Call To Worship

From Hymns of the Spirit with Services – Beacon Press, copyright 1937

from the Fifth Order of Service

From the cares that fret, the burdens that weary, the voices that disrupt us, we turn aside to the quiet of this house of worship. Here the noises of the outer world are hushed, and our thoughts are lifted to contemplate the ways of mystery beyond naming.

We rejoice this day, in the unquenchable and eternal light that lights every person in this world. In that light we are ashamed of those greeds within us that have darkened our own souls, and those selfish customs among us that have shadowed the lives and spirits of others. We seek the illumination of wisdom in all of our doings, until every child is brought out of darkness into this marvelous light of life.

A Story for All Ages (there are many variants of this story, this is one of them…)
Once upon a time there lived a little boy who became angry at the slightest provocation. If he felt he was not getting his way at all times, he would fly off into rage at those he felt had wronged him.

One day, his father decided that his son needed to learn a valuable lesson. So his father gave him a hammer and a bag of nails and told him that each time he would lose his patience, he should nail a nail behind the door in his room.

The first day the boy nailed _37_ nails behind the door!!!

In the weeks that followed, the boy began to make progress. He began to learn to control his temper, each day that went by he would nail less nails behind the door as he learned to master himself. Finally, he discovered that it was easier to control his temper than to pound nails behind his door.

The day ultimately came when he could control his temperament throughout the day. He was so proud for the progress he had made, and he ran to his father to share his accomplishment. His father told him how proud he was, and suggested that he should remove a nail each day he could control himself.

Many days passed and for each day of his mastery, the youth removed the nails faithfully from the door. Finally the day came when he could announce his father that there were no more nails to remove from the door.

His father took him by the hand and led him to the door. He told him: I am proud, my son, you have worked hard, but look at the holes in the door. You must not forget that never more will it be the same. Each time you lost your patience, you left scars exactly as the ones you see here.

Always remember, when you fling your words in anger it may seem you are able to withdraw them, but in the way and things you have said you may devastate a person, and the scar can last forever. A verbal offense can be as damaging as a physical offense, only perhaps less visible.

Reading:

From Hymns of the Spirit with Services – Beacon Press, copyright 1937

Prayer of Confession from the Twelfth Order of Service

O thou unseen source of peace and holiness, we come into thy secret place to be filled with thy pure and solemn light. As we come to thee, we remember that we have been drawn aside from m the straight and narrow way; that we have not walked lovingly with each other and humbly with thee; that we have feared what is not terrible and wished for what is not holy. In our weakness be thou the quickening power of life. Arise within our hearts as healing, strength and joy. Day by day may we grow in faith, in charity, in the purity by which we may see thee, and in the larger life of love to which thou callest us. Amen.

Another story:

There once was a scientist, who lived in great fear for the shortcomings and failures of the world and was determined to find means to diminish them.

He spent days enclosed in his laboratory in search of answers to his doubts about mankind’s future. One day, his young son, invaded his sanctuary and said that he had decided to help him in his work. The scientist, distracted by the interruption, attempted to make his son go out to play someplace else. Seeing that it would be impossible to get him out of there, the father looked around the lab to see what he could give his son to do to distract him.

He noticed a magazine sitting amongst his paper, with a beautiful map of the earth on the cover. So with a pair of scissors, he cut the map in many pieces. Along with a roll of adhesive tape, he handed it to his son saying:

—Do you like puzzles? Then I’m going to give you the world to fix. Here is the world all broken. See if you can fix it! See if you can do it all by yourself.

He calculated that the child would take days to fix the map, but a few hours later, he heard the voice of his son calling him calmly:

—Father, father, I have done it! I managed to finish it all!

At the beginning the father could not believe the word: “Is it possible at his age to manage to fix a map he had never seen before?” Then the scientist took his eyes away from his writings sure that he would see a child’s poorly constructed map. To his surprise the map was complete. All pieces had been placed in their right places.

How could that be possible?

-My son! You did not know how the world was, my son. How did you do it?

-Father, I did not know how the world was, but when you removed the paper from the magazine to cut it, I saw that on the other side there was the figure of a man… When you gave me the world to fix, I tried and tried but I couldn’t do it. Then I remembered about the man, I turned over the cuttings and started to fix the man, because I knew how he looked. I managed to fix the man, I turned over the sheet and found that I had fixed the world…”

The Message

The EASY prayer goes like this:

I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault. In my thoughts and in my words. In what I have done and what I have failed to do. And I ask Blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, Our God.

I sometimes tripped on that Apostle’s Creed, but Confession was something that I really owned!

I call this the easy prayer, because this was the prayer that you got to say in a group every Sunday, the general penitential rite was part of the Mass. We would all examine ourselves, but in the privacy of our own anonymity, thank you very much.

In the Blessed Mother Church of my youth, the Sacrament of Reconciliation was the gateway to receive the Sacrament of Communion. They gave you plenty of training, but when that moment came, when you and all the rest of your little kiddie posse were lined up waiting to go in for that first visit to the confessional, it was gut-check time. For my Protestant brothers and sisters who are not familiar with this particular rite, I’ll share the mechanics. (And for My catholic siblings here today: perhaps this will bring back some fond and terrifying memories!)

The priest is sitting in his booth, typically between two other booths. This is for the formalized version. There was a truly terrifying variant in my youth where the priest would just set up shop in a big open room, with a simple divider in between himself and the penitent. There were a LOT of us little scamps who said there was no way they’re going to get us to confess THERE!

Inside each booth is a kneeler, and a screened window with a sliding door, about head high for a kneeling person. In a terrifically clever and modern way, the kneeler is typically equipped with a pressure switch that turns on a light outside your particular confessional to let folks outside know that there are “doins’ a transpirin’” inside. Don’t want to wander in on someone sharing their innermost errors…

I’ve heard tales that in the days when boys actually learned manly arts like morse code, some little scamps liked to send messages by blinking the light. Now I don’t know morse code, but I can testify that on occasion I saw that light doing a little dance.

Did I say “gut-check?” I think I should have said “sphincter time”, because it was pretty tense waiting for that terrifying moment when your turn came up… You’ve been examining your sinful life, to figure out what you need to say, and you know there must be something, and you know the priest is there to hear YOU…

Bless Me Father for I have sinned…

We’re both here. I know it. You know it. But we have to be official about why we’re here today. You have to own your sinful self.

It has been bluzbluza since my last confession…

Now when I was young, confession was pretty regular, so I could rattle off with good conscience that it had been a week or 3 weeks, or whatever, since I had been in for a visit. As you work your way up the age ladder, though, and have more control over when you have to go in there, you start to think “Wow, do I really want to tell him that it has been THAT long between visits.” But they taught us that it was more important that you got your self back in there, than how long it had been, so I sometimes fell back on old faithful:

“It has been a long time since my last confession…”

And then you list your sins.

Now I admit, I often felt pretty inadequate as a sinner: not because I didn’t feel sorry for my sins, but my sins seemed pretty lame. I said a bad word. I had impure thoughts about that girl over in the third row. I took the Lord’s name in vain. The comedian Eddie Izzard tells a funny tale about confessing to a vicar in the Church of England, one searching for a TRULY original sin, to which Eddie suggests “I poked a badger with a spoon?”

