A New Year's Integrity

A New Year's Integrity

Rev. Laura Bogle

Reflection, January 2016

Opening Words:   “I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light.  I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.” – Parker Palmer

Story:  Jonah and the Whale

Readings

From Rev. Sean Dennison’s sermon The Integrity of the In-Between:  “It is an act of courage and an act of liberation to remember all of ourselves. Re-membering means being conscious of all the parts of ourselves that are too complex, too messy, too solid to be held by imaginary boxes. Reclaiming these parts of ourselves is the work of integrity, and integrity is one of the things we as individuals, and as a society, need most.”

Parker Palmer:  “Here is the insight most central to spiritual experience: we are known in detail and depth by the love that created and sustains us … known as members of a community that depends on us, and on which we depend.”

 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Book of Jonah is a short, somewhat confounding story in the Hebrew Bible.  It is included with the prophets, though Jonah is never actually called a prophet in the story.  

In Jewish tradition this scripture is traditionally read in its entirety at Yom Kippur services – the holy time in the year that falls in Autumn, just before the New Year of the Jewish calendar.  Yom Kippur opens the days of Awe, several days of self-examination, taking stock, and asking for forgiveness from those you have wronged in the year.  It is a time to ask questions of oneself, like the ones that the sailors asked of Jonah—  What is your occupation? Where do you come from?  What is your country?  And of what people are you?” (Jonah 1:8)  Essentially they are asking, “Who are you?  Who or what do you worship? Why are you here?”

It is a strange little story, and does not give very much clear instruction, perhaps a bit frustrating for those hoping for some clarity in a New Year.

Think about Jonah.  Is Jonah a loser, or not? 

It is hard to tell.  He is forced to spend some time in the belly of the whale considering whether to follow the call of God, or not. 

Just because he repents and makes a different decision doesn’t mean he is a wholly different person.  He has both impulses inside of him:  that which wants to run away and serve himself and his interests.  And that which willingly jumps into the turbulent ocean to save the ship.  He has that part of himself that bravely strides into a foreign land to warn its inhabitants, and he has the part that sulks under a bush because God made him feel like a fool. 

Think about God in this story.  Is God a violent vindictive judge, or a loving merciful protector?  Hard to tell.

God changes God’s mind too – in the end, instead of destroying the people of Nineveh God says, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons…, and also many animals?”

Think about the Ninevites—are they wicked or humble and pious?  Hard to know. Apparently they did something to provoke God, but they sure did get themselves in order quickly.  Jonah simply had to utter five words and they were all fasting.

So many unresolved questions in this story!  We don’t even know if the Big Fish is male or female, as both the masculine and feminine versions of the Hebrew word for fish are used.  (http://www.reformjudaism.org/sometimes-we-are-jonah )

It is impossible to fit any of the characters into a box, to say they are this but not that.

The story itself almost seems unfinished, as at the end we aren’t quite sure of Jonah’s fate, just perhaps that he will continue to struggle with all that is in himself—the impulse to run from a call, then seemingly selflessly offering to be thrown overboard to save the ship, how he by turns praises his God, and then is deeply annoyed with his God.

If you are looking for a pure hero, a simply inspiring prophet, Jonah ain’t it!

But I’m drawn to him precisely because he isn’t.  There is a real humanness, a wholeness to Jonah. 

Who among us hasn’t run away from a call?  Who hasn’t slept through a storm, numb, when everyone around us is bailing out the ship?  Who hasn’t been swallowed whole by our monsters of grief, of depression, of a crisis of faith, of addiction, of anxiety? Who hasn’t spent time struggling in the belly of the beast, only to be spit back out—the same person, yet also a little different.

There is no final conclusion about Jonah, the Ninevites, any of us, or even God. 

We are made of messier stuff.

It’s a perfect story for the New Year.

Many of us make our own secular marking of New Year’s as a time to reflect and take stock.  A time to brush off the last year and make plans for the new.  It is a liminal time, an in-between time.  We haven’t quite left the old and we haven’t quite embraced the new.

We are tempted to make grand resolutions and pronouncements about how our life will be different this year from last year.  How we will be different.  Some of us think we might leave behind parts of ourselves that haven’t been serving us well.  Or experiences we’d prefer to forget. 

