a sermon preached by the Rev Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday January 27, 2008
OPENING WORDS: “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius” -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, b. Jan 27, 1756
***
My message this morning is a simple one: so simple, in fact, I can summarize it in three words. "People are Precious." I wish I could say that I thought that up myself, but I didn't — it was originally the motto of the Reverend Robert “Daddy Bob” Raible, who was for many years the minister of the First Unitarian Church in Dallas, and whose son Peter Raible was one of my early mentors in ministry at University Unitarian Church in Seattle. But it's still a good motto, and I'm not above stealing it; and I put it before you this morning not so much as a proposition of fact, but rather as a proposition of faith.
If I were to stick strictly to the facts, I think I would have an awfully tough time proving this proposition. What is the inherent worth of a human being anyway? A couple of dollars in chemicals, the value of which is doubtlessly less than the cost of their extraction? Or perhaps a few dollars an hour, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year — even less if you happen to have been born somewhere in the so-called “developing” world. And I suppose in some way it’s always been this way. “The poor ye shall always have with you,” and perhaps the best first thing we really can do to remedy that situation is to work hard not to become one of them ourselves. It’s not the whole solution, but it’s a start.
Of course, having grown up in Seattle, I was born into a community that is generally considered one of the major beneficiaries of globalization. And, of course, over the many years I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I also eventually became something of a coffee-snob.
It’s true; one of my greatest “small pleasures” in life is brewing and drinking freshly ground whole-bean coffee. These days, I generally try to seek out shade-grown, Fair Trade beans when I can find them (and they’re becoming much easier to find all the time); they cost a few dollars more; but I can afford it, and it’s worth it to me...not because the quality of the coffee itself is any better, but for the difference I’d like to HOPE it makes in the quality of other peoples lives.
Fair trade or not, the Colombian peasant who handpicked those coffee beans (Juan Valdez, or one of his neighbors) was probably only paid pennies for his labor: the average wage of a Latin American coffee picker is still only a couple of dollars a day.
The part-time barista who sells me the coffee is probably doing a little bit better, possibly earning slightly more than the minimum wage: still not enough to support a family above the official US government poverty line, but a fortune to someone like Juan Valdez.
And would anyone even care to hazard a guess at the net worth and gross annual income of Howard Schultz, the founder, former, and now once again Chief Executive Officer of Starbucks?
If I were to ask each of you, individually, "what are you worth?" what would you tell me? The amount of money you earn? The size of your investment portfolio? The appraised value of your home minus the outstanding balance of your mortgage? As I said, if I were to present it to you as a proposition of fact, I would have a difficult time proving my case.
So instead I put it before you as a proposition of faith. "People are Precious" — every human being has an inherent worth and dignity which we must honor and respect as people of faith. Starbucks is generally considered a pretty progressive company, but we all know in our heart of hearts that Howard Schultz is not inherently a more worthy person than Juan Valdez simply because his annual income is several hundred thousand times as great.
Nor do corporate CEO's have some kind of God-given right to dictate policies that deliberately (or even unintentionally) undermine the worth and dignity of third-world people simply because the impersonal nature of the global economy and international commodities markets allows them that power.
Actions like these are on some fundamental level both immoral and unjust — and one of our principle responsibilities as a faith community is to educate ourselves about these things, to try to understand them in all their complexity, to confront them, and then to learn how best to change them -- first in our own lives, and then in the larger society where we live.
Yet I also realize at times these issues and these responsibilities are difficult even for reasonably sensitive and political aware individuals to see and fully comprehend, preoccupied as we so often are by our own economic circumstances, and the outrageous price of heating oil, and sneakers, and whole-bean coffee.
Worth is one thing. Dignity is something else. To dignify something is to honor it, whether it is truly worthy or not, which is why diplomats treat even the most notoriously odious “official” dignitaries as honored and respected guests: to do otherwise would be undignified.
An indignity, on the other hand, is a source of insult and humiliation, to which it often seems the only appropriate response is one of righteous indignation. An ability to maintain one’s own sense of dignity even in the midst of the most undignifying and embarrassing circumstances is a wonderful skill; it allows us to retain a feeling of self-respect and self-confidence even when all the evidence would seem to be pointing in the opposite direction. In my experience, the secret to this skill is really very simple: it is merely the cultivation of a humble willingness to appear foolish for a worthy cause.
And likewise, the willingness to treat others with dignity and respect, regardless of their particular circumstances or perceived “worthiness,” is a magnificent gift: a small act of generosity and kindness in what is often a cruel and unforgiving world.
And this is why it is so appropriate that we begin with the proposition that "People Are Precious." Because an important early step in every spiritual journey is the humble recognition and acknowledgment of our own inherent worth and dignity: the realization that despite our own apparent unworthiness, that we are unique, that we are special, that we have been given a great gift thin the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity simply to be alive -- a give we didn’t really ask for, and don’t really deserve, and for which our only appropriate response is one of gratitude and generosity.
And this in turn is followed by a great leap of faith, in the form of a devoted commitment to treat others with the same respect and dignity and integrity we believe we are worthy of receiving ourselves.
"Love your neighbor as yourself, " "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" — the Golden Rule, the fundamental moral teaching of every great religion known to humankind. It's a simple rule: most of us have known it by heart since childhood. So why, then, is the Golden Rule so difficult a principle to take to heart?