Okay, so now it’s time to wrap it up:

“For these and all my sins, I am truly sorry.”

I often wondered, about that “all my sins” part: was that for the stuff you forgot or was it really a DODGE for the ones you didn’t want to share? I think more than one of those guys I went to catechism with were using it as a dodge; what can I say -  they were a pretty rough crowd.

And then he gives you your penance. Typically a number of prayers, a few Hail Marys, A handful of Our Fathers, an Act of Contrition. And he sends you on your way.

There is nothing like the spring in your step coming out of there! You made it!

I can do those Hail Marys standing on my head!

I AM ALIVE! THE WORLD IS GLORIOUS AND I AM A PART OF IT! THE WEIGHT IS LIFTED!

I am reconciled with God and the World!

Until NEXT TIME!

Now I know my Protestant Brothers and Sisters, turned their back on most of this ritualized stuff centuries ago. But confession is not just a quirk of Catholics. The Buddhists have a tradition of confessing your sins to your elders, as a discipline in understanding your truth. Additionally, both our Buddhist and Hindu brothers and sisters have to think about running up that Karmic debt; will I come back as a cow for eating so much meat?

Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holy Day, is the annual Day of Atonement, where the focus is on Sin and Forgiveness. The Kol Nidre is the start of that service, and goes like this:

In the tribunal of Heaven and the tribunal of earth, by the permission of God — praised be He — and by the permission of this holy congregation, we hold it lawful to pray with transgressors.

The cantor then chants the prayer beginning with the words Kol Nidrei and repeats three times the following words:

All personal vows we are likely to make, all personal oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our personal vows, pledges and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths.

The leader and the congregation then say together three times

“May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are in fault.”

I have to admit, I really like that acknowledgement of all of our faultiness, and the prayer that even the strangers be forgiven.

In selecting stories for today, I was moved by the metaphor of “the nail holes in the door” in our Story for All Ages. I’ve had opportunity in the last 10 years or so to try and go back and fill in nail holes I believed I had created in the past, some of them real, some of them imagined. Sort of like Earl on Thursday night’s “My Name Is Earl”, except a lot more humbling. Jason Lee makes it seem easy in comparison, the comedic highjinx aside.

This morning we heard the confession from the 1937 Unitarian prayerbook, and we even sang a confession from our modern era prayerbook. But lets admit it, you were pretty surprised to see that thing was actually IN our prayerbook weren’t you?

C’mon, you can tell me…

That’s not UU… Is it?

UU makes me feel good…

I don’t believe in that superstitious confessional stuff…

I can see where it would be possible to get that idea. It doesn’t come up much, does it?

Why is that?

Some of this comes, I think, from our “attractive” penchant for thinking “we got it going on.” Hey, we’re a smart bunch of progressive liberal religionists. We must have it going on, look at all the cool “got it going on” people who are around here…

Confession has that extra little humbling twist of the knife though. Not only do I NOT have it going on, but I have to OWN it? Ouch… And that seems to be one of the first challenges admitting that we HAVE sinned.

The Reverend Dr. Virginia Knowles wrote a terrific paper on worship where she talks about “ghosts” that haunt us as UUs, and I think some of them contribute to our confession aversion. One ghost is what I would call the Ghost of Efficiency: that worship produces no visible quantitative product and therefore can’t have value to us – we need to get out there and DO something.

And confession certainly doesn’t “knit the baby a sweater”, or get petitions signed, or stock the foodbank.

Another ghost that she describes is our fear of dependency: being all “churchy” is what those immature people do with their dependency on their little “fundagelical” religions. A third ghost she mentions is emotionalism: that we won’t be true to reason and science.

And I think all of these come into play when we ponder why we might shy away from confession. That stuff is just for people who’ve done something wrong!

As a Congregational Administrator and a resident fly on the wall, if I had Santa’s List, I would have no problem checking the “Has Naughty Tendencies” box next to a lot of your names.

Whether you believe in a universal scorekeeper, a clock maker, a process, or check the theological “none of the above” box, sitting down and looking at where we missed the mark puts us in that terrible position of being beholden. Maybe not to a galactic scorekeeper, but we have to acknowledge that we let our actions get away from us and that it spreads beyond us. We are forced to acknowledge that the stinky old “interdependent web” is all interdependent, and we’ve let our shortcomings spill out into someone else’s life.

And that really strikes at acknowledging our interdependence, when we see the effect of our actions in the world. We can be amazing forces for good and healing, but we can also terribly muck things up.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think humans are sinful because we’re inherently evil or anything like that. I think we’re sinful because we’re so woefully inherently ignorant and oblivious. Harlan Ellison is quoted as saying that the two most common elements in the world are Hydrogen and Stupidity, and I’m not sure he’s wrong.

In reading about Yom Kippur, I liked some thoughts that Rabbi Arthur Green had on sin. Rabbi Green says that early Rabbis believed that “’good and evil’ inclinations are the forces within each person who lead us to do good and evil…” And that sometimes they are personified and depicted as quarreling with one another, each trying to get us to follow their path.

To me an even more interesting model that Rabbi Green offered is found in the ideas of kelipah and pri, the shell and the fruit. In this idea, the mind or soul is the delicate fruit that begins to grow a hard shell around itself for protection. Your truest self is within that shell, and not subject to corruption, but the protective shell can turn evil, even becoming destructive. I really like that image. It reminds me of a callous: that thick hide that we develop when our skin has been punished too much in one place. That callous is what we put forth, when we don’t do the right thing, when we turn away from those in need, when we were silent when a single voice would have made a difference. Maybe Billy Joel’s “Stranger” IS that shell, the face we can’t recognize, because it is so distorted from the face that we know within our soul.

Philip Simmons, in a UU World article called “The Usefulness of Sin” thinks it is easy for us to slide into a comfortable moral and spiritual complacency, and I agree. We live in one of the most pampered times, in the one of the most pampered countries the world has ever know, and it can be easy to lose track of what life is like for the rest of humanity.

He shares the common definition of sin from our Judaic background: of an arrow missing the mark but he also counsels that we examine what mark we were actually trying to hit.

You WERE trying to hit a mark, weren’t you?

He points this out as another type of sin, born of thoughtlessness: we weren’t even TRYING to hit a mark!

Now I know some people are saying:

What’s with this guy?

He’s just hitting us with all that Catholic guilt stuff, and just trying to bring us down.

I could have stayed home and read the Times, and almost be to the Magazine by now…

Really, I’m not advocating going around dwelling on what sinful wretches we are, but there is a missed opportunity for growth in never examining our sins. Ask a scientist or successful businessperson: which events were more instructive – the successes or the failures?

One of our biggies, Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.” And perhaps Confession is a piece of that unsettlement. There is also a vital and integral piece at the end of that Act of Reconciliation: the healing. Being willing to acknowledge our shortcomings and brokenness is the first step to that healing.

I shared the story of the Scientist and the son, trite as it may have seemed, because I like the way it shows the scientists misplaced focus in where the change needs to be. Just as OUR perception sometimes can be too focused on the need for change in the OTHER:

“It’s that darn speck in my neighbor’s eye, I’m worried about. Have you got a tissue? My eye waters like crazy around this log…”

While our theologian James Luther Adams points out that the unexamined faith is not worth having, a more ancient source, Socrates points out the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps this is a bit of the examination he suggests.

