it would – the yellow daffodils beamed against the white wall of their garage.

“We didn’t think they would grow!” Ryan shouted as he and his sister ran toward the beautiful sight.

Their mother knelt down to be eye level with her children, and gently said – “Sometimes, the most wonderful things that happen are not within our sight. You two thought the flowers weren’t growing, but they were – you just couldn’t see them. And grandma’s spirit is here even though you can’t see it.”

Ryan and Katie spent the entire lunch staring out the window, their eyes fixed on the yellow flowers that swayed in the early spring afternoon breeze. And they wondered – what other wonderful things are happening right now – that they just can’t see.

“Hope Rising”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Easter Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
April 4, 2010

It seems right to have prepared this message on Good Friday. As a child I went with my parents to our Presbyterian church and sat through the whole marathon of sermons and prayers and passages from the gospels about Jesus’ suffering and death. It was grueling, but I was a fairly serious kid with a vivid imagination, so I listened and wondered. I knew what was to come—a Sabbath Saturday and then Easter Sunday, when Mary and others went to the tomb where Jesus’ body had been carried. They arrived to find it wide open; someone had rolled away the huge stone intended to seal it. They walked in and found a young man dressed in a white robe, who according to the Gospel of Mark told them not to be surprised. He knew they were seeking Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t there; he had risen. This stranger then told them to go and tell the disciples that Jesus was on his way to Galilee, where they would see him. Understandably, they ran off in fear and trembling.

I’ve thought a lot about the story of Jesus—at least the story as we have it in just a few versions. As a young person, I didn’t have access to those gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible. The only sources I knew were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and the letters of the first Christian missionary, Paul, who after all had fallen off his donkey on a trip to Damascus. Even these sources had been passed on and translated into so many languages and so many versions in English alone. Yet I believed that Jesus quite literally rose from the dead and did indeed appear to Mary and her friends and the disciples.

Years passed. I began to wonder. Did it happen? Did Jesus really walk out of a high-security tomb alive again, even though the Gospels don’t have him staying too long? As people of faith and doubt, we tend to be skeptical to say the least. We tend to raise our eyebrows and wonder at such a story. We also tend to be literal and, trapped by our literalism, find it easy to throw the transformation experienced by Mary and her friends and the disciples right out the window along with the notion of an honest-to-goodness resurrected Christ. From the many vantage points of our liberal religion, we too easily blur the distinction between the miraculous and the moving, the magical and that which stirs our souls.

As an impressionable and imaginative child, it was the miraculous and the magical that I found so appealing. I didn’t pay much attention to biblical contradictions or the notion of metaphor, an image set forth or a story told to communicate a larger truth. I didn’t pay much attention to how the biblical gospels differed from one another. Nope, it was the incredible that I embraced!

But the Bible does hold contradictions; and the gospels do differ from one another; and metaphor is powerful, soul-stirring, and life changing. So I find it fascinating that Mark, the earliest Gospel, has nothing to say about Jesus actually appearing to anyone after his death. When Mary and the other women visit the tomb, they’re greeted by what Mark calls “a young man.” Granted, this figure tells them that Jesus isn’t there because he’s risen and that they should go and tell his disciples and that they will see him. But when the women hear this, they flee from the tomb, absolutely terrified. And Mark’s story comes to a halt. The other Gospels have Jesus making appearances. John, the latest Gospel, even had the risen Jesus presiding over an early morning feast of bread and fish, miraculously caught by the disciples after Jesus told them where to drop their nets. Mark tells nothing of the sort.

“Strangely enough,” writes the Christian theologian John Shelby Spong,

“there is a minimum of supernaturalism in Mark’s account of the resurrection, which is the first biblical narrative of that experience. The raised Jesus…never appears in Mark’s text.”

While later Christians added to Mark’s seemingly abrupt ending accounts of how Jesus did after all make an appearance, Spong contends that Mark probably ended his gospel with the women fleeing the tomb in fear. It was enough to have told the story of this extraordinary man who preached a gospel of love amid a social and political climate that was about as anti-love as it gets. It was enough to tell the story of Jesus’ life and teachings and death.

So what’s the big deal about Easter for Mark? What’s the big deal about Easter for those of us who hold to a religion of faith and doubt? What’s the big deal about Easter if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, but stayed dead? Prophetic women and men such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who died 42 years ago today, preached a gospel of love and paid with his life. To our knowledge, King stayed dead. The gospel of love is a message that threatened the powers that were in Jesus’ time and in King’s time; the gospel of love is a message that threatens the powers that be in our own time. What’s the big deal about Jesus that brings us here this morning to celebrate Easter?