It is a good thing to dream about how our lives might be better, more perfect, more righteous, more healthy, more…

And then, if you are like me, long about the second week of January, you are confronted with the fact that you are still you.  A complex person full of beauty and ugliness, full of dreams and also full of inertia.  Full of kindness and also full of pettiness.  Full of praise and also full of judgement.

As Quaker teacher Parker Palmer reminds us, we are people “of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. …to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”

To have inner integrity we must grapple with those parts of ourselves we’d prefer to hide, ignore, or cut-off.  To look at them honestly and forthrightly.  Not in some sort of pity and not in some sort of false humility, and certainly not to tear ourselves down.  But to simply hold it all honestly, to recognize that the places in us which are in-between, imperfect, and unfinished can also be a part of our salvation.

Theologian Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock has talked about what she calls interstitial integrity.  She says:

“Interstitial refers to the places in-between, which are real places, like the strong connective tissue between organs in the body that link the parts. This interstitiality is a form of integrity.… Integrity has to do with entireness or of having no part taken away or wanting.”

It is the in-between places, places where our goodness and our short-fallings rub up against each other that change can take place, that the connective tissues of our lives are built.  Those places where we have struggled and re-considered, where we might even have changed our minds.  Those places make us human and keep up whole. 

This year, I invite us all to watch out for times when we label ourselves or someone else as fully good or fully bad.  I invite you to think about how to share yourself more fully with this community, warts and all.

This year may we do the hard work together of living into our own integrity, remembering, as Parker Palmer tell us that we are already “known in depth and detail by the Love that created and sustains us.”  May this community be a manifestation of that Love that holds all, not in judgement but in mercy and kindness.

Joy to the World, even now

“Joy to the World, even now”

Rev. Laura Bogle

Luke 1: 39-45

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.  When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.  And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.  And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?  For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.  And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

⁵⁶ And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

This time of year we hear “Joy to the World” being played at every turn and we have “Joy” up in lights on city streets and we get “Joyful Greetings” arriving with advertisements in the mail.  It’s an in-your-face kind of “JOY”—almost a command.  Be JOYFUL! – or else.  As if Joy is just something you are supposed to have in your back pocket, ready to whip out for the holidays.

As if JOY can be bought or sold, passed around like a trinket.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it that easy; this year I’m feeling a little cynical about that cheap kind of joy.

Where can we find a deeper and sustaining joy?

We have in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the short account of Mary and Elizabeth.  I think it tells us something important about joy at Christmas-time.

Mary and Elizabeth, Two women who were dangerously pregnant, living in the margins of an unfriendly empire.

Elizabeth has lived her life in disgrace because she could not bear children.  Her husband Zechariah has a mystical experience at the temple and stops talking and here she now is, an old woman with a mute husband, and suddenly she is pregnant! 

And Mary, so young, and unwed.  Not only that, but she has been told by an angel that she is bearing a child who will be called “Son of the Most High.” 

Elizabeth: Strangely, dangerously pregnant. 

Mary: Scandalously, dangerously pregnant. 

We don’t really know how these two were feeling… Biblical accounts don’t spend much time on the emotions of pregnant women.  By rights, both these women could have been feeling small and scared and isolated, shrinking from the expectations of motherhood and angels looming over them. 

And yet, they are so powerful --

And yet, we get this glimpse of joy:

Mary, having been told by the angel that her relative Elizabeth is miraculously pregnant, sets out on her own and she goes to visit her. 

When Elizabeth heard Mary coming, before perhaps she had even seen her and embraced her, she has a bodily experience of connection, she is filled with the Holy Spirit.  She says “As soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.”

This joy is more than merely feeling happy at seeing a relative. 

This joy is a spontaneous and deep reaction from the center of her being.

This joy is a moment of recognition, of seeing and being seen. 

This joy is born out of the womb of creativity, that dark place of conception and growth, which is in all of us. 

And then Elizabeth blesses Mary, she blesses her creative power and her creation-in- progress--the fruit of her womb-- and she blesses her for believing in herself.

Elizabeth blesses Mary, loves her, at time when perhaps no other human does.   And the story says Mary stays with Elizabeth for three whole months. 

Now, who among us feels that kind of joy at the prospect of a relative coming to live with us for three months?

But here is where their joy arises – out of their creative solidarity with one another.  They did not shrink and they did not stay alone.  They are both working on risky projects, bringing children who will be liberators--John the Baptist and Jesus-- into the world of the Roman Empire, and they decide to stick with each other.