I can think of at least three common factors which contribute to our inhibitions to live up to this ideal. And the first is simply the common human tendency to be suspicious: to anticipate the worst out of a given situation rather than making a special effort to have it turn out for the best. I have no doubts some of you may have also heard that well-known parody of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others before they get the chance to do it unto you."
In a society as mobile and transient as ours, where anonymity is often the rule rather than the exception, and we must frequently interact with total strangers, trust can become a very precious commodity. Sometimes it can seem as though an open and trusting attitude merely extends an open invitation for others to take advantage of us; we’ve all heard those proverbs as well: "a fool and his money are soon parted," "never give a sucker an even break."
Yet although a certain degree of caution and skepticism may well be an unavoidable necessity in preventing our own exploitation by the unscrupulous, this does not grant us a license to be callous or manipulative in our own behavior. The Golden Rule does not call us to do unto others as we are afraid they might do unto us. It demands a standard somewhat higher than our minimum expectations. It calls us to maintain an ideal which exceeds what we might reasonably expect of others, to act the way we might wish to be treated, respecting the worth and dignity of strangers even when they have done nothing in particular to deserve it, simply because by doing so we affirm our own worth and dignity as well.
It calls for us to be trustworthy even when those we deal with may not be completely worthy of our trust. It calls for us to be honest even when we fear we are being cheated. It calls for us to be truthful even when we know we are being lied to. It calls for us to be forgiving, and generous of spirit, simply because that is the right way to be. It does not, I believe, require that we become fools or suckers. It merely insists that we refrain from exploiting the weakness and naiveté of others, even when it lies within our power to do so.
This brings us to a second source of inhibition: that sinking feeling many of us experience deep down inside us that maybe we don't really deserve to be treated as well as we are. Popular psychology even has a name for this experience — it's called "The Impostor Syndrome," and it's dangerous because it tempts us to believe that we can't afford to be kind and generous of spirit; that deep down inside we're really just fakes, and if we allow ourselves to be too forgiving, we run the risk of being found out as something less than we appear.
Of course, the great irony of this affliction (which I suspect is far more common than most of us would imagine) is that what it truly reflects is the tendency of many sincere human beings to judge themselves by standards far more strict and demanding than those by which they would ordinarily be evaluated by their peers. Knowing those deep, dark secrets which only we can know about ourselves, we become our own worst critics; and thus it appears to us far less threatening simply to withdraw from a profound and authentic engagement with the world, than it would be to do unto others as harshly as we ourselves do unto ourselves.
Until we are willing honestly to take responsibility for our triumphs, and forgive ourselves our failures, we stand little chance of doing likewise for those with whom we interact. When our own sense of worth and dignity is so tenuous, so fragile, we simply become incapable of recognizing that everyone else is in exactly the same boat. How can we put ourselves in the other guy's shoes when our own seem too large for us to fill?
Perhaps the Impostor Syndrome would be more easily overcome were it not for the third inhibition I perceive to the ideal: the tendency of our society to set up false and artificially objectified categories of worth and privilege, which undermine our appreciation of the inherent worth and dignity which is all of our birthrights. "Whosoever has the Gold makes the rules" — a man is only worth the value of his productive labor, and a woman 67% of that.
The absurdity of it all is apparent on its face; and yet its pervasive cultural influence remains undiminished. There are winners and there are losers, the elect and the reprobate, the sheep and the goats, the sharks and the minnows. Our dignity is dependent solely upon our worth; our worth dependent exclusively upon our wealth; and those who have nothing deserve nothing better.
This philosophy, which sometimes goes by the name of Social Darwinism, takes an instrumental view of humankind — life is cheap, people are playthings. The means and the ability to impose one's will upon the world becomes the ultimate standard of moral authority; might makes right, and is its own justification.
Yet any ideology which takes an exclusively economic view of human worth is ultimately both soul-crushing and spiritually bankrupts; we become our jobs, we are reduced to our paychecks, we are left pre-disposed to live and die as nothing more than replaceable parts in the gigantic industrial engine which drives our throw-away civilization.
As I said when we started this morning, a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person is fundamentally a proposition of faith. This odd notion that "People are Precious" in and of themselves is a dangerous one, because it requires us at times to make a radical response to the world we see around us.
Yet it also stands at the center of our religious tradition, and indeed, at the center of the broader Faith traditions out of which we have come. Ultimately, I believe, it is the source of our capacity for compassion, for altruism, for the recognition of our common humanity beyond differences of race, culture, gender, or any of the other superficial things which distance and separate us one from another.
And yes it is also essential to our own personal spiritual growth and development, and perhaps even to our survival as a species upon this planet.
But for the moment perhaps we can be content simply to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, in kindness and in generosity, in forgiveness and in love, as we struggle to make habits of what we most value and believe, and learn to trust the wisdom of those things we know in our heart of hearts must be true....
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
THE STRENGTH TO LOVE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland Maine,
Sunday January 20th, 2008
OPENING WORDS: from “A Knock at Midnight” by Martin Luther King Jr.
“Faith in the dawn arises from the faith that God is good and just. When [some]one believes this, [they] know that the contradictions of life are neither final nor ultimate. They can walk through the dark night with the radiant conviction that all things work together for the good for those that love God. Even the most starless midnight may herald the dawn of some great fulfillment.”