The message, the teachings, the life, the love, and the hope that the young man Jesus brought and left with us is a big deal. Against all odds, he fed the most down-trodden with hope. With healing presence, he touched soul and psyche, and perhaps bodily healing followed suit. He restored a belief in the possible and claimed that there were ways other than violent rebellion to resist the forces of imperial Rome. He befriended the outcast.

“Is it possible?” we wonder, for someone to live like this? How many of us spout principles that we stumble over day after day? How many of us trust that in our own time, we can be compassionate to everybody? How many of us take to heart the teaching of Jesus to love our enemies and, in his story of the Good Samaritan, to let our enemies love us?

On Easter, hope is reborn. On Easter, we remember and tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection in all its forms and wonder at such a life. On Easter, we recall the transformation of his friends from despairing to hopeful—with or without appearances of a risen Jesus. On this Easter morning, we behold the daffodils, just a few weeks ago invisible, wriggling in the tomb of soil, now waving at us from earth and altar and your very laps. On Easter, we receive a story of two young children who had lost their grandmother in the autumn and who missed her dearly and whose wise parents told them to plant daffodil bulbs. On Easter, we hear how those bulbs worked all winter long out of sight of the children, who wondered if anything would come of their planting. On Easter, we hear how, hope against hope, sun-yellow blossoms burst through the ground, radiant as the spirit of their grandmother, alive as their love for her.

On Easter, we tell the stories of Jesus; so many different stories there are to tell. On Easter, we tell the story of the amazing daffodils and love and hope that rise and last. On Easter, we tell the story and sing the songs and open our hearts to hope rising. On Easter, we hold that hope—in our hands and in our hearts.

May the hope of Easter spill over into this day and every day of our amazing lives. May the spirit of Easter be with us all. Amen.

Sources:
Jim FitzGerald, “The Amazing Daffodil Story,” 2006.

The Gospels According to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

John Shelby Spong, “The Original Christ: Before the Theistic Distortion,” from  A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying & How a New Faith Is Being Born, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

Chalice Reflection
of
Joan Kovach
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
March 21, 2010

When we lived in Budapest, I met Yazmine Mohamed. She was a former banker, the wife of the Malaysian ambassador, and the mother of three kids at the school where she was the PTA president. As ambassador’s wife she had the convenience of a driver, and when she learned I was traveling on public transportation, she offered me rides to meetings, for which I was very grateful. That December, her driver also delivered three bags of food from McDonalds to her kids after school, before basketball practice. As Muslims they observed the annual month of fast between sun up and sundown. As a good mom, she wisely managed the blend of religious observance and after school sports. At the end of the month, she invited our entire family to the luscious feast held to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

We made other friends that year who were Muslim. Iiris, who was Finnish, and her husband Mehdi from Iran had three children in the American school as well: Nasar, Ali and Daria, a darling 9 year old who wanted very much to visit New York City. The Rouhalamine Family also invited us to their home, many times, where they served meals of shish kebab and saffron rice and all kinds of other fabulous foods they described and shared with us. They taught us that the dry crispy rice in the bottom of the pot is considered special and saved for the youngest or favored member of the family. When we encouraged them to come and visit us in the states when we returned so Daria could see New York, they just smiled. When the children left the room, they confided that Mehdi’s dark skin and hair and his Iranian passport would make travel to the US difficult for the family and they weren’t likely to make such a trip.

The mechanics who fix our cars are a family of Muslim brothers. One day I presented my prize Miata and told them of strange noises it was making. It could be many things Mohammed said, and I marveled at such a wise response from such a young man. Since then, in our chats before and after car repairs, I’ve learned about their mother and handicapped brother back in Lebanon, how much they love and protect this brother, and how they call home often to check on his well being.  I have not read the Koran, but I believe I have learned about Islam from the people I’ve met who are Islamists. I have learned that Muslims are like us, perhaps the best and worst of us, and that world troubles are not about different religions, but about troubled people.

I light this candle in celebration of the diversity of peoples and the universality of kindness and caring.

“Peace and Islam”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 21, 2010

Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic year, was the occasion for my roommate, Layla, to give me the gift of this shawl. [Hold it up.] I treasure it. The setting was the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, where I spent my junior year of college. It was mid-point in time between the U.S. troops landing in Beirut and the Six Day War. It was also a time of relative calm in Lebanon, though beneath the surface stirred an uneasy balance of power between Lebanese Christians and Lebanese Muslims, with Christians holding the edge though Muslims outnumbered them. In the Middle East religion, peace, and violence are intimately linked.