I love to imagine that time of solidarity… the two women, two dangerously pregnant women, one old, one young.  Living together, supporting each other.  Growing and changing together, blessing one another, despite being overshadowed by the unknown, despite their dangerous circumstances.

Mary and Elizabeth, in touch with their creative powers and God’s desires for them.  Mary and Elizabeth sharing with one another, not just to bring forth new life for the children they are carrying, but new life for themselves.

How can we do the same for each other?

Theologian Catherine Keller talks about the womb of the universe, “the depth of Godself” in which we all live and out of which the creative love of God emanates.  She says, “We might also call this creative love desire, or the divine passion.  Alfred North Whitehead had called it ‘Eros of the Universe.’”

There is a joy in experiencing creative love, love that brings forth new life, love that taps into our deepest desires, God’s deepest desires for us.

Audre Lorde—black woman, feminist, lesbian, cancer survivor, and poet-- called this kind of creative love “a self-connection shared.”   A self-connection shared—when I am in touch with my own deepest desires, and I share that with another—becomes a moment of joy.

Audre Lorde goes on to say that the “self-connection shared is a measure of the JOY which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling.  And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible....”

Joy itself is not something to be possessed, something we can just have at the ready when the carols and Christmas cards command it.  It is born of sharing with another.  Joy is also not something that lasts—it comes in moments of connection, and then is over.

I can’t imagine that the three months Mary spent with Elizabeth were non-stop Joy.  After all, there were chores to be done, there was a mute husband to take care of, there was the pain of being a religious minority in a time of persecution, maybe there was morning sickness, who knows.

BUT, as Audre Lorde reminds us, we can call on Joy.  We can live our lives remembering that it is possible to tap that Godly place of creative love.  We can live our lives remembering those moments when we have shared our deepest desires with one another.

This is not a sugary-sweet business, living our lives in this way, under the current day version of the Roman Empire...  An empire of gross inequality, of exclusion and domination of people of color and LGBTQ people, An empire that locks people out of health care for their bodies and minds; an empire where the disenfranchised and the desperate feel they have little choice but to pick up guns that are far too easy to obtain; an empire that values profits over the well-being of the planet and the health of our children.

It takes stamina and a commitment to call on Joy in the midst of an Empire that numbs us to our deep feeling for one another.

But we Unitarian Universalists know that the birth of hope can and does happen every day, and that we participate in the delivery.  We celebrate the birth of Jesus not as a singular event in time, but as symbolic of something that happens over, and over, and over.  Every time we join together to bring new love and life into this world, we are witness to joy and the birth of hope.  Every time the marginalized and the excluded stand in solidarity with one another and claim life, even in the face of empire, we are witness to joy and the birth of hope. 

Just as Mary and Elizabeth claimed their own lives with joy, and shared their own lives with blessing, let us do the same. 

Let us do some risky things to bring hope to the Empire.

Let us open our doors and share our lives with solidarity.

In the year ahead, let us be the ones who greet one another with a leap of joy inside, knowing our deepest connections, believing in one another, knowing what beauty and love and justice we may together bring to life in this world. 

May it be so, Merry Christmas, and Joy to the World.

What Are We Waiting For? Part II

What are we waiting for?  Part II

Sermon delivered December 11, 2016

Rev. Laura Bogle

Our monthly worship theme for December is “waiting”—appropriate for this season of the year when the darkness is longer each day as we approach the winter solstice.  We wait for the sun to return.

Appropriate for this time of year when we remember the story of a pregnant woman, poor and unwed, on the road, waiting for her child to be born. 

Appropriate for this time of year when we remember the story of the Maccabees who re-dedicated their temple, even though they just had one small bottle of oil and they knew rationally that it wouldn’t last for the eight days until they could get more.  But they lit their lamps anyway, and waited, and miraculously the light burned for eight days.  (Christmas Eve is also the first night of Hannukah this year.)

All we can do sometimes is wait.  You can’t hurry along the workings of our solar system; the sunlight returns when it returns.  You can’t hurry along the gestation of a child in the womb; they will be born only in the fullness of time. You can’t force a miracle to happen, but you must simply let it unfold.  

There is deep and old wisdom in this kind of waiting.  There are some things we simply do not have power or control over.  A great philosopher once said, “Rivers know this:  there is no hurry; we shall get there some day.”  Winnie the Pooh.