***
I’ve been thinking an awful lot this past week about the idea of martyrdom, especially after hearing our preacher last Sunday, Marta Valentin, paraphrase a sentiment I’ve so often heard attributed to Martin Luther King, that a person who doesn’t have something worth dying for has nothing worth living for. It sounds so logical in its grammatical structure, and yet one thing that has always bothered me about this sentiment is that it also seems such a short leap of logic (or maybe you could call it “faith”) from having something worth dying for to having something worth killing for; or at least the willingness to take the lives of other people as your sacrifice your own to whatever noble purpose you’ve chosen to die for. Personally, I’d just as soon leave the dying and killing part out all together, and reframe the question in a different way. How do we determine what things in life are truly worthy of our devoting our entire lives to them?
About fifteen minutes research on the internet and you will find that the original form of this quotation was: “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” And apparently it’s something that Dr. King plagiarized from one of his most important intellectual and inspirational role models, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi. Some years ago I happened to see an interview with the actor Ben Kingsley, who observed that the secret to his successful characterization of 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 an awful lot about that apparently offhand remark as well since first hearing it, especially at times like this, in the midst of a prolonged and hotly-contested political campaign. Why is it that professional politicians are so universally held in such low esteem, so much so that even honest-to-God “saintly” individuals (like, say, Jimmy Carter or even Al Gore) invariably appear "compromised" in the public eye when they attempt to participate in the political process? I can’t help but be reminded of yet another 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 clever."
To which Ms Landers immediately responded "So you're a politician. Tell me a lie."
Political activity is the lifeblood of a democratic society; it is the means by which the will of the people becomes the law of the land. Yet for some reason we find it all too easy to believe that those who choose to practice politics as a vocation are motivated principally by their own personal ambition -- that they are avaricious, deceitful, with only their own personal advancement in mind, rather than motivated by a heartfelt devotion to public service and the best interests of their constituents and fellow citizens. It’s 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.
But what about that rare politician, like a Mohandas Gandhi, who struggles to become a saint -- who seeks to express through his or her political convictions the high ethical and humanitarian principles of a profound and deeply authentic religious faith? Actually, I suspect that this sort of politician is far more common than we suspect, and that our appreciation of their efforts depends considerably 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” is 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 appearance of 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 praise. The essential 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 personal 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 that 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 side of the story, one might easily say that Martin Luther King did indeed have his greatness thrust upon him, and with the unanimous consent of older, wiser, and more politically savvy colleagues at that. But this would be only part of the tale. More importantly, there was an inner quality to this young preacher, a “seed” of saintliness if you will, which, once exposed to the light, 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. simply 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 admiring freshmen about Socrates and Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau, while writing best-selling books for Harper and Row.
And don’t kid yourselves, these options were certainly made available to him many times. And yet he chose instead to continue in the 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 destiny had chosen for him, a path which eventually led to his death on a motel balcony in Memphis. There have been those who have suggested 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 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 Garry 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.
I think it’s even fair to say that many Americans now even understand that the whole idea of “race” itself is simply a figment of our imaginations: a social convention and shared fiction with no real basis in biological science, which we have taught ourselves to see, generation after generation after generation. Yet even though the idea of Race may have no basis in reality, the ideology and historical legacy of Racism are still very real. The Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators are still alive and kicking; access to jobs, housing, justice, and educational opportunity is still not completely color blind. In many ways racism has become much more subtle, even sophisticated, in the 21st century; it has replaced its white sheets with pinstriped suits, and is fueled as much by the ignorance of the well-intentioned, who wish that the problem would simply "go away," as it is by the malice of those few kooks who would just as soon trot Jim Crow back out of the closet, if they thought they could get away with it.
In contemporary America, skin color has in many ways become a symbolic marker of social class. Successful Americans of African heritage: Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Denzel Washington, and many others I’m sure we all could name, are perceived by dominant “mainstream” society as merely a little darker shade of white; while the essential “blackness” of the hip-hop inner-city urban youth underclass is so well-established that even a highly-respected community leader like Bill Cosby can be sharply criticized for his “political incorrectness” in suggesting that “it’s not what [white people are] doing to us. It’s what we’re NOT doing [for our own children].” And how many of your can remember the recent kerfufle over whether or not Barack Obama (with apologies to Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Alan Keyes and Carol Moseley Braun) was really “black” enough to serve as America’s first “serious” African American Presidential candidate?
Yet underlying this ongoing and complicated societal conversation regarding skin color, social class, and competing cultural identities, Dr. 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 half-century which has now elapsed since the bus boycott in Montgomery first brought this amazing man to our national attention.
It’s a little known fact (and one that typically doesn’t show up on my resume), but my former wife and I spent our honeymoon in Atlanta. It’s kind of a long story: she was living in Seattle, I was living in West Texas, and our minister lived in Boston -- but it just so happened that we could all get together during the third week in June at the UUA General Assembly, so I wrote to the Fulton County clerk and got a license and we tied the knot at midnight on the longest day of the year. It was the only time either of us had ever been to that city; but 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 really the only "touristy" thing we did while we were in Atlanta (we were much too busy being newlyweds to bother with such foolishness as plenary sessions or the Coca-Cola museum), but we made the most of it; we even bought each other T-shirts at the gift shop. And we were also able to spend 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. 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....