May we have the courage to examine our strengths AND our frailties, and the wisdom to always reconcile our sins.

May it be so.

Benediction:
Brothers & Sisters (Saints & Mostly Sinners) Bow Your Head and pray for wisdom and blessing – May the truth that makes us free, and the hope that never dies, and the love that casts out fear, lead us forward together, until the dayspring breaks and the shadows flee away.

Gathering Hymn:

Birdsong by Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter

Call to Worship:
Lemme hear you say: PRAISE THE SPIRIT!

Today we are gonna talk about all kinds of spirit.

We’re gonna talk about wandering and grateful spirits.

We’re gonna talk about the spirit of music! (One special kind of music!)

And we’re gonna talk about our holiest spirit: the Spirit of this Life!

Can I hear you say: PRAISE THE SPIRIT?

You are alive!

In this place.

On this day.

The Sun is shining. The solstice has (rather belatedly, to us in North Texas) trumpeted the arrival of summer.

Come: Let us share this morning, this music, this spirit, with grateful and open hearts.

Come: Let us worship together!

Opening Hymn
Sugar Magnolia by Robert Hunter & Bob Weir

A Story For All Ages:
The Swedish folktale of Pippin, King of the Franks (See Grateful Dead Folktales by Bob Franzosa)

Singing Out the Children:
Not Fade Away – (singalong) written by Charles (Buddy Holly) Hadin and Norman Petty

Pastoral Prayer:
Please bow your heads: Gracious and everlasting spirit of many names, we hold these spoken joys and sorrows in our hearts, as sign of the covenant of our community. We also pray for all those intentions left unspoken. Let us also remember and reflect on those times when we have forgotten our covenant with the world, and with each other, that we gain the wisdom to hold our covenant sacred and true.

Finally, we ask to be always open to the miraculous grace and challenges that we share in this life together. AMEN

Pastoral Hymn:
Going Down the Road Feeling Bad – traditional words & music

Reading:
This reading is reportedly an entry from Volume 1 of the 1955 Edition of the Funk & Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language

Grateful Dead:
The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begins with the hero’s coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion’s disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended.

Offertory:
Eyes of the World – written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

Sermon:
Let’s all close our eyes and do a little guided meditation.

Please center yourself, uncross your legs, and take a deep long breath that fills your belly and exhale it alllllll the way out…

It’s a beautiful sunny day and you are walking through the vast field of cars. The glorious sunlit warmth glows upon the side of your face. You feel the satisfying crunch – crunch – crunch of the loose gravel paving, as you make your way across the field, zigging and zagging between the cars, trucks, and vans that fill the field.

As you walk you hear snippets of music being played.

A car radio here.

A guitar strum there.

Far off to the right you here the rhythmic throb of what sounds like a LOT of drums being played.

On the left you hear a young woman laugh.

As you continue to walk, you smell a heady indescribable mix of fragrances that swirl around you and pass. Some lingering, some flitting by so quickly you can barely imagine them.

You smell sweet grass… and flowers… and incense… and car exhaust…. A whiff of patchouli oil…

You hear the sizzle of food cooking, and the smell of cumin… soy sauce… vegetables…

And soap… and also musky human bodies, and a certain unmistakable sweet skunky herbal scent….

Up ahead you hear the hopeful cry of voices calling “I need a miracle!” and “Kine veggie burritos”

As the drums grow closer, and louder.

Not too far off, you begin to hear the sound of electric guitars being tuned and sound levels being adjusted and what sounds like a BIG gathering of humanity, as you hear a man loudly repeating:

“PLEASE HAVE YOUR TICKETS OUT!”

You can come back to this room…

In 1965, a group of Northern California musicians, Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzman, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir, calling themselves the Warlocks were on the cusp of a record contract when they discovered: somebody HAD that name!

As legend has it, while at bassist Phil Lesh’s house, Jerry Garcia picked up a 1955 Funk & Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and read the words GRATEFUL DEAD.Nobody really liked it, but nobody could really shake it.

And it stuck.

As we heard earlier, the Grateful Dead is a folktale motif that is found in many cultures around the world. We heard a Swedish version in A Story For All Ages. The Book of Tobit, part of the Apocrypha (the books that my beloved Christians can’t all agree on) is a tale of the Grateful Dead.

Tobit was an obedient and pious Jew who always did his best to follow the law. He made his pilgrimages to Jerusalem and paid his tithes to the priests and for widows and orphans.

And Tobit buried people, his country men, who were killed by the oppressive king. He stole their bodies from the king and buried them. For crossing the king, he was forced to flee. And, through a tragic bird-dropping accident in the night, he was struck blind.

In Tobit’s case, the Grateful Dead came in the form of the Angel Raphael who, in human form, helped Tobit’s son, Tobias, win the lovely Sarah and restore order in Tobit’s household, including returning Tobit’s sight.

Sarah, of course, had her own problems: she was melancholy for the loss of her husbands.

7 of them.

In a row.

I can see why some of you may find it difficult to read the Bible…

But we really want to talk about the modern Grateful Dead, don’t we?

The Greek’s have an interesting pair of words: chronos and kairos. Chronos is time, as in “what time is it?” What is the hour?

Kairos is also a word for time, but it’s about “the right time,” as in when things are ripe for a change, a move, a jump.

I came to the Dead late in their career. I didn’t really “get” the Grateful Dead in my first two casual brushes with them. In high school, I had an encounter with their studio album “Blues for Allah.” The kairos was definitely not there.

My lovely wife (at the time my lady friend), who is Deadhead #1 in our household, also coaxed me to a Los Angeles concert of theirs in the early 90s, but having been coaxed into it mostly to fulfill HER desire to go, it didn’t stick with me.

A few years later, I drew a 6 month assignment on a theme park job in Osaka, Japan. There’s a funny thing that happens after a few months of being in a foreign culture, you start to pine a bit for things that are from your own culture. One of my fellow workers on this project had left a tape of one of their live shows (Dead Set) in our shared communal car, and the kairos apparently was ripe: this stuff sounded pretty terrific!

This is sometimes called “getting on the bus” from a famous Dead Lyric in their song The Other One: “The bus came by and I got on, that’s where it all began.” An allusion to Ken Kesey and his Merry Prankster’s psychedelic bus, Furthur, which was sometimes even parked at Grateful Dead shows.

Upon my return to the States, my future wife was dumbfounded that I had “found” the Dead on the other side of the world. So we started going to shows, which is when things really started to get interesting.

The Grateful Dead were FEARLESS. I came to understand that the chemistry that they had was seldom (if ever) something found in the recording studio, but something that they had to mix in front of a crowd. And sometimes, it didn’t mix right. They could be bad and it didn’t seem to matter, because they were chasing something different, an alternative type of excellence. It’s said they were so bad at Woodstock that they got CUT OUT OF THE MOVIE.

I hate it when the band can’t handle their high.

Most bands try to give you something that approximates the experience you got from their recorded studio albums. Oh sure, they might tart it up a bit, but they know that the average fan wants to hear the hit songs and not too fancied up, thank you very much.

The Dead never played a song the same way twice!