I hold this shawl as a personal icon of peace and Islam. Layla was Muslim. Her home city was Baghdad. Not long after the United States attacked Iraq just seven years ago yesterday, I tried to locate my friend. I contacted the university’s alumni office. There was no record of her whereabouts. I continue to wonder about her well-being and whether she’s even alive.

My year in Lebanon was the year I added Universalist to my then Presbyterian identity. I had yet to discover the Unitarian Universalism that would be my chosen faith, as those of us who were not raised “UU” commonly refer to it.

What happened that year that was so transformative for me? I met Layla. I met Tanya. I met Mahmoud. I studied with students and professors and visited families whose religious filters were radically different from my own—from Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christian to Druse and Muslim. To this stunningly beautiful campus on the Mediterranean we came to learn. We came from the United States, Britain, France, Greece, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, the Sudan, Iran, and Iraq, to name just a few of the nations represented. Christmas Dinner was spent on the terrace of a Muslim family in Cairo. My Christian American friend and I were treated like royalty.

Did I believe then that Muslims were all about peace and love? No more than I understand now that Christians or Jews or even Unitarian Universalists are all about peace and love. I just know that “us and them” isn’t sustainable.

Peace and Islam is a topic I approach beyond gingerly. I’m an expert in neither. I struggle for peace from the inside out and the outside in. I’m in my infancy in discerning the richness of the religion that is Islam. This morning I’m modeling chutzpah, a non-Arabic word as you might know. I’m out on a slim limb as I seek to honor the winning bid made last spring at our service auction for a sermon topic of choice. The winning bidder graciously offered three or four topics, from which I was foolhardy enough to choose the highly complex topic of Islam. I was foolhardy minus one to hone in on the marginally narrower topic, “Peace and Islam.” It could only consume the better part of a lifetime.

Nonetheless why not “Peace and Islam” on dual anniversaries? The first anniversary I’ve already noted. Yesterday marked the seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, tied so erroneously to the 9/11/01 attack of 19 members of Al-Qaeda, a fundamentalist arm of the Sunni branch of Islam “calling for a global jihad,” (struggle or effort) to vanquish perceived enemies of what they understood Islam to be. Like extremist arms of Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, extremist arms of Islam hold high-intensity self-righteousness unleashing the most horrific of acts. Their aftermath clouds for many of us the role of peace in this faith that is one of the great religions of the world stemming from the story of Abraham.

The second anniversary is a 1400th! Yes, 1400 years ago, in 610 CE during the month of Ramadan, which existed before the formalization of Islam, Muhammad ibn Abdallah retreated to a cave atop Mount Hira on the outskirts of Mecca. There he prayed and fasted, distraught over the runaway greed in his own tribe. Legend tells us that in the middle of the night at almost the mid-point of Ramadan Muhammad awoke, seized by the sense of a powerful presence that spoke the first words of what would be the Qur’an, “the recitation.” More revelations followed. What he received were prescriptions in the form of glorious and powerful poetry, but imparted in such a way that he had the good sense to tell no one except his trusted wife and cousin.

Two years passed, and he could contain himself no longer. He began to preach these revelations. Converts were slow in coming and were initially among those downwind of the growing economic disparities in Arab society. Just as Jesus preached a gospel of love as a return to the soul of Judaism, so Muhammad preached a message of social equity as a return to the soul of his culture. Both threatened power brokers of religion and government.

It would take 21 years for Muhammad to receive all 114 chapters, or surahs, of the Qur’an.

Islam means “surrender,” and it was expressed in ritual prayer, originally three times a day and later increased to five times a day. To prostrate oneself was a physical antidote to the arrogance and greed that had become so pervasive in and around Mecca.

An adherent of Islam was called a Muslim,

“….a man or a woman who had made this submission of their entire being to Allah and his demand that human beings behave to one another with justice, equity and compassion.”

Muslims were expected to live according to the precepts of the Qur’an. This meant giving a portion of their income to the poor. And it meant obligatory fasting during Ramadan—the month when Muhammad had received the first revelations of the Qur’an—as a reminder of the hunger known to the poor.

According to scholar Karen Armstrong,

“Social justice was…the crucial virtue of Islam. Muslims were commanded as their first duty to build a community (ummah) characterized by practical compassion, in which there was a fair distribution of wealth.”