And so last week I talked about two kinds of fruitful waiting for these times, these times between the election of Nov and the inauguration of January:

Waiting like a firefighter. You practice your skills and you work out your body and you keep all your tools ready and in working order. You are someone who is ready and prepared to answer a call to save, a call to serve, a call to spring into action.  

Waiting by the door for a loved one who you haven’t seen in a long time who you know is already on their way, and you want to be ready to receive them.  Remembering that what we wait on, the hope of our faith—that we might live in freedom and with justice and love guiding our human systems and communities-- is already on its way.  It is already growing from the ground on which we stand.  We have to be at the ready to recognize it is coming, to open the door when it arrives, to embrace it, even if it looks a little different than we might last remember. 

Two kinds of active, wise waiting.

And yet, I worried that I’d be misunderstood a bit.

Because there are some right now who are taking a “wait and see” attitude about the incoming administration of our country.  “We’ll just have to wait, and see what they do.  We don’t know what it will look like.  We can’t do anything about it now.”

Well, none of us can foretell the future, but I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what is coming down the pike.  And here’s why I don’t like this kind of waiting to see:  it is disempowering and covers up the fact that each and every one of us, as citizens of this country and as people alive right now in history, have some power and agency we can use. My power and my ability to act may not be exactly the same as yours.  But we don’t have to wait.  In fact we can’t wait.

In the Circles of Trust that met this week, I heard some stories about times when people realized they could no longer wait, but had to take action.  Waiting on someone else to take the initiative.  Waiting on someone else to fix your life.  Waiting on someone else to change.  Waiting on the world to change.  Waiting for the right time or the right place or the right job or the right person….. that never seemed to appear.  At some point we realize maybe there is something that we can do, that we must take some responsibility to make a change, to stop waiting.

It is a sign of privilege and power and control when you can make someone else wait. 

Parents make their children wait all the time. 

Health insurance companies can make you wait for treatment if you aren’t approved and don’t have the funds to pay for it yourself. 

Under Jim Crow segregation whites could make African Americans wait for just about any reason. 

It is claiming power and agency to say, “I’m not going to wait any more.”

During the Civil Rights movement there were plenty of well-intentioned liberal white folks who saw the resistance movement as too radical, as asking for too much, too fast.  Just wait, they said.  Be patient.  We will work within the system to change things slowly, give it time. 

Actually, I’d say that has probably been a response to any kind of people’s movement for change throughout history.

Well, you know what Dr. Martin Luther King thought about that, right?  

In his book “Why We Can’t Wait,” he wrote:

“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

In this quote Dr. King is articulating a core theological idea that is also central to our Unitarian Universalist faith:

The idea that we humans are co-workers with the Spirit of Life, that some call God.  We have never taken the attitude that somehow human problems will be solved by simply leaving it all up to God.  Or that we might just wait for the end times when all will be put right.  Both our Unitarian and our Universalist heritage has affirmed throughout our history that we have a role to play in bringing about the Beloved Community where all people are made whole and free. 

But we have sometimes nevertheless bought into the idea that our hope is only in the future.  As Rev. Rebecca Parker puts it in her book Blessing the World: What Can Save us Now :  “The traditional response of religious liberalism is to place our hope in the future.  Our apocalyptic myth imagines that the present world will come to an end and a new age will dawn.  The liberal apocalyptic imagination skips the violent parts.  It sees change coming through an evolutionary process—the gradual dismantling of evil empires and the eventual unfolding of life into greater forms of beauty and justice.”

But she says, we’ve got to come to terms with the fact that we are already living after the apocalypse, actually many different apocalypses. Apocalypse is usually associated with the end-times—and for many peoples and animals of this world, they have already experienced a kind of end-time of violence and hopelessness, genocide and extinction.

Given this, she asks, how shall we live?  Not waiting on some distant future but living fully now;  Clearly seeing reality now; finding love and hope in the now; creating the conditions for life to flourish, now.

The root of the word apocalypse means an unveiling, a revelation of knowledge. 

Some of us who have lived lives of relatively more privilege are only now waking up to the knowledge that when your own life is in danger, or the lives of people you love, then waiting is not an option.

What our own Unitarian Universalist principles call us to do is to widen the circle of people we love.  Knowing that we are all interconnected, we know that no one is free when some are not free.