They were chasing a musical transcendence, and that chase could only be made if you were willing to stretch out into unplanned places. And the audience just said: We want to go with you. In fact, it often seemed like no one actually had their studio albums (or they didn’t seem to play them) as the talk was always about live tapes, amateur-recorded audience tapes, or tapes from the Dead’s infamous Vault, of all their recorded shows.

After attending a few shows, I started to understand that this was actually a thinly veiled religious experience.

Now stay with me: it’s easy to dismiss this bunch because they’re about as “other” as a comfortable suburbanite can imagine. Long hair, often scruffy, unshaven (men & women!), sometimes smelly. Dressed funny.

(One of my favorites were a certain type of Deadhead that I usually call the Renaissance People. To me they look like some serfs who have wandered out of some long ago, feudal / peasant, lifestyle. I’ve never seen where those clothes are sold; there must be a J.C. Peasant department store, that I have never heard about.)

I won’t glamorize the scene: I don’t have any illusions about the various escapist vices that people engaged in, and often to excess. There’s nothing ecstatic or transcendent about being so high you can’t move and are laid out, with your friend’s trying to drag your limp body to the Rock Med Aid Station.

But the root word of religion is religiare, which means “to bind.” And I started to see that there was an unspoken bond amongst the people at these shows. And what was amazing was what could happen (unaided by chemicals) to me at these shows.

Spalding Gray, the late, great American monologist, spoke once about being in South East Asia and trying to force himself to have a perfect moment, and finally after trying to force it — trying to will his moment into being — he decided to give up on it, and in the process found a perfect blissful moment bobbing around in the Indian Ocean. He described the feeling of the boundaries between himself and everything else fading away, and feeling at one.

And that’s the kind of feel that could sneak up on you at a Grateful Dead show. If the kairos (including your heart space) was right. You could feel an amazing slip-sliding in your focus, away from secular concerns, away from boundaries, away from all of the screwed-up world, and bask, even for a moment, in a boundless, trans-rational communion of ecstatic souls swaying in the dark night.

Or it might suck. You never knew.

What is the Good News about the Grateful Dead? In many ways I find it similar to the Good News that I see in Unitarian Universalism, or even the Good News that Jesus taught: you have a place here. You can ride this bus, all you have to do is walk this “way” with us.

And I could see why these people were literally “on the bus,” following this band wherever they went, for months and years. Not just to get high on drugs, that’s the facile explanation. Sure, there were some people for whom the scene was just about another chance to smoke pot or drop acid or imbibe the intoxicant of your choice. But I think that most of them, perhaps even those who could or would not ever verbalize such a thing, were there to chase an even greater high of that BLISS. That ecstacy, that communion. An unearned grace.

You are alive.
You didn’t choose it,
you can’t buy a 2nd one,
you can’t will it into existence.
This life, also, is an unearned grace.

On this beautiful (and hot) summer morning you are here on this bus, in this community, I think to chase after a little of that ecstasy. To search for those ecstatic moments. To go where the “chilly winds don’t blow” and “the climate suits your clothes.” And to go there with this family.

And when we can keep our covenants,
When we can remember to put aside, for a time,
all those worldly concerns,
And leave our ancient angers
and hurts at the door,
Occasionally, we’ll feel that
unearned blissful communion
slip-sliding into our lives.

May we never cease to search for that communion and may the spirit help us always to be open to the possibilities “on the bus.”

May it be so.

Closing Hymn:
Ripple – written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

Benediction:
Please bow your heads. We gather in this community to celebrate our sacred communion of souls. We pray that this communion feed and nourish us through both life’s joys and sorrows. May we walk humbly with open and grateful hearts until we meet again. The blessing of the spirit be upon you all the days of your life.

And all the people said:

PRAISE THE SPIRIT.

My journey back to the ancestral birthplace of my Christianity has been guided by many signposts. Many of today’s thoughts are from the teachings of John Dominic Crossan and the other fellows of the Jesus Seminar, who continue to seek the truth, we can ascertain, about the Jesus who lived on this earth.

I’d like you to close your eyes and imagine for a moment.

The Gospel [Matthew 21:1-11] this morning teaches us that there was a spectacular procession on a morning like this almost 2000 years ago. But history teaches us there would have been another procession that week, maybe even that day.

With banners and golden eagles.

With Cavalry.

With hundreds of feet falling in unison.

The smell of men, and animals, and leather, and the clank of armor, and swords.

Jerusalem was too much of a backwater for the Romans to want to actually stay there, unless they had to. Herod the Great built Caesarea Maritima as a suitable capitol from which to control Judea, and the Governor of Judea typically stayed there, as befitted someone of great rank.

But what to do about these Jews and their festivals? Festival time was a problem. Jerusalem had been the center of the Jewish world for 1000 years by Jesus’ time. Pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem was an imperative for Jews, throughout the region and the Diaspora. Now it is Passover, a time of celebration. A huge number of pilgrims would flood Jerusalem and the Temple would be packed, performing many more sacrifices than usual.

Passover was a powder keg. Here we have an occupied people celebrating their LIBERATION from some other oppressive empire? And the rulers in and around the area had a history of using a heavy hand to control those rowdy Jews. Just before the turn of the Common Era, Archelaus, Herod the Great’s son, had problems with celebrating Jews not obeying his troops, and Josephus tells us that they killed 3,000 Jews “establishing order.”

There were two processions that week…

One procession was specifically to remind people that they were part of the Roman Empire. Ruled by divine right, by a divine emperor. “We must be divine, look how successful we’ve been defeating everyone!” That procession would have included Pontius Pilate, and was done to show the power of one group over another, to show who was in charge, to dominate. The Pax Romana. The Romans had an interesting way of bringing peace to an area; they brought it by conquering you. Peace through Victory. The Greatest Kingdom of the World of its time with great “Power Over” others.

I’ve been reading a book by an evangelical minister recently.

Oooooh…

The E Word…

Evangelical.

That may be enough to send the average UU running for the exit, but I know my UU Christian brothers are made of stronger stuff!

The Reverend Greg Boyd has written a terrific book called “The Myth of a Christian Nation.” He takes our evangelical Christian brothers and sisters to task for focusing all their attention on Kingdoms of the World. For trying to create a Christian world politically, thinking they can wield Christian power over others. While he has many observations specific to our American experience, His thesis is that we can never create the Kingdom of God by trying to structure it as a kingdom of the world. The domination systems required by the “power over” model, can never bring forth the Kingdom of God. They’re mutually antithetical. Kingdoms of the world offer, and are maintained by, the power of the sword.

There were two processions that week...

The second procession had its leader riding on the back of a donkey. Jesus and the boys had planned a little demonstration, a little counter-procession, hadn’t they? Those Romans are having their big march into Jerusalem. Well we, the followers of Jesus, are having our OWN procession. Here comes Jesus, riding a donkey, and we bow down to HIM. Because Jesus was showing people a transformative way of being in the world, the way to the Kingdom of God. By pushing aside systems of oppression and domination, by pushing aside class distinctions, by pushing aside legalistic purity systems. Jesus brings peace in a truly challenging way – Peace through love.