***
READING: from The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills
The 1960’s was a period obsessed with power – the power of the American system, or power to be sought by working outside it; the power of insurgency, or of counterinsurgency; the power of rhetoric and “image” and charisma and technology. The attempt to fashion power solely out of resource and will led to the celebration of power as destruction – as assassination of leaders, the sabotage of rival economies, the poising of opponent missiles.
The equation of real power with power to destroy reached its unheard refutation in the death of our charismatic leader, [John Fitzgerald Kennedy]. As children can wreck TV sets, so Oswalds can shoot Kennedys. The need to believe in some conspiracy behind the assassination is understandable in an age of charismatic pretensions. The “graced” [leader] validates [their] power by success, by luck. Oswald, by canceling the luck, struck at the very principle of government, and it was hard to admit that he was not asserting (or being used by) some alternative principle of rule. Oswald was a brutal restatement of the idea of power as the combination of resource with will. Put at its simplest, this became the combination of a [mail order] Mannlicher-Carcano [rifle] with one man’s mad assertiveness. Power as the power to conquer was totally separated, at last, from the ability to control.
Robert Kennedy’s assassination gave lesser scope to conspiracy theorists – no one knew, beforehand, his route through the kitchen. With him, the effect of sheer chaos was easier to acknowledge (though some still do not acknowledge it – they think purposive will rules everything). What was lost with Robert Kennedy was not so much a legacy of power asserted as a glimpse of a deeper understanding, the beginnings of a belief in power as surrender of the will. He died, after all, opposing the caricatures of power enacted in our wars and official violence.
But another man was killed in the 1960’s who did not offer mere promise of performance. He was even younger than the Kennedys – thirty-nine when he was shot, in the year of Robert’s death at forty-three. There were many links between the Kennedys and Martin Luther King – links admirably traced in Harris Woffords book on the three men. Together, they summed up much of the nobler purpose in American life during the 1960’s. Yet there was opposition too – Dr. King, more radical in his push for racial justice, was far more peaceful in his methods. Robert Kennedy, however reluctantly, used the police powers of John F. Kennedy’s state to spy on Dr. King, to put in official hands the instruments of slander. King was a critic of the space program and war expenditures. King, though more revolutionary in some people’s eyes, was not “charismatic” in the sense of replacing traditional and legal power with his personal will. He relied on the deep traditions of his church, on the preaching power of a Baptist minister; and he appealed to the rational order of the liberal state for peaceful adjustment of claims advanced by the wronged. His death, at tragic as Kennedy’s, did not leave so large an absence. His work has outlasted him; more than any single person he changed the way Americans lived with each other in the sixties. His power was real, because it was not mere assertion – it was a persuasive yielding of private will through nonviolent advocacy.
Since he relied less on power as mere assertiveness of will, mere assertiveness of will could not entirely erase what he accomplished. He had already surrendered his life to bring about large social changes, constructive, not destructive. He forged ties of friendship and social affection. He did not want to force change by violence or stealth, by manipulation or technological tricks. His power was the power to suffer, and his killer only increased that power.
The speeches of John F. Kennedy are studied, now, by people who trace their unintended effects in Vietnam and elsewhere. The speeches of Martin Luther King are memorized at schools as living documents – my son could recite them in high school. “Flexible response” and “counterinsurgency” are tragicomic episodes of our history. But the Gandhian nonviolence preached by Dr. King is a doctrine that still inspires Americans. My children cannot believe that I grew up in a society where blacks could not drink at public water fountains, eat in “white” restaurants, get their hair cut in white barber shops, sit in white theaters, play on white football teams. The changes King wrought are so large as to be almost invisible.
He was helped, of course – he was not a single mover of the charismatic sort. And he was helped not so much by talented aides as by his fellow martyrs, by all those who died or risked dying for their children or their fellow citizens. While Washington’s “best and brightest” worked us into Vietnam, an obscure army of virtue arose in the South and took the longer spiritual trip inside a public bathroom or toward the front of a bus. King rallied the strength of broken men [and women], transmuting an imposed squalor into the beauty of chosen suffering. No one did it for [their] followers. They did it for themselves. Yet, in helping them, he exercised real power, achieved changes that dwarf the moon shot as an American achievement. The “Kennedy era” was really the age of Dr. King.
The famous antitheses and alliterations of John Kennedy’s rhetoric sound tinny now. But King’s eloquence endures, drawn as it was from ancient sources – the Bible, the spirituals, the hymns and folks songs. He was young at his death, younger than either Kennedy; but he had traveled farther. He did fewer things; but those things last. A mule team drew his coffin in a rough cart; not the sleek military horses and the artillery caisson. He has no eternal flame – and no wonder. He is not dead.
at the First Parish Church in Portland Maine,
Sunday January 20th, 2008
OPENING WORDS: from “A Knock at Midnight” by Martin Luther King Jr.
“Faith in the dawn arises from the faith that God is good and just. When [some]one believes this, [they] know that the contradictions of life are neither final nor ultimate. They can walk through the dark night with the radiant conviction that all things work together for the good for those that love God. Even the most starless midnight may herald the dawn of some great fulfillment.”