So even if we ourselves have health insurance, we won’t wait for Medicare and Medicaid to be gutted—we will speak up alongside those whose lives depend on it.

Even if we ourselves can walk down the street without fear of harassment, we won’t be silent when we hear or see it happening to others.

Even if we have the security of citizenship now, we won’t be silent when our government threatens those who don’t, or threatens to punish resistance by taking away citizenship.

I am very intentionally saying “we won’t be silent” not “I won’t be silent” because this has to be a collective enterprise. 

It is the practice and sustenance and challenge of communities of memory and hope and faith like ours that make it possible to act in the face of oppression, to no longer wait.

Let me give you an example from history to illustrate what I mean; an example that inspires me, and reminds me of the purpose of our gathering, of any gathering in the name of Love.

During the resistance to fascism and the Nazi regime in  Europe during WWII, there was one small mountain village in the south of France that stood out for the number of people it kept in safety.  Le Chambon was only a tiny community of about 5,000 people, but throughout the war they and some neighboring villages protected and saved about that same number of people.  About 3500 jewish people, most of whom were children, and 1500 other dissidents in danger.

It was a Protestant village in a majority Roman Catholic area.  Perhaps this gave them a heightened sense of being in the minority, of what it is like to not have your views your culture reflected in the day-to-day of the world around them.  I don’t know. 

But here are two things I do know: The minister there, Andre Trocme, was a central leader in the resistance, and he ended every worship service this simple and direct way:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Go practice it.”

And that is what they did.

Magda Trocmé, the minister’s wife was interviewed later, and explained how it began.

“Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done—nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it immediately. Sometimes people ask me, “How did you make a decision?” There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!”

There is something in these times, too, that demand that we not think too much.  These times demand that we not wait in our rational brains to see exactly what policy proposals come down the pike.  These times demand that we not wait until Maryville or Alcoa or Knoxville is added to the growing list of hate crimes across this country since the election.  These times demand that we not get bogged down with one another arguing about the best strategy or the right analysis.  These times demand that we not wait for answers from our leaders.

We have 40 days until inauguration day.

In our story this morning (The Three Questions), Leo Tolstoy tells us that there is only one important time, there is only one important person, there is only one important action.

The important time is Now, right now, not some other time, not some other day.

The important person, the important people are those here, right here in our community, and those beyond our walls that we have relationship and influence with.

And the important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. 

As we say every week when we light our chalice, we heal, we help, we bless, we serve the spirit of Freedom.

May we, like the tiny baby whose birth we remember this month, embody in ourselves the Love and the Hope we yearn for. 

We can’t wait.

Amen.

Closing Words

As our chalice is extinguished, may the Love within us and the Love between us, join with the Love that holds us all,

Shine forth and serve Life today and in the days ahead.

Go in peace and greet your neighbor with Love.

Meditation and Prayer 12/4/2016

Meditation and Prayer 
December 4, 2016

Meditation                                                                     

It is our quiet time.

We do not speak, because the voices are within us.

It is our quiet time.

We do not walk, because the earth is all within us.

It is our quiet time.

We do not dance, because the music has lifted us to a place where the spirit is.

It is our quiet time.

We rest with all of nature.  (words by Nancy Wood)

Time of silent meditation…

We hold in the quietness of this place and the love of our circle

All those who lost their homes, their businesses, their family members or friends during the fires in Gatlinburg and the Smoky Mountains.

We hold tenderly the spirits of those whose lives could not be saved.

We hold with gratitude the effort and work of the firefighters, the first responders, the public officials, the Red Cross, the social workers, the national park staff, the chaplains, all the helping neighbors in a time of need.

We give our attention to all the people who have lost their livelihood, their work, the income that supports their families.

We hold the forests, the trees, the streams, the animals, the air, water, and soil of our beloved and thirsty mountains. 

We give thanks this day for rain, for water is life. 

We connect our loss and our pain to the larger story of our warming and changing planet.

We admit our reliance on fossil fuels, and confess our own complicity in a system that is bringing devastation.

Knowing what we have lost, what we are losing, we mourn.

Knowing what we have lost, what we are losing, we look for hope, for ways to be that hope.

This morning we connect our loss and our pain to the hope of the Water Protectors in North Dakota. 