But if we’re all equal, how can I be in charge of you? How can I extract my taxes? Collect my debts? Have you as a slave? Make money off of you? Is it any wonder that this entrance into Jerusalem will lead us to Jesus’ execution by the end of the week?

I wonder if Jesus wouldn’t be executed today.  We like to think of ourselves as very evolved, but I wonder sometimes. Humans don’t like it when people challenge the status quo. Miguel Servetus – burned at the stake. Ferenc David – thrown into a hole to die of exposure. Abraham Lincoln  – assassinated. Mohandas Gandhi – assassinated. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King – assassinated. I hear we’re evolving, but sometimes it’s hard to see it.

The Rev. Boyd reminds us that Jesus’ model of the Kingdom of God is about power UNDER. The Power of sacrifice and  of sharing. The Power of self-less service and of Love. The Pax Romana brought peace through victory, but the Pax Christi brought  peace through love – power under.

The Gospel today tells us that the true power of love and peace does not arrive in a column of military might. And later in chapter 26, he tells us straight out that those who live by the sword will die by it. Transformation doesn’t come at the tip of a sword! Transformation comes when we stop letting ourselves get sucked into believing that we will change the world by DOMINATING one another.  Transformation comes when we recognize and respect each other’s humanity, even when we don’t initially understand each others point of view. Transformation comes when we listen and appreciate other’s truths, even when we might not share those truths. It comes when we learn to open ourselves and expand the growth of mutuality in the world. It never comes at the end of a sword, assault rifle, or laser-guided cruise missile.

And it’s hard not to notice in this story, that the “power under” ultimately triumphed. Jesus wasn’t a fool; the Jews knew how the Romans operated. It’s like messing with a beehive; you stir up the bees you’re going to get stung. And the Romans used crucifixion, because it was the ultimate public desecration of a human, a horrible painful death followed by being allowed to be devoured by the animals. One of the reasons it is now believed that so few crucified bodies have been found is precisely that – they were never buried and simply left to be devoured. Jesus so believed in the truth of the Kingdom of God, he went to Jerusalem, knowing what end might be in site.

Jesus didn’t triumph by worldly “power over” standards:  before the week is up, this “nuisance” Galilean would be executed. But the Roman Empire is long vanished, and Jesus’ wisdom is still upon the hearts and minds of billions.

What does this tell us as Unitarian Universalist Christians? Well, I’d like to thing we’re A LITTLE ahead of the game, because we USUALLY don’t loose track of our responsibility to social action in the world. But the world will always tempt with the idea that we can solve all problems with POWER OVER. If we just have the right law, the right politician, the right weapon system, everything will be okay.

Legalities and governments are fine and necessary in the world, but laws and governments come and go. As Christians, we can never forget our responsibility to manifest Christ’s love –carrying this virtue into all our transactions in the world is truly challenging – and truly transformative.

May we never lose sight of the strength in the “power under.”

May it be so.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: Is it just me or does being a UU Christian sometimes feel a little preposterous? What passes for UU conventional wisdom sometimes sends the message that I oughta be a “real” UU and embrace a “big tent” sort of Neapolitan-flavored spirituality, and this “Jesus-fetish” seems just a liiiittle suspect.

 “You’re not one of ‘those’ are you?”

My mainline Christian brothers, on the other hand, say “What are you doing hanging around with those flaky UUs?”

What can I say – we get no respect coming or going!

Pilgrimages figure highly in the scripture passages I’m going to share. Some scholars believe the group of Psalms from 120 – 134 are Pilgrim songs (their titles are sometimes translated as “Songs of Ascent”) that might be sung on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem or on the steps up to the Temple.

When Jewish pilgrims made the trek to the temple in Jerusalem, bandits knew that they were likely to be easy pickings. These Songs of Ascent offer reflections about the experience of being on that path. Sanctuaries from the dangers of the trip were built on the hills surrounding Jerusalem, to help these pilgrims make the trip safely. In Psalm 121, we hear the pilgrim affirming the faith in the Lord to protect that pilgrim passage to the Temple. “My help comes from the Lord.” 

Faith for the trip figures highly in Genesis 12:1-4. God says to Abraham: PACK IT UP. Leave everything. Country. Kindred. Father’s House. Pilgrimage time for you, my son  – I will show you a new land and bless and raise you up as a great nation.  Now that is what you call faith & pioneering spirit! And later the passage says that Abram was 75 — and he went!  Don’t know where I’m headed, but it must be fine because it’s the path the Lord has put me on. (Being a human, presumably Abraham also thought it was a little cool that God told him that his name would be so great it would be used in blessings. That would be cool wouldn’t it? “In the name of Gil, and all things faithful and righteous: I bless you…”?)

In Romans 4:1-5/13-17, Paul talks about Abraham. Paul is discussing how Abraham and the People received their justification. Paul takes issue with the notion that one “got good” with God by just doing all the supposed “right” things, regardless of the spirit or faith involved in the actions. He uses Abraham’s calling and pilgrimage experience with God, coming as it does before the gift of the Mosaic law, to show this can be everyone’s experience. Paul is broadening the message out to the Gentiles by saying that faith, not just strict obedience, was the key to Abraham’s blessing and those who follow in that faith, share in that grace.

On February 6th, we started our own Lenten pilgrimage for this year. Lent to me is a time to reflect on our path as UU Christians and what message we take from Christ. This season certainly focuses our reflection on Jesus’ path to Jerusalem, the last days of His ministry, His capture and execution at the hands of the Roman Empire, and His resurrection.

Finally, in John 3:1-17, we have Jesus meeting in the dark of night with Nicodemus the Pharisee, the representative of the Jewish lawyerly ruling class. I get the sense of Nicodemus being curious and a little furtive, he has heard some powerful things, but doesn’t want to be caught talking to this little peasant Rabbi. Nicodemus comes across as having the density of “too much book learnin’.” He can’t understand the emotional and spiritual lessons that Jesus is offering. “Born again? You mean climb back into the womb?” But Jesus is calling him to the new life that comes from the cleansing baptismal waters. John also reminds us here that we are being lead down the path to Jesus’ crucifixion, and the ultimate manifestation of God’s Love by offering the sacrifice of His Son.

I can only imagine the turmoil that the disciples must have gone through in their lives. Our beloved Rabbi and Teacher, BOOM – dead. Now where do we go? It takes a big dog faith to see your leader snatched and executed, and to still have faith in the path you’ve been put on. It certainly puts my little UU Christian twinges and neuroses in perspective.

What is this Lenten pilgrimage that we are on? As part of a small Lenten spiritual practice, some within the our local UUCF group are sharing some UU Lenten meditations this year, and a terrific one came by the other day about “Reinforcement through Fellowship.” Henry and Regina Wieman offer the following

“The sense of belonging to a noble, larger whole marks religious behavior. This introduces warmth, and strength, courage and pattern to the responding of the devotee. Usually this sense of belonging is mediated through a group sharing the same devotion.” 

Wieman’s student Donald Harrington adds:

“What we all want more than anything else in the world is for our lives to have some genuine significance – to be part of something greater than ourselves…For the truly religious person that something is to be part of the evolving ‘City of God,’ the growth of mutual support, enhancement and meaning among all humans and all parts of the living universe.”