***
I’ve been thinking an awful lot this past week about the idea of martyrdom, especially after hearing our preacher last Sunday, Marta Valentin, paraphrase a sentiment I’ve so often heard attributed to Martin Luther King, that a person who doesn’t have something worth dying for has nothing worth living for. It sounds so logical in its grammatical structure, and yet one thing that has always bothered me about this sentiment is that it also seems such a short leap of logic (or maybe you could call it “faith”) from having something worth dying for to having something worth killing for; or at least the willingness to take the lives of other people as your sacrifice your own to whatever noble purpose you’ve chosen to die for. Personally, I’d just as soon leave the dying and killing part out all together, and reframe the question in a different way. How do we determine what things in life are truly worthy of our devoting our entire lives to them?
About fifteen minutes research on the internet and you will find that the original form of this quotation was: “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” And apparently it’s something that Dr. King plagiarized from one of his most important intellectual and inspirational role models, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi. Some years ago I happened to see an interview with the actor Ben Kingsley, who observed that the secret to his successful characterization of 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 an awful lot about that apparently offhand remark as well since first hearing it, especially at times like this, in the midst of a prolonged and hotly-contested political campaign. Why is it that professional politicians are so universally held in such low esteem, so much so that even honest-to-God “saintly” individuals (like, say, Jimmy Carter or even Al Gore) invariably appear "compromised" in the public eye when they attempt to participate in the political process? I can’t help but be reminded of yet another 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 clever."
To which Ms Landers immediately responded "So you're a politician. Tell me a lie."
Political activity is the lifeblood of a democratic society; it is the means by which the will of the people becomes the law of the land. Yet for some reason we find it all too easy to believe that those who choose to practice politics as a vocation are motivated principally by their own personal ambition -- that they are avaricious, deceitful, with only their own personal advancement in mind, rather than motivated by a heartfelt devotion to public service and the best interests of their constituents and fellow citizens. It’s 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.
But what about that rare politician, like a Mohandas Gandhi, who struggles to become a saint -- who seeks to express through his or her political convictions the high ethical and humanitarian principles of a profound and deeply authentic religious faith? Actually, I suspect that this sort of politician is far more common than we suspect, and that our appreciation of their efforts depends considerably 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” is 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 appearance of 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 praise. The essential 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 personal 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 that 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 side of the story, one might easily say that Martin Luther King did indeed have his greatness thrust upon him, and with the unanimous consent of older, wiser, and more politically savvy colleagues at that. But this would be only part of the tale. More importantly, there was an inner quality to this young preacher, a “seed” of saintliness if you will, which, once exposed to the light, 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. simply 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 admiring freshmen about Socrates and Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau, while writing best-selling books for Harper and Row.
And don’t kid yourselves, these options were certainly made available to him many times. And yet he chose instead to continue in the 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 destiny had chosen for him, a path which eventually led to his death on a motel balcony in Memphis. There have been those who have suggested 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 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 Garry 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.
I think it’s even fair to say that many Americans now even understand that the whole idea of “race” itself is simply a figment of our imaginations: a social convention and shared fiction with no real basis in biological science, which we have taught ourselves to see, generation after generation after generation. Yet even though the idea of Race may have no basis in reality, the ideology and historical legacy of Racism are still very real. The Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators are still alive and kicking; access to jobs, housing, justice, and educational opportunity is still not completely color blind. In many ways racism has become much more subtle, even sophisticated, in the 21st century; it has replaced its white sheets with pinstriped suits, and is fueled as much by the ignorance of the well-intentioned, who wish that the problem would simply "go away," as it is by the malice of those few kooks who would just as soon trot Jim Crow back out of the closet, if they thought they could get away with it.
In contemporary America, skin color has in many ways become a symbolic marker of social class. Successful Americans of African heritage: Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Denzel Washington, and many others I’m sure we all could name, are perceived by dominant “mainstream” society as merely a little darker shade of white; while the essential “blackness” of the hip-hop inner-city urban youth underclass is so well-established that even a highly-respected community leader like Bill Cosby can be sharply criticized for his “political incorrectness” in suggesting that “it’s not what [white people are] doing to us. It’s what we’re NOT doing [for our own children].” And how many of your can remember the recent kerfufle over whether or not Barack Obama (with apologies to Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Alan Keyes and Carol Moseley Braun) was really “black” enough to serve as America’s first “serious” African American Presidential candidate?
Yet underlying this ongoing and complicated societal conversation regarding skin color, social class, and competing cultural identities, Dr. 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 half-century which has now elapsed since the bus boycott in Montgomery first brought this amazing man to our national attention.
It’s a little known fact (and one that typically doesn’t show up on my resume), but my former wife and I spent our honeymoon in Atlanta. It’s kind of a long story: she was living in Seattle, I was living in West Texas, and our minister lived in Boston -- but it just so happened that we could all get together during the third week in June at the UUA General Assembly, so I wrote to the Fulton County clerk and got a license and we tied the knot at midnight on the longest day of the year. It was the only time either of us had ever been to that city; but 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 really the only "touristy" thing we did while we were in Atlanta (we were much too busy being newlyweds to bother with such foolishness as plenary sessions or the Coca-Cola museum), but we made the most of it; we even bought each other T-shirts at the gift shop. And we were also able to spend 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. 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....
***
READING: from The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills
The 1960’s was a period obsessed with power – the power of the American system, or power to be sought by working outside it; the power of insurgency, or of counterinsurgency; the power of rhetoric and “image” and charisma and technology. The attempt to fashion power solely out of resource and will led to the celebration of power as destruction – as assassination of leaders, the sabotage of rival economies, the poising of opponent missiles.