We hold in respect and care the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and the people from many other Native Tribes, their elders and their youth, who are standing together and putting their bodies at risk in the service of the common good, for protection of the land, the water, our planet.

We send our love and solidarity to the veterans and the clergy and the people of many different faiths who are gathering today in North Dakota to be in prayer and to be a presence of protection for the Water Protectors.

We join our prayers with concerned citizens across this globe who may not know the answers to the global climate crisis we face, but who see a part of the answer in being in solidarity and following the way of the Water Protectors. 

Spirit of Life, God of Love, Mystery of this Universe,

We ask for blessing and protection of the most vulnerable.

We ask that a peaceful way forward will open.

We ask that our own hearts open to consider more ways we might also become protectors of the waters, protectors of the earth.

May this Fellowship bring us courage, creativity and compassion so that we help make it so. Until all people have access to the gifts of this life.  Amen.

What are we waiting for? Part I

What Are We Waiting For?  Part I    Rev. Laura Bogle

Sermon delivered on December 4, 2016

Monthly worship theme: Waiting

Readings

Luke 6:1-3 (The Message translation)

 3 ^1-6 In the fifteenth year of the rule of Caesar Tiberius—it was while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea; Herod, ruler of Galilee; his brother Philip, ruler of Iturea and Trachonitis; Lysanias, ruler of Abilene; during the Chief-Priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas—John, Zachariah’s son, out in the desert at the time, received a message from God. He went all through the country around the Jordan River preaching a baptism of life-change leading to forgiveness of sins, as described in the words of Isaiah the prophet:
Thunder in the desert!
“Prepare God’s arrival!
Make the road smooth and straight!
Every ditch will be filled in,
Every bump smoothed out,
The detours straightened out,
All the ruts paved over.
Everyone will be there to see
The parade of God’s salvation.”

"A Vision" by Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

The week after the election I took a trip to The Mountain  – UU retreat center near Highlands, NC.  I decided to drive through the national park to get there, and I drove in the early morning through the usual Smoky Mountains mist, but also through the heavier acrid smoke of forest fires.  By the time I got up to the top of Little Scaly Mountain, where the retreat center sits, the wind had shifted and cleared the air right there. But there’s a tower you can climb, and in the 360 degree view from up there, most every direction I looked I saw plumes of smoke.

It kind of mirrored how I have been experiencing the aftermath of the election. Since November 9^th,  every direction I look I see potential hardship, potential devastation – health care, education, civil rights, foreign policy, environmental protections, law enforcement, economic strategy…  the list goes on.  I feel like we are surrounded by fires being set on purpose and it’s hard to know which one to start with.

But I want you to know that while I was up there on that mountaintop for a couple of days with colleagues, I learned about an amazing life form that I would have easily overlooked if all I paid attention to was the smoke.

See the picture up here?  Anyone know what it is?

This is a kind of lichen called the Rock Tripe Lichen.  Doesn’t look like much.  Kind of dry, 

scaly patches clinging to a rock.  Not colorful – greenish brown on top and dark brown or black underneath.

Well, you are looking at an organism that is about 1,000 years old.  Scientists know this because they know how slowly these lichen grow, just a couple of millimeters a year.  Near this rock at The Mountain there is a sign to keep people from touching the lichen, or climbing the rock.  You see the lichen is really quite fragile;  I could reach out and just scrape it off I wanted to.

I did a quick search and I did discover two other things that might disturb this kind of lichen and kill it:  fire.  And disturbance of the water table.

And yet, this lichen has survived for 1,000 years.  Our lives are so short in comparison.  What would it take for us to have a 1,000 year worldview?  Like Native American and environmental activist Winona LaDuke has said,

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/together-with-earth/bigger-than-science-bigger-than-religion

“The world is alive, everything has spirit, has standing, has the right to be recognized.

One of our fundamental teachings is that in all our actions we consider the impact it will have on seven generations.  Think about what it would mean to have a worldview that could last a thousand years, instead of the current corporate mindset that can’t see beyond the next quarterly earnings statement.”

As I pondered the 1,000 year old lichen and the surrounding fires, I was pulled in two different directions.  In the context of 1,000 years, how can anything feel so urgent?  Four years of a presidency, even eight years of a presidency seems insignificant when looked at in that time frame.

And yet, at the same time, the mountains are burning.  This week people and animals, and probably some 1,000year old lichen have succumbed to the fires ravaging our mountains.