This season has been for me an opportunity to reflect on being in fellowship, on Jesus, and on my faith. Faith in being a UU Christian. Faith in Jesus’ message. I do believe in the possibilities of the “big tent” of Unitarian Universalism, but “the wind blows where it chooses,” and I’m native born and fluent in Christianity. I do find wisdom in other religious traditions, but I can focus my attention most effectively in Christ’s teachings. This kind of focus and long-time training internalizes that faith, so that it flows naturally in the everyday transactions of life. And let’s face it: Jesus is HARD. Compassion and love for all – no exceptions. (The tent doesn’t get any bigger than that!) But when we’re harried, and late, and in our own little bubbles, it can be hard to see the spark of divinity in a dirty smelly unkempt face at a stoplight, or in the jerk that cut us off on the freeway, or the backstabber at the office. That takes PRACTICE. And a lot of it!

Even for my moments of despair in how tenuous being a UU Christian sometimes feels, I feel a tremendous grace in having found Jesus in a way that he wasn’t available to me before. In a way that “makes sense.” And that grace comes from Unitarian Universalism. It sometimes feels like being born “anew” (as some scholars translate it) because this world looks different; this Jesus certainly looks very different from the one I knew as a child.  Yet, he’s much more complex, compelling, and much more radical than I every understood or imagined.

What is this Lenten pilgrimage we’re on? This pilgrimage is something we get a chance to practice every year, if we allow it into our life. Coming to Church is a spiritual practice. Smiling at a stranger is a spiritual practice. Being in fellowship is a spiritual practice. When we practice fellowship this season, we share our Christian path and share our faith in walking together. Every one of us must wrestle with our understanding of Jesus and the message of his Life and Death, perhaps again and again. Together in the Body of Christ, we walk this pilgrimage in the only way we know how: a step at a time, seeking, questioning, reasoning, and yet still faithfully choosing to walk the path with Christ.

Perhaps the best message to be found in the above scripture is faith in this path, faith in the wealth of this particular journey. Faith in going somewhere, wherever it may be: ask Abraham!

I said earlier we get no respect coming or going, but let us take comfort in the closing of Psalm 121: “The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.”

May it be so.

First off, a word of caution: I don’t tiptoe (well I don’t do it much) so we’re gonna say a bunch of those hot button words today that make some folks crazy.

I’ll state up front that banning words from the range of religious expression doesn’t help further the conversation. I think our UU path and our covenant calls us to wrestle with these words and find the definitions that work for each of us. And when we disagree, we respect each other enough to allow ourselves to disagree, and we don’t feel compelled to “fix” the other person.

So, what the heck is a UU Christian?

Seems like a simple enough question.

Who are you people?

Saying you’re a Christian certainly seems to conjure up an image for most people. What happens when you put those two little letters in front? In some UU Circles, the word “Christian” seems to set people’s teeth on edge. Jeremiah today speaks that it is the end of the way of the parent’s who ate the sour grapes and the children who’s teeth are set on edge. That the sins of the fathers will no longer be visited on the children, but I’ve seen this very principle at work here in our own community. The Jesus Problem. There are those who lash out because they are wounded or who choose to live in their narrowly (and usually naively) defined conception of what a Christian is. They choose to visit the past sins of people who failed in their responsibilities and understanding of Jesus’ teachings, on any who would claim the title of Christian today. For some, the misbehaviors of others in their past (and their pain) cannot allow them to see any wisdom or truth in this path.

So who are we? We who walk this path?

A trap that some seem to fall into is to view Christianity as some giant, highly polished, monolithic slab that can be defined or qualified (picture that big monolith at the beginning of 2001:A Space Odyssey…)

But since the beginning, it’s obvious that we should speak less of Christianity and more of Christianities! Gnostics. Jews. Gentiles. Pagans. Romans. You have to give Paul and the boys credit: they must have been a tough bunch to be able to pull together a Church out of this amazing range of expression. And it continues to be a range of expression: what it means, to walk on the path that this provincial middle eastern teacher started so many of us on 2 millennia ago. And it is a path with many side trips.

The Unitarians and Universalists trace our path back through Protestantism and the Reformation (the Unitarian trip being a particularly virulently rational one!) As the (hopefully) soon to be Reverend Jessica Rodela shared just a few weeks ago, “There are many ways of being human in the world.” And there are many ways to be a Christian. Sadly, there are those who find it simpler to paint any Christian with a fundamentalist brush.

So we follow Jesus Christ. And if I got your teeth on edge with that one, I’ll point out that you can say and mean that in different ways. Jesus the Christ is a valid expression, but so also is Jesus the Christ. Christ is not a last name.

As UUs, our covenant calls us to acknowledge and “own” our own path, and respect others on theirs. And not see other paths as a threat. Knowledge of the range of expression is what better helps us to define our own expression. As the Rev. Marjorie Bowens Wheatley, says so beautifully in her Litany of Restoration: our differences “will not matter.” If I choose the Jesus Path, and you choose the Flying Spaghetti Monster path: It will not matter. Actually, I like the Reverend Susan Smith (because she’s a little more in your face about things); she just tells you straight up: “We’re not here to decide who’s right!”

So what do UU Christians do? I’ll share just a few thoughts from a UU blogger (PeaceBang) who often talks about UU Christianity, and my observations on them:

1) We worship in community.
When I read the Bible, I get the sense that Jesus was a bit of a party animal. He loved life, he loved people. He liked to eat, he liked to drink. Hey, when they started to run out of wine at Cana, who made sure that there was plenty to finish up the party? Jesus’ movement was a fellowship movement; we come together to praise God and to celebrate this unearned life we share. And we continue His fellowship path today, when we gather around to break bread and remember His ministry.

2) We share table fellowship.
This was obviously a central element of Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus’ table was radically egalitarian. And we as UU Christians should welcome all to our table, because it’s what we believe, and because it’s right.

3) We share the Bible when we are together.
It’s a story that moves us, a path that is revealing to us, and we know that it is possible (and imperative) to take the Bible seriously, and not literally.

4) We study the Bible on our own.
I wasn’t raised much with the Bible, which may seem like a surprise to those of you who know I’m a Catholic. But my Post-Vatican II experience kept the Bible mostly to the Sunday worship experience.

I’ll admit I now sometimes play a “game” with the Bible. First off, I have to come out of the closet (okay, I wasn’t too deep in the closet), I’m one of those “God people” you may have heard about. I know, I know… You would think that college and all this good UU rational thinking would have reamed it out of me, but here we are.

Actually, I think one of the things that brings me so strongly back to God is how completely trans-rational it is that we are here. This life, this creation, remains for me a gift that is unearned and unearnable.

Back to my game: I’ll open it up to a page and see what that page has to say to me. This summer I had a despairing moment when I was seeking guidance about whether there was a UU path for me. UUs can sometimes seem so opposed to anything with the “taint” of Christianity about it, that I worried about having a place at the table. So I stuck my finger in the Bible and it landed on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 12, on Service and the community. I highly recommend it, but I’ll share a little bit:

“Love in all sincerity, loathing evil and holding fast to the good…With unflagging zeal, aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. Let hope keep you joyful; in trouble stand firm; contribute to the needs of God’s people; and practice hospitality.”

So if you want to blame somebody for the fact that you are stuck listening to me rant this morning, blame the Apostle Paul!