The equation of real power with power to destroy reached its unheard refutation in the death of our charismatic leader, [John Fitzgerald Kennedy]. As children can wreck TV sets, so Oswalds can shoot Kennedys. The need to believe in some conspiracy behind the assassination is understandable in an age of charismatic pretensions. The “graced” [leader] validates [their] power by success, by luck. Oswald, by canceling the luck, struck at the very principle of government, and it was hard to admit that he was not asserting (or being used by) some alternative principle of rule. Oswald was a brutal restatement of the idea of power as the combination of resource with will. Put at its simplest, this became the combination of a [mail order] Mannlicher-Carcano [rifle] with one man’s mad assertiveness. Power as the power to conquer was totally separated, at last, from the ability to control.
Robert Kennedy’s assassination gave lesser scope to conspiracy theorists – no one knew, beforehand, his route through the kitchen. With him, the effect of sheer chaos was easier to acknowledge (though some still do not acknowledge it – they think purposive will rules everything). What was lost with Robert Kennedy was not so much a legacy of power asserted as a glimpse of a deeper understanding, the beginnings of a belief in power as surrender of the will. He died, after all, opposing the caricatures of power enacted in our wars and official violence.
But another man was killed in the 1960’s who did not offer mere promise of performance. He was even younger than the Kennedys – thirty-nine when he was shot, in the year of Robert’s death at forty-three. There were many links between the Kennedys and Martin Luther King – links admirably traced in Harris Woffords book on the three men. Together, they summed up much of the nobler purpose in American life during the 1960’s. Yet there was opposition too – Dr. King, more radical in his push for racial justice, was far more peaceful in his methods. Robert Kennedy, however reluctantly, used the police powers of John F. Kennedy’s state to spy on Dr. King, to put in official hands the instruments of slander. King was a critic of the space program and war expenditures. King, though more revolutionary in some people’s eyes, was not “charismatic” in the sense of replacing traditional and legal power with his personal will. He relied on the deep traditions of his church, on the preaching power of a Baptist minister; and he appealed to the rational order of the liberal state for peaceful adjustment of claims advanced by the wronged. His death, at tragic as Kennedy’s, did not leave so large an absence. His work has outlasted him; more than any single person he changed the way Americans lived with each other in the sixties. His power was real, because it was not mere assertion – it was a persuasive yielding of private will through nonviolent advocacy.
Since he relied less on power as mere assertiveness of will, mere assertiveness of will could not entirely erase what he accomplished. He had already surrendered his life to bring about large social changes, constructive, not destructive. He forged ties of friendship and social affection. He did not want to force change by violence or stealth, by manipulation or technological tricks. His power was the power to suffer, and his killer only increased that power.
The speeches of John F. Kennedy are studied, now, by people who trace their unintended effects in Vietnam and elsewhere. The speeches of Martin Luther King are memorized at schools as living documents – my son could recite them in high school. “Flexible response” and “counterinsurgency” are tragicomic episodes of our history. But the Gandhian nonviolence preached by Dr. King is a doctrine that still inspires Americans. My children cannot believe that I grew up in a society where blacks could not drink at public water fountains, eat in “white” restaurants, get their hair cut in white barber shops, sit in white theaters, play on white football teams. The changes King wrought are so large as to be almost invisible.
He was helped, of course – he was not a single mover of the charismatic sort. And he was helped not so much by talented aides as by his fellow martyrs, by all those who died or risked dying for their children or their fellow citizens. While Washington’s “best and brightest” worked us into Vietnam, an obscure army of virtue arose in the South and took the longer spiritual trip inside a public bathroom or toward the front of a bus. King rallied the strength of broken men [and women], transmuting an imposed squalor into the beauty of chosen suffering. No one did it for [their] followers. They did it for themselves. Yet, in helping them, he exercised real power, achieved changes that dwarf the moon shot as an American achievement. The “Kennedy era” was really the age of Dr. King.
The famous antitheses and alliterations of John Kennedy’s rhetoric sound tinny now. But King’s eloquence endures, drawn as it was from ancient sources – the Bible, the spirituals, the hymns and folks songs. He was young at his death, younger than either Kennedy; but he had traveled farther. He did fewer things; but those things last. A mule team drew his coffin in a rough cart; not the sleek military horses and the artillery caisson. He has no eternal flame – and no wonder. He is not dead.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
AND A HAPPY NEW ERA
a homily delivered by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday January 5th, 2008
OPENING WORDS: A New Year's Prayer for 2008 by the Rev. Chuck Currie.
Loving Creator,
Long ago you brought life from cosmic chaos.
For over 4.5 billion years your creation has evolved.
Along the way humanity has stumbled as we have matured.
Yet you have never abandoned us.
A New Year has dawned.
Help us to make this the year we take our stewardship over creation seriously.
Guide us to protect your forests and oceans.
Give us the wisdom to look after all life (even the “creeping things”.)
Help us to recognize the interconnectedness we humans share with the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the deserts.
Help us to recognize the interconnectedness we humans share with other humans though we may worship differently.
Bestow on us the courage of the Prophets of old so that we may speak truth to power in your Holy name.
Another year, O God.
Another year to do justice.
Another year to love kindness.
Another year to walk humbly with you (Micah 6:8).
Praise be to God!
Amen.