How can we not feel urgency?

How can we even consider talk of “Waiting” this month? 

Next week I’m gonna talk more about action, about why being loyal to our Unitarian Universalist values means we can’t just “wait and see” under a Trump administration.

Today, I want to propose two important ways “Waiting” can be meaningful and important for these times.

I am not talking about a drumming-your-fingers impatient kind of waiting, like you might do in the middle of a traffic jam.

I am not talking about a falling-asleep kind of waiting like you might do at the DMV.

The first kind of waiting I want to propose, is the kind of waiting that a fire-fighter does, with everything prepared for the call.

Or the kind of “waiting” that a server in a restaurant engages in—waiting to respond to what you need.

Think of the phrase “ladies in waiting” – the servants to a Queen who are ready to spring into action at any moment. 

There’s a meaning of the term “Wait” that means  being and remaining ready and available for use. 

In these times, we Unitarian Universalists need to also be waiting in that way.  To wait on one another and on the most vulnerable in our community.  Meaning to serve one another and the most vulnerable in our community.  To stay awake.  To pay attention for the calls we can answer.  In this way we are ultimately serving the flourishing of life.

The poet David Whyte puts it this way:

…It must be

under all the struggle

we want to go on.

It must be,

that deep down,

we are creatures

getting ready

for when we are needed.

….

we are getting ready

just to be ready

and nothing else.

(Excerpt from “Waiting to Go On”)

So that’s the first way I propose we wait:  to be at the ready to respond when and where we are needed.

The second way of waiting I want to talk about has to do with an active expectation that Love and Goodness will arise, is actually already arising at this moment.

I am talking about the kind of waiting you do when you sit by the door waiting for a loved one to come home, knowing they are on the way.

John the Baptist, and the Prophet Isaiah before him said,

Prepare the way, clear a path,

make the ways straight for the arrival of God, the arrival of the Good, the arrival of Life.

Christian theologian Henri Nouwen talks about “the attitude of waiting that allows us to be people who can live in a very chaotic world and survive spiritually.”  (“Waiting for God” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas) 

A very active kind of waiting.

A way to wait that has a sense of promise and hope. 

He says that people who wait in this way “know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing.  That’s the secret.  The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun.  Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.  A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.”

This kind of waiting remembers that there is something powerful in life that wants to live – a seed of life in everything.

This kind of waiting, in being present to the moment, understands that hope can break forth in infinite places, in infinite ways. 

This is not a naïve kind of pie-in-the-sky hope.

We have seen the 1,000 year old lichen clinging to a rock.

We are seeing the Native People of this land, after 500 years of oppression, continue to lead even those of us whose people have done the oppressing, towards a hopeful vision of sustainable co-existence.

We have seen generations of African Americans resist slavery and Jim Crow segregation and lynchings and mass incarceration and daily indignities.

We have seen the LGBTQ community live through the devastation and loss of the AIDS crisis, when our federal government would not act, creating their own systems of care and compassion.

We are seeing, right now, here in Blount County, people engaging in vulnerable conversations about race and racism, about how to seek the humanity in one another across difference.

Are we paying attention?  Are we, especially those of us in privileged positions, preparing, clearing the way for Love and Justice to arrive, expecting that it can and will? 

Remembering, in the Christmas story, that Love arrived in the body of a tiny baby that some these days would call an illegal immigrant born to an unwed mother. 

What we are waiting on is already in motion in the ground on which we stand, even though there is ruin in the land.  

What we are waiting on is already in motion within us,

Hope can even break forth in us if we are paying attention, waiting with expectation to greet it.

Now is the time to dig deep in our spiritual practices.  Whatever helps you wait with expectation, stay awake and pay attention. 

A colleague said that we all need to be finding that “grounded place that is neither numb nor hysterical.”

Gathering here for worship is our corporate spiritual practice, to be physically together, building relationship with one another, meditating, and singing and praying together.  Weaving connections of love that matter when we leave this place.  So I want to challenge you to be here even more often, to simply show up and wait on one another.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be considering some other ways we might gather in the New Year, to keep ourselves prepared, paying attention, to clear a way for Love to arrive, to stay grounded in the wisdom of the survival of ancestors.  I’d love to hear your ideas about what you need, what our community needs during this new era.

Wendell Berry tells us:

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed

May it be so.  Amen.