5) Here’s sure to be a controversial one: UU Christians pray. For healing in the world and for others.

Jesus seems to have been one of those amazing people who had a direct and continuous relationship with the divine. And he seemed to have an open and ongoing conversation with God. Whether you believe in something called God, a “creative force” or “energy” in the Universe, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, or none of the above, I believe that prayer always matters. Prayer for me is where I focus myself and direct my energies on those things of ultimate concern.

Prayer also helps me to stay humble, and ward off the ridiculous human propensity to believe we’re the top of the heap. I can’t know who or what is listening or responding, but I can know that I am casting my energy forth into the universe, and that is enough.

When we started looking at dates to kick off this new worship, I started looking at the Revised Common Lectionary to see what Sundays were coming up. And I have to say, this Sunday spoke to me. Jeremiah speaking about God’s New Covenant, spoke to me about the covenant we share as UUs and as Christians. It’s a covenant that we have to renew continuously: to walk together in love and respect. It’s so perilously easy to wander off the path, and into our own selfish ways. God’s new covenant in Jeremiah also spoke to me about the possibility of renewing our covenant as UU Christians here today (and hopefully monthly!)

And in the Gospel of Luke, and Jesus’ Parable of the Widow and the Judge, I could see the message of persistence and faith. The Widow will not give up, and so, too, I feel that those of us who walk the UU Christian Path cannot. It’s where we came from and who we are. Let us continue to humbly walk this path together.

May it be so.

If you see Charles Foster Wineboy on the street, smack the smug little smirk off his face.

He’s a gender traitor!

He’s been seen sweeping his babe-alicious young wife off to a “secret romantic getaway.” This kind of behavior makes all the rest of the Brethren look like cr@p. This must not stand! Stop him before he kills again. The life you save may be your own…

Don’t leave home without ‘em…

“Swimmin’ In A Sea of It” assumes no responsibility for the state of your psyche after participating in the Belief-O-Matic…

MY BROTHERS & SISTERS!

Everything I am about to tell you is TRUE!

At least I think so.

Most days…

One of the most extraordinary, invigorating, maddening, frustrating blessings of being a Unitarian Universalist is: the diversity of worship and sermons a congregant is exposed to and today we are going to see how diverse it can get.

A couple of weeks ago we were treated to a wonderful sermon about eschewing mystical mumbo jumbo, the Bible, and all that “malarkey,” and embracing “rational naturalism” to give our faith meaning. Today, in true contrarian UU fashion, we’ve been celebrating a lovely Biblical service, we’ve been talking about Jesus & God, and if you don’t storm out before we get to it, we’re going to take communion.

Is that life’s rich pageant or what?

I got ordained last week.
Didn’t want to do it.
Felt I had to do it.

Got this cool official ID card (and if you hold it juuust right, you can see a liiiittle hologram in there!)

I wanted you to know you were in professional hands.

I joined the ranks of other noted theologians like the Beatles (who said “Give peace a chance.”), Sharon Stone (who said “Give nudity a chance.”), and Courtney Love (who said “Give heroin a chance.“) (Did I steal that joke from you, Brother James Sturdivant?)

Now I was born a Roman Catholic ( like a lot of Roman Catholics… ) and have had most of the experiences one might expect in that faith: I was baptized, and confessionized, and communionized, and after a 25 year sabbatical I even got confirmed into God’s Army.

I think the first chink in my Catholic solidarity came during my teens, from the laser-guided wit of my fellow Roman Catholic, George Carlin, who asked:

“Fatha, if God is all powerful, can he create a rock so large that he himself can’t lift it?”

Well now there’s a puzzler, huh? Kinda like counting angels on the head of a pin…

I had several casual brushes with Unitarian Universalism in my early life. I knew that my maternal grandmother was Unitarian. I knew that my grandfather had been told to “get a real religion” if he intended to advance at the very Presbyterian university where he was teaching.

I got to attend a Memorial service for my mother’s mentor at a Unitarian Church. It was interesting: very quiet and sacred yet seemingly so MODERN.

In the intervening years, I wandered, like many of you. And my own theology began to develop. I attended Ba’hai, Self-Realization Fellowship (Paramahansa Yogananda’s group), read about the Tao, dabbled in Hinduism, took yoga…

I began to develop my belief that religions are actually quite separate from faith. I began to see religions as one of the ways that human egos are always trying to raise their own views above those of “those other tribes,” without seeing the ultimate divinity that all are actually speaking to.

One of the things that drew me, and probably many of you, to Unitarian Universalism was that it was not necessary to check your intellect at the door. That it allows us to consider things in the light of the ongoing revelation of discovery about the universe we live in. UUs call this a healthy skepticism; not allowing someone else (usually male, usually white) to pronounce dogma, and freeze all knowledge at some distant point in the past.

I actually don’t see any contradiction in saying that I’m Roman Catholic and UU. I’m quite comfortable reconciling my own background as a Catholic Christian with our strong Unitarian and Universalist Christian backgrounds. I DO believe in the Unity of God, and I do believe in the Universal salvation of God’s creatures. But I also believe in the good works that my Catholic Church, sometimes imperfectly, aspires to in the world. And I give them a lot of credit for walking a fine line of reconciling almost 2000 years of Christian traditions with ongoing scientific revelations. I know, I know, they got it wrong a lot, but they’re trying. Hey, Popes have even started apologizing for goofing stuff up in the past. Give ‘em a break!

But even with that strong Christian background in UUism, I was a little perplexed, by how little we seem to touch on OUR Christian background. Or any OTHER background for that matter. We seem to have gotten the impression that respect for each other’s views meant we should never mention anything that might make us or someone else feel like they got it “wrong.”

We’re in a Church conducting “worship” and God seems, to me, to be the elephant in the room, that no one wants to talk about. A new Church friend, in trying to explain to me what I might expect in my new UU Church home, told me: “Well, it’s kind of like a Sunday Social Club!” And that made me a little sad.

As a Roman Catholic, I believe I have experienced the power of tradition. My short experiences in UUism have led me to believe that many UU’s are unaware or choose to ignore our own rich and powerful traditions. I started to wonder what worship in a Unitarian Church looked like before we became so rational and “modern.” Last fall in a class with our librarian and resident theologian Jo Leach, she showed us a prayer book and hymnal from the 1930s, a time before our modern thought processes were so all-consuming. It made me wonder what our worship looked even farther back, so I set out to find something earlier. Through the marvels of the internet I found the prayer book from which our service comes today, published by the American Unitarian Association in 1877.

I thought this service would be an interesting way to look in a mirror, to look at how we see ourselves in our modern 21st century light, but also to remind ourselves of where we came from, and remember the shoulders of the ancestors we stand on. I also wanted to share the power that comes from following these ancient rituals, especially sharing communion. Our Unitarian forebears were unashamedly Christian (as they defined it) yet I sometimes think we shrink from mentioning ideas like God and Jesus (or Krishna or Mohammed or Allah for that matter.) Okay, I’ll admit, we throw “the mystery beyond all naming” around reasonably comfortably.

We definitely seem down on “God Talk.” The Reverend Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker, the leader of Starr King School for the UU Ministry, has pronounced that religious liberals have presided over the death of God and that such stuff is best left buried. She states that God-talk has too often been used to support injustice and oppression. I sort of see this like saying “I burned myself on the stove, so I’m never going to eat again.” I like to call this fundamentalist humanism.