Theological speculation was deemed self-indulgent. “….Far more crucial,” explains Armstrong, “was the effort (jihad) to live in the way God had intended for human beings.” The well-being of the community, the ummah, was evidence of their faithfulness.

Fair-play, compassion, and community are at the core of Islam. This is born out in the understanding that the Arabs issue not from Abraham’s legitimate son, Isaac, but from Ishmael, the son of Abraham’s mistress, Hagar, whom Abraham’s wife Sarah had cast out in a fit of envy when she was pregnant and Sarah wasn’t. God served as mediator. Sarah became pregnant after all and gave birth to Isaac. As for Hagar and Ishmael, God had promised that a great people would descend from Ishmael. To Abraham, God made a covenant with him that he would “be the father of a multitude of nations.” Then God promised Abraham that Sarah would conceive and bear him a son and that Sarah would “be a mother of nations.”

According to the narrative of Genesis, God made promises to Abraham about both his sons:

“’As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I will bless him and make him fruitful and multiply him exceedingly; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. But I will establish my covenant with Isaac…’” (Genesis 17:20-21a)

Hagar and Ishmael are said to have settled in Mecca. Muhammad learned from neighboring Jews about these promises made by God to Hagar and to Abraham and Sarah. Muhammad was overjoyed. God had not rejected his people after all. The Jews and the Arabs shared the same father, Abraham; but the Jews descended from Isaac; the Arabs, from Ishmael. In the sight of Muhammad, the historic scale had been tipped toward justice.

When I heard as a child the story of Sarah casting out Hagar, I was horrified and angry. How could Sarah behave so badly? How could God let this happen? In Islam, this is not the whole story. The saga of Ishmael and his legendary descendants and the saga of Isaac and his legendary descendants continue to our day. We can understand the deep rivalry between Jews and Muslims as a family divided. When peace comes, a great family will be whole.

The history of the Jews and the history of the Arabs—and God knows the history of Christians claiming the Judaic tradition—have been fraught with violence. Each has self-righteously claimed to be the offended party. Holy wars have been fought in all religions. None are without accountability. Each seeks validation for violence. Each holds precepts for peace.

In our time, many non-Muslims tend to perceive violence as the heart of Islam. Perhaps some of us in this Meeting House share this sentiment. Hear the words of the Qur’an:

In the 7th surah, we read:
“…And My Mercy encompasses all things.” (7:156)

In the 25th surah, we read:
“The servants of the Compassionate are they who walk upon the earth humbly, and when the foolish address them, they answer: ‘Peace!’” (25:63)

And in the 60th surah, we read:
“It is possible that God will ordain love between you and your enemies. God is Almighty. And God is Forgiving, Merciful. God does not forbid you from showing kindness and dealing justly with those who have not fought against you, nor driven you from your homes. Truly, God loves the just.” (60:8)

While there may not be a message of peace at all costs, there is a clear prohibition against pre-emptive violence.

In his introduction to a compilation of The Koran’s Teachings on Compassion, Peace & Love, scholar Rez Shah-Kazemi notes the likely objections within and without the Islamic world to highlighting only one strain of teachings, namely, the compassionate, the peaceful, and the loving, when the Qur’an contains promise and threat, peace and violence, hope and fear. Because so much emphasis has been given in our time—and he wrote in 2007—to the Koranic themes of threat, violence, and fear, he registers hope that his work

“… will help to draw attention to the absolute centrality of the principles of compassion and mercy, peace and love in the Koranic worldview.”

Peace does not equal pacifism, nor does peacemaking equal pacifism. Pacifism is an absolute, and I respect such a stance. Peacemaking is what I try to practice. As long as I know that I am capable of violently defending myself or another creature, I am not a pacifist. If, however, I feed the fear that another person or another people or another religion is undermining however I consider “me and mine,” and if I act on this fear, I am no more innocent than a hijacker, a crusader, or any of the women and men of history made and history being made who reject surrender to the promise and possibility of love and peace.

Embedded in a poem by the late W.H. Auden are the words:

“You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.”

As humans endowed with conflicting capacities, may we seek to acknowledge our own shortcomings and reach out in love and peace to our neighbor, who shares them.

Salaam Aleikum, Peace be unto you. Amen.

Sources:

“Al-Qaeda,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda.

Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, The Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 2000.

W.H. Auden, “As I walked out one evening,” in The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden, Random House, New York, 1945, 197-199.

My Mercy Encompasses All: The Koran’s Teachings on Compassion, Peace & Love, Gathered & introduced by Reza Shah-Kazemi, with a foreword by Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2007.

Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, a Mentor Book by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, New York, 1958.

1958 Lebanon crisis,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lebanon_crisis.

“The Six Day War,” http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/six_day_war_1967.htm.

Peacemaking: Congregational Study Action Issue Resource Guide 2006-2010, http://www.uua.org/documents/csw/csaiguide_pm06.pdf.

“Spirit of Life”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 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)

Spirit of Life. It’s become the core expression for how we as Unitarian Universalists name the God we believe in and the God we don’t. Spirit of Life works. For some of us, it seems to wipe clean the scarred slates of our childhood religion. For some of us, it’s what we’ve grown up with. For some of us, it’s perhaps the not completely satisfying synonym for God or “the deity,” but we’ll let it be.

I sometimes imagine asking God or the Spirit of Life or the Great Whomever, “What exactly would you like to be called?” As yet I haven’t received an answer, but if we put that question to our larger world, so many names are offered before any ultimate voice could possibly be heard. It’s rather like an expected child who can’t speak for herself or himself, but whose relatives-to-be can’t restrain themselves from saying to the expectant parents, “Well here’s what I think works!”

Names matter. The ancient Hebrews understood one’s name to be one with the essence of that being. Perhaps that’s why YAHWEH was rendered only as an acronym for “I am who I am,” as YHWH. The name itself was too holy to be spoken or even written in full form.

In the second verse of the first chapter of The Book of Genesis, we read: “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” In Hebrew, the Spirit of God translates “ruach Elohim.” It can also be rendered, the “wind of God” or the “breath of God.” In this particular Creation myth—and myth doesn’t mean an untruth, but a way of conveying truth—was spirit, wind, breath that was life giving. I don’t suppose that particular author of Genesis—and there were several—imagined that he was introducing what would be the core expression for a Unitarian Universalist understanding of the Creator.

Throughout the Bible, there are many renditions of what religion commonly uses as the default name—that is, God. There is ruach Elohim. There is Elohim. There is YHWH. There is Adonai, commonly translated as Lord. And there is God.

In this congregation, some of you wonder why we don’t give voice more frequently to the term, ”God,” and some of you wonder why we give voice so frequently to the term, “God.” If we took a vote, which we’re not about to do, Spirit of Life would likely win, hands down.

I see it in your faces when we sing Spirit of Life. It’s not just that this is the consensus about what to call the Holy; it’s the full flow of this song that has become in a few short years the Unitarian Universalist anthem. In her article for UUWorld, Kimberly French writes that:

     “No other song, no other prayer, no other piece of liturgy is so well known and loved in Unitarian Universalism as ‘Spirit of Life’ by Carolyn McDade.”

If someone asked you what you would sing if you were invited to describe our faith in song, I’m betting that most of you wouldn’t hesitate. “Spirit of Life,” of course. If I asked you what you would choose as the most spiritual song in Singing the Living Tradition, I’m guessing that “Spirit of Life” would again be your choice.

We sing it as a song ancient to our souls, yet it was born on a night in the early 1980s, so it’s not much older than our shared Principles and Purposes, adopted in 1986. Just as we proclaim our principles as if they’re creed, we tend to sing this song as a melodic credo.

Like all songs, this one had a pregnancy, a long one, a deeply soulful gestation. Its receptacle was the social activism that has described Carolyn McDade’s life for decades. While she now does workshops and recordings that find their life in congregations well beyond our Unitarian Universalist world, her primary community is not religious, but groups of women who sing together, write together, and join together in mindful activism. Buoyed by the feminist movement, she has allied herself with what she calls simply “the movement”—a term familiar to some of us who are children of the ‘60s. “The movement” for her is not only feminist, though a strong strain of “women’s spirituality” weaves its way through her music and gives voice to her social activism, just as her social activism gives voice to her music.

Born in 1935 and raised in rural Louisiana as a Southern Baptist, Carolyn McDade was just six years old when this nation entered World War II. Even at this early age, she paid close attention to the events of her larger world. The newsreels mesmerized her. Images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are engraved in her soul. In her words:

     “No God I had learned about would ever want or allow such behavior, such suffering, such brutality.”

Carolyn became a teacher, married, and had three daughters. During the time of the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, she lived with her husband and children in Austin, Texas; and she chafed when her church held silence. Her only choice was to break the silence. The theology of her childhood propelled her to action.

I empathize. In my own life and through my own early years in Presbyterian Sunday school, I often wondered why so many didn’t seem to take seriously the teachings of Jesus. Was it all just show, I wondered. A friend introduced McDade to the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, where she found her first political mentors and experienced her first demonstration, marching “from the State Capitol to the Air Force Base.” Peace and civil rights were among the initial causes that found her heart, mind, and body committed to activist social justice.