***
How many of you have ever had the pleasure of discovering a really great new restaurant? Not one of those fancy, formulaic, heavily-advertised chain restaurants coming soon to a mall parking lot near you. But a quiet little neighborhood place, with great food and friendly service -- maybe you're walking by one evening and poke your nose in just to see what it’s like, then you go back again and bring a friend, and the next thing you know, you’re one of the regulars. All the servers know you by name (and probably know what you’re going to order before you can even open your mouth); you’re friends with the chef, and you’re eating there maybe two or three times a month (or if you’re like me, two or three times a week).
The only problem is, if it’s REALLY a good restaurant, other people are going to find out about it too. Then the place gets reviewed, and the next thing you know it’s hard to get a table, and the service starts to seem a little sloppy and less personal, and the food’s not quite as good as you remember it...and, of course, the prices are higher too. So maybe you stop going quite as often as you used to, because it’s just not the same as it used to be, although it’s hard not to feel happy for the owners, since after all you are a regular and they are your friends and this is exactly what they were hoping for all along. Yet as nostalgic as we may feel for the good old days, I think it’s also important to remember that every new person who discovers “our” restaurant is just as thrilled about their discovery as we were the first time we sat down and opened up the menu. Because they don’t remember how it used to be; for them the excitement is in the here and now.
Attending a new church for the first time can sometimes feel a little like discovering a new restaurant. After all, both institutions are basically in the “hospitality industry;” we're both essentially in the business of making sure that people are nourished, either physically or spiritually, we try to feed them, body and soul. And as I look out over the Meetinghouse each week from way up here in this high pulpit, I certainly sense a lot of energy and excitement in the room...lots of expectation, but lots of change too. We have a new Minister, we have a new Administrator, we now have a new Director of Religious Education, and pretty soon we’re going to have to start looking for a new Music Director too...and, of course, come this spring I suspect there’ll be lots of new members as well.
And sure, the clocks still aren’t working, and we have a leak in the roof and the ceiling is falling in...but we’re repairing those things, and remodeling the kitchen, and the bathrooms, and getting everything spiffed up again. It really does feel like the start of a Whole New Era here at First Parish: one of many that this congregation has been through in its 333 year history. And it doesn’t really matter whether you are here today for the first time this Sunday, or your family has been attending this church for generations: you are all part of it. This is your time now (if you want it to be); so seize the day, savor the moment, and enjoy the thrill and the excitement of discovering something new, and making it your own.
The beginning of a new calendar year is a natural time to be thinking about fresh starts and new beginnings. But have you ever wondered who decided to begin the new year in January? It hasn’t always been that way; and if you’ve ever studied Latin (or one of the other Romance languages) you may even have noticed that September is supposed to be the seventh month, October and November eight and nine, which of course makes December month number ten. So why is January 1st suddently one-one-whatever, when a little simple arithmetic tells us that there are actually thirteen 28 day lunar months in a 365 day solar year, with a day left over for good measure?
Apparently back in the days when human beings were first learning how to tell time from the heavens, the New Year actually began in the spring, with the first new moon following the vernal equinox, when the days at last had become longer than the nights. It was important that early farmers learn how to keep track of the time so that they would know when to plant and harvest their crops; but apparently, once they got to ten they simply stopped counting for the winter, because it didn’t really matter any more; they simply hunkered down by the fire until the food was gone, and hoped that spring would arrive before then. The Romans inherited this calendar, but of course, being civilized, they made it year-round; and with the exception of two pretty significant tweaks by Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory the XIII, it is still pretty much the same calendar we use today.
But it was also the Romans who decided to move the start of the New Year to the middle of winter, and named the month for their two-faced God Janus, who looks both forward and backward. Because the start of a new year is not just about change and transition; it is as much about retrospection as it is anticipation, a taking stock of the past before moving forward into the future. I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20, but let me assure you as a historian that it is simply not true. We can second-guess our past just as easily as we can second-guess the future. The only REAL difference is that we can’t really DO anything about the past, because it’s over, it’s history. The future, however, is always open to endless possibility, and limited only by the limitations of our imaginations. A Fresh Start. A New Beginning. It’s a cliché because it’s true: today really is the first day of the rest of your life. And every tomorrow gives us yet another opportunity to give ourselves a second chance, or a third chance, or however many chances we need in order to get it right, to get it just the way we want it.
But just because we have another chance to make a fresh start doesn’t mean that we have to start from scratch. The beginning of a New Year, or a New Era, also offers us an opportunity to renew ourselves and reconnect to our heritage, to build upon the solid foundations of our past, and to draw inspiration and encouragement not only from our own experience, but from the example and the experiences of those who have gone before us. But before we can ever truly be free to stand on the shoulders of giants, we must also learn to let go of those regrets from our past that hold us back, and keep us from achieving the full potential we can imagine...for ourselves, for our community, and for the world.
[introduce Burning Ritual]
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday January 5th, 2008
OPENING WORDS: A New Year's Prayer for 2008 by the Rev. Chuck Currie.
Loving Creator,
Long ago you brought life from cosmic chaos.
For over 4.5 billion years your creation has evolved.
Along the way humanity has stumbled as we have matured.
Yet you have never abandoned us.
A New Year has dawned.
Help us to make this the year we take our stewardship over creation seriously.
Guide us to protect your forests and oceans.