Now what is a fundamentalist? That word conjures up some powerful images: some might see images of our Muslim brothers and think of terrorist bombings and improvised explosive devices. Some of us might envision a big Christian revival tent.

As I was doing my research for this sermon I came across what I thought was a good definition: A Movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles. I believe that sometimes we can get fundamentalist about science and rationalism, and not acknowledge that there are things beyond our limited comprehension. Perhaps it’s fear of acknowledging how truly tiny we are. We humans do certainly have an egotistical tendency for putting ourselves at the top of the universal heap, as the pinnacle of creation (something our self-destructive tendencies seem to contradict.)

Isn’t this simply our hubris and bravado in the face of our own puniness in the universe?

By contrast the president of the UUA, the Reverend Bill Sinkford believes we need to reclaim “God-talk” and the language of reverence. I, for one have no problem with it, the G-man and I talk every day, and I continually marvel at the miracle of creation and my delightful (and challenging) participation in it.

But I’ve also seen the winces I sometimes get, when I say things like “I’ll say a prayer for you” or mention embarrassing words like God or Jesus to some of my UU brothers and sisters. My agnostic humanist wife has learned to mostly conceal hers. The Reverend Scotty McLennan, in his terrific book “Finding Your Religion,” talks about James Fowler’s stages of spiritual development. I think we can get “stuck” at whatever place we originally lost our magical / mystical faith. For many of us, it was when we started to understand and have a scientific rationalist view of the world. After that, when we listened to what we were hearing out of the Bible, a lot of us said “Well, THAT certainly seems like it defies all physical laws.”

We had been living in what Marcus Borg calls Pre-critical Naiveté: we accepted things at their face value with no real basis to analyze or contradict it.

But when our big juicy modern rationalist brains caught up, we ended up feeling like “Hey, this stuff isn’t literally true so it’s gotta go.“

I can sort of understand this, when the prevailing evangelical culture is so constantly in your face with literal interpretations of the Bible, it can be easier to just say “Aw, the heck with it, you can have it!”

But what do we lose when we turn our turn our back on those traditions? When we let someone else define the terms and the argument? Don’t we lose the benefit of the spiritual and philosophical truths, just because we can’t or won’t get past the problems with reading scriptures literally?

I have to admit, I spent a fair amount of time at that place. And I can see this in some UUs. In some ways this is surprising to me: with such a rich heretical tradition to stand on, I wonder why UUs seem so timid about reclaiming the language, and asserting their own definitions. How can a Unitarian, with that natural anti-authoritarian streak, who defines his own relationship with the divine, allow anyone else to define terms like God?

You can’t tell a Unitarian Universalist the TIME OF DAY without being given a second opinion.

“But Gil,” you say, “I don’t believe in God.” This always makes me want to ask “Which God don’t you believe in? The super-hero, long robes, white-bearded guy? That God? Yeah, I don’t believe in him either. Too small.”

I think we do a disservice to ourselves, to religious liberals, and to the public when we do not step boldly into the marketplace of ideas and offer things like alternative conceptions of God or views of the Bible, or when we do not challenge a fundamentalist view of the World, be it Christian, Muslim, scientific or whatever. I for one am fed up and have finally decided that I’m taking back God and while I’m at it I want my Jesus back, too. The Jesus who said to love one another, take care of your brother, and preached radical egalitarianism. I will not let some so-called Christian tell me that Jesus told him to buy a DVD player for the headrest of his inflatable pool lounger, to drive a Hummer, and laser bomb his fellow man.

Alan Watts, suggests that “that ultimate something which can’t be defined or fixed can be represented by the Word, God.”

The Hindu vedas have a sanskrit saying: “There is only one Truth, only men describe it in different ways.”

In a similar vein, our brilliant UU, Reverend Forrester Church wrote an article on building a theology for the 21st century. He uses a wonderful metaphor. Imagine yourself in a giant cathedral filled with wondrous stained glass windows. Each of us is standing at a different window and the sun is shining and light is streaming in through each of those windows. I can see it now: somebody asks “what color is the light?” Each of us gives a rapid but emphatic answer: It’s Blue! No, it’s yellow! No, it’s red! No, it’s purple – I’m gonna kill you for saying it’s red!

I think this says a lot about the world’s religions, how human’s can muck up a good thing, and how man’s ego so completely gets in the way of experiencing the divine with arbitrary (and ridiculous) attempts to segregate each other from our essential sameness. I think Kris Kristofferson told us a lot about our nature in the opening hymn “Everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on.”[Ed: opening hymn was Kristofferson's "Jesus Was A Capricorn"]

Soooo, I got ordained last week…

Not to disrespect the men and women who labor for years to prepare for, and labor even more to conduct their ministries, but because I wanted to punctuate for you what I see as one of the challenges of our denomination: lacking the dogma and creeds of other faiths, lacking someone telling us what to believe, I believe each of us has the responsibility of being the “minister to a congregation of one,” of formulating the theology of our own unique experience. The blessing and burden of our UUism is having to do our own heavy lifting theologically.

Have you got your 30 second elevator speech about what you believe ready? And let me tell you: it doesn’t count if you spend the first 29 seconds saying what you don’t believe!

I met a very smart lady this summer, who shared her definition of UUism with me: we have no creed, but we share a covenant to walk together, to search together, to agree sometimes, to disagree others, but always to come back together for the journey. To not let our individual differences tear us apart.

In our individualistic society, we sometimes forget that we can gather so much illumination and strength on our own path, when we share the path with the circle of our community

It’s our way, and I hope we can share it with each other for a long time.

May we walk together, humbly and reverentially seeking the divine, wherever we can find it.

May it be so.

The “Reverend” Gil Guerrero

Universal Life Church • World Wide Web Division

We had Pibil, Cook’s Country Corn & Zucchini with herbs, the venerable Avocado/Onion Salad with vinegar. Saffron Rice (Diana says: “Can’t get that saffron to bloom.” To which Jen advised: roast it folded into a newspaper bindle over the stove. Gonna have to try that one…) Chuck provided a delicious Kabinett riesling from the Guerrero’s new wine messiah, Dr. Pauly. Even Dr. Uncle Ron was impressed. We also taste-tested a Laetitia 2004 estate Syrah. A very nice soft red, though it was best with the terrific chocolate mousselets that the Weintraubs brought. Not a pairing for that acidic orange/vinegar pibil (although we knew that going in!) but great with the chocolate.

Capped it off with a siplet of the venerable sicilian amaro, Averno, which Jen pronounced “Undrinkable!” LOL! Admittedly, it’s pretty firey and weirdly herbal medicinal. Uncle Ron had his 2nd liquor of the evening, and Gil has now gone to the dark-side superstition that it helps his digestion. Uh, huh…

As usual, a terrific time, terrific food, and terrific family at table. We’re trying to figure out how to get the three kids to zonk out so the grownups can enjoy a nice cult-showing of Zappa’s “200 Motels” or “Babette’s Feast” without an 8:00ish curfew. Only time will tell…

Water is prescribed for all to fend off Sunday’s morning headache.