In the mid-60s the McDades moved to Boston. Jim McDade had found a job at Boston University, and the whole family joined Arlington Street Church, the Unitarian Universalist church just off Boston Common. Home-based sing-a-longs hosted by Carolyn became a feature in the life of the McDade family and the Arlington Street family. Eventually she was invited to coordinate the music for the “first women’s service” at Arlington Street. She found precious little written by women. This was a pivot point. Her own first song would emerge.

During the 1970s, she began to find herself completely at home in the growing family of female activists in Boston. While Carolyn McDade moved in a direction that left church membership behind, her early engagement with Unitarian Universalism left a spirited mark.

Carolyn’s activism moved in crescendo mode, finding voice in opposition to U.S. policy in Central America and the sanctuary movement that countered this policy. It was almost time for “Spirit of Life” to be born.

It was an evening in the early 1980s when she was on her way home with a close friend from a meeting for “Central American solidarity.” McDade reports feeling an overwhelming fatigue over what was happening in the world. Her friend simply sat with her—a presence that endears a friend for life. Once at home, she found herself going directly to her piano, where she prayed with voice rising and fingers on the keyboard. “Spirit of Life” came to life. It embodied her commitment “to continue in faith with the movement.”

Again and again she shared it with the group of women she sang with. When Singing the Living Tradition began to take shape in the early ‘90s, McDade’s song-prayer was so well known that the UUA Hymnbook Commission was unanimous in seeking to include it. Carolyn was reticent: “’I thought of it as a living prayer, not a hymn.’”

Thankfully for all of us, she relented. We find two other McDade songs in this hymnal. “We’ll Build a Land” is the Unitarian Universalist title for the song we often sing, though her chosen title was “Creation of Peace.” The other is “Come, Sing a Song.” In Singing the Journey, the new supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, we find “Rising Green,” which I hope will become as familiar to you as her other songs. Written by Carolyn, it was arranged by Jim Scott, who will be our pulpit guest just two weeks from today.

Our faith exposure to the music of Carolyn McDade is just a sampling of the many songs she has written and taught and performed. Now 75, a resident of Cape Cod, a single parent since the 1970s, and a grandmother of eight, Carolyn is an enthusiastic workshop leader whose primary participants are women who inspire her and collaborate with her in new songs and a ready stream of social activism. In her own words, “I write love songs to social movements.”

Spirit of Life, a love-song, a prayer written late at night. It continues also as the name we commonly give to the holy in our own prayers and meditations, as if it rose from that legendary moment when the breath of the Holy moved across the face of the waters. Imagine the primordial waters singing in chorus, “Spirit of Life, come unto me.”

Let’s lift our voices and sing the first stanza of this beloved song:

     Spirit of Life, come unto me.

We evoke the holy; we call it to enter us. In an intimate personal plea, we ask the Spirit of Life to “come unto me.” Join with me please in the next stanza:

     Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.

Sing, not just sound, but sing in my heart. Stir through song the most profound prerequisite for doing justice…compassion.

     Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;

Remnants of that Genesis force moving over the face of the waters, metaphors vivid for this congregation as we worship together on the edge of the sea, where the wind blows with abandon and the surf arches in tidal rhythms.

     move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.

Our songs and our acts are of the body, the work of our hands, from which rise the forms of justice.

     Roots hold me close; wings set me free;

Roots and wings, grounding and liberating our spirits and deeds.

     Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.

And so it does, if we open our hearts and our minds and our lives to what this will mean for each of us, for all of us, if we join in this love song to compassionate justice, this prayer that we too might become ever more committed to living this faith that we share.

So may it be. Amen.

Sources:

The Book of Genesis, The Bible (Revised Standards Version)

“Come, Sing a Song with Me,” Words and music: Carolyn McDade, in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 346.

Kimberly French, “Carolyn McDade’s Spirit of Life: Unitarian Universalism’s most beloved song, the woman who wrote it, and the communities that sustain her spirit,” UU World, Fall 2007, http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/35893.shtml.

“Rising Green,” Carolyn McDade, in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005, 1068.

“Spirit of Life,” Words and music: Carolyn McDade, arr. by Jim Scott, in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 123.

“We’ll Build a Land,” Words: Barbara Zanotti (Isaiah/Amos), adapt., Music: Carolyn McDade (1935 – ), in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 123.