Give us the wisdom to look after all life (even the “creeping things”.)
Help us to recognize the interconnectedness we humans share with the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the deserts.
Help us to recognize the interconnectedness we humans share with other humans though we may worship differently.
Bestow on us the courage of the Prophets of old so that we may speak truth to power in your Holy name.
Another year, O God.
Another year to do justice.
Another year to love kindness.
Another year to walk humbly with you (Micah 6:8).
Praise be to God!
Amen.
***
How many of you have ever had the pleasure of discovering a really great new restaurant? Not one of those fancy, formulaic, heavily-advertised chain restaurants coming soon to a mall parking lot near you. But a quiet little neighborhood place, with great food and friendly service -- maybe you're walking by one evening and poke your nose in just to see what it’s like, then you go back again and bring a friend, and the next thing you know, you’re one of the regulars. All the servers know you by name (and probably know what you’re going to order before you can even open your mouth); you’re friends with the chef, and you’re eating there maybe two or three times a month (or if you’re like me, two or three times a week).
The only problem is, if it’s REALLY a good restaurant, other people are going to find out about it too. Then the place gets reviewed, and the next thing you know it’s hard to get a table, and the service starts to seem a little sloppy and less personal, and the food’s not quite as good as you remember it...and, of course, the prices are higher too. So maybe you stop going quite as often as you used to, because it’s just not the same as it used to be, although it’s hard not to feel happy for the owners, since after all you are a regular and they are your friends and this is exactly what they were hoping for all along. Yet as nostalgic as we may feel for the good old days, I think it’s also important to remember that every new person who discovers “our” restaurant is just as thrilled about their discovery as we were the first time we sat down and opened up the menu. Because they don’t remember how it used to be; for them the excitement is in the here and now.
Attending a new church for the first time can sometimes feel a little like discovering a new restaurant. After all, both institutions are basically in the “hospitality industry;” we're both essentially in the business of making sure that people are nourished, either physically or spiritually, we try to feed them, body and soul. And as I look out over the Meetinghouse each week from way up here in this high pulpit, I certainly sense a lot of energy and excitement in the room...lots of expectation, but lots of change too. We have a new Minister, we have a new Administrator, we now have a new Director of Religious Education, and pretty soon we’re going to have to start looking for a new Music Director too...and, of course, come this spring I suspect there’ll be lots of new members as well.
And sure, the clocks still aren’t working, and we have a leak in the roof and the ceiling is falling in...but we’re repairing those things, and remodeling the kitchen, and the bathrooms, and getting everything spiffed up again. It really does feel like the start of a Whole New Era here at First Parish: one of many that this congregation has been through in its 333 year history. And it doesn’t really matter whether you are here today for the first time this Sunday, or your family has been attending this church for generations: you are all part of it. This is your time now (if you want it to be); so seize the day, savor the moment, and enjoy the thrill and the excitement of discovering something new, and making it your own.
The beginning of a new calendar year is a natural time to be thinking about fresh starts and new beginnings. But have you ever wondered who decided to begin the new year in January? It hasn’t always been that way; and if you’ve ever studied Latin (or one of the other Romance languages) you may even have noticed that September is supposed to be the seventh month, October and November eight and nine, which of course makes December month number ten. So why is January 1st suddently one-one-whatever, when a little simple arithmetic tells us that there are actually thirteen 28 day lunar months in a 365 day solar year, with a day left over for good measure?
Apparently back in the days when human beings were first learning how to tell time from the heavens, the New Year actually began in the spring, with the first new moon following the vernal equinox, when the days at last had become longer than the nights. It was important that early farmers learn how to keep track of the time so that they would know when to plant and harvest their crops; but apparently, once they got to ten they simply stopped counting for the winter, because it didn’t really matter any more; they simply hunkered down by the fire until the food was gone, and hoped that spring would arrive before then. The Romans inherited this calendar, but of course, being civilized, they made it year-round; and with the exception of two pretty significant tweaks by Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory the XIII, it is still pretty much the same calendar we use today.
But it was also the Romans who decided to move the start of the New Year to the middle of winter, and named the month for their two-faced God Janus, who looks both forward and backward. Because the start of a new year is not just about change and transition; it is as much about retrospection as it is anticipation, a taking stock of the past before moving forward into the future. I’m sure you’ve all heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20, but let me assure you as a historian that it is simply not true. We can second-guess our past just as easily as we can second-guess the future. The only REAL difference is that we can’t really DO anything about the past, because it’s over, it’s history. The future, however, is always open to endless possibility, and limited only by the limitations of our imaginations. A Fresh Start. A New Beginning. It’s a cliché because it’s true: today really is the first day of the rest of your life. And every tomorrow gives us yet another opportunity to give ourselves a second chance, or a third chance, or however many chances we need in order to get it right, to get it just the way we want it.
But just because we have another chance to make a fresh start doesn’t mean that we have to start from scratch. The beginning of a New Year, or a New Era, also offers us an opportunity to renew ourselves and reconnect to our heritage, to build upon the solid foundations of our past, and to draw inspiration and encouragement not only from our own experience, but from the example and the experiences of those who have gone before us. But before we can ever truly be free to stand on the shoulders of giants, we must also learn to let go of those regrets from our past that hold us back, and keep us from achieving the full potential we can imagine...for ourselves, for our community, and for the world.
[introduce Burning Ritual]
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