Sermons

READING ~ from The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration by Vera Nazarian

Once upon a time there were two countries at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean. But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met. To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction from the meeting point. Our common language; It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear.

READING ~ Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.

SERMON

When I was in the third grade, the teacher gave us a writing assignment. We were to finish the sentence: “If I ruled the world…” I still have this piece of paper because my mom, bless her, she saved it. My first rule that I wanted to enact as an 8 year old was “No flat maps of the world.” And my second rule was: “Everyone must speak English.”

These two rules have been a koan for me, a puzzle to contemplate at different times in my life. Rather than being a precocious cartographer or an English-only advocate, I think I was trying to express my need to understand and be understood by the world around me; to find meaning in the zeitgeist of family and culture. This is an intrinsic need for all of us, to make sense of the world and have the world make sense OF us.

That’s part of what religion is for, even for us UUers. I think that’s part of what the Bible is for, to connect us to the stream of Western history and culture.

I didn’t grow up learning much about the Bible at ALL. My parents weren’t religious, but as a kid, I longed to belong to something bigger and tried out churches and synagogues until I landed, in my early teens, in a high Episcopal Church with a great youth program. I loved the ornate vestments, the smells and the bells, the Saturday retreats where we learned to sing Kumbaya and that Jesus loved us. It was the sixties, people. I can’t remember ever learning Bible stories.

Fast forward to 2012. As a newly minted minister and chaplain, one of my responsibilities was to lead weekly worship service where I worked. When I first started, I felt like the teacher who didn’t know the material and was cramming each week before going into class. I spent a lot of time on Google, finding out what other people had to say about Jesus in the New Testament. Then, about 4 months after I started, an old curmudgeon, churched since childhood, came up to me after the service, shook my hand, leaned in, and said, “No more book reports.”

That was some tough love right there. But what a gift! He opened my mind and heart to find out for myself what the Bible stories meant to this half Jewish, UU, Hindu Buddhist. I was invited and challenged to be pulled out of my comfort zone and find my own personal relationship with scripture. So, over time I went from parroting others and learned to riff on the Bible stories; I went from practicing scales to free jazz.

I tell you all this as preamble because last Sunday, in the Christian calendar, was Pentecost. I promise this is not a pop quiz, but does anyone know the story of Pentecost?  ASK FOR ANSWERS Yeah, most people relate Pentecost to the Pentecostals, the arm of Christianity who get the Spirit, run around arms flailing and speaking in tongues. And hey, that’s one way to free jazz scripture. It’s just not my way.

I’m not sure why I remembered that elementary school writing assignment, but when I knew I was going to speak today, I realized that the story of the Tower of Babel in the Torah and the story of Pentecost in the Christian Testament both tried to explain how we came to be so different and so confused, and how we can begin to understand and be understood.

Bear with me here as I free jazz some Scripture.

The Tower of Babel story in Genesis starts by telling us that “in the beginning” - just as all good stories start with Once Upon a Time - In the Beginning all people spoke a common language. It wasn’t English, but that’s a pretty amazing statement! The basic story is, people decided to build a tower that went all the way to heaven; they wanted to meet God face to face. God was not amused by humanity’s hubris and caused the people to speak in many different languages. Chaos ensued and the tower was never completed.  If you’ve ever built or renovated a house, you know of what I speak.

I love this story! It tells my confused 8 year old, still living inside me, that at one time, people DID understand each other. That before the use of horses to pull vehicles, before the development of boats with masts, the story has it that we understood each other more than we do now. I think it’s fascinating that even back then, people were  grappling with the concept of communication, and why sometimes we are able to communicate with others, and sometimes not.

Sometimes it seems like not understanding is almost a prerequisite for deeper understanding. When I worked at a meditation retreat center in upstate New York, I was one of two North Americans in a department of about ten people. There was a Mexican, a Spaniard, East Indians, an Australian who lived in Switzerland, a Brazilian man… oh, and our supervisor was a 20-something French woman. Even though our common language was English, we often had a really hard time communicating.

For instance, part of my job there was to facilitate the flow of money of different countries to and from headquarters in the United States. For me, there were the obvious language barriers but also some cultural challenges. I still remember one lengthy conversation with an Eastern European guest and her translator, where it took me far too long to understand that sometimes, in some countries, the safest place to keep money really is in a mattress and not a bank.

I learned many things about communication by working with this group. We learned to speak slowly and enunciate, to take our time before and after speaking. We learned to think about what we wanted to convey, and then use our whole selves – mind, body, heart and soul – when we spoke. Perhaps someone didn’t understand my words or my context or my meaning, but they often understood my  heart.

And sometimes it’s easier to communicate without language at all. Rumi wrote: “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.” I recently took a 5Rhythms dance class. For 5 weeks we danced instead of talking. One of the exercises was to find a partner and dance a conversation. Who were we? What did we want to express? It was such a great experiment. Although I couldn’t put into words what my partner was “saying,” I understood who she was by how she danced.

So Pentecost… I have not forgotten. In the nutshell version of the story, Jesus has died, the cave where he was buried was found empty and then he appeared to his disciples a few times before ascending to heaven for good.  When he left for the last time, it was during the Jewish holiday of Shav-oo-oat, (celebrating the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai).  At the time, believers were required to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the holiday, so there were many different kinds of Jews there, speaking many different languages. The story goes, because God wanted everyone to hear about Jesus, he (and at the time God was always a he) he caused Jesus’ disciples to speak in all the different languages so everyone could understand Jesus’ teachings.

What I find so remarkable about the Pentecost story is not that the disciples were given the gift of multi-lingualism. I doubt that literal interpretation. As Niels Bohr observed, “The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer.” Like my 8 year old desire that there be “No Flat Maps of the World” this story gives us a glimpse at the incredible range of human culture; how many exquisitely different people were there in Jerusalem.  And for my 8 year old insistence that “Everyone must speak English,” this story asks us to consider the possibility of hearing the message of SPIRIT… with the common language of Love.

Jesus’ wisdom teachings were about the unity holding all diversity, about a personal relationship with the sacred, and first and foremost about Love.

As a religion we UUers have many different concepts of God, and no concepts of God. Our beliefs about the form of holiness, the nature of what is sacred, our exploration of life’s big questions … are as varied as the leaves on a tree. AND the trunk of that tree, the very roots of that tree, the fundamental, foundational, non negotiable belief  in Unitarian Universalism is in Love with a capital L, unconditional and without exception.

Before the men who wrote the “new” testaments, before they were interpreted and used for political, hierarchical and misogynistic ends, my belief is that what drew the original disciples to Jesus was his teachings on Love, with a capital L. You’ve heard it before, but what a radical Jesus was, not only to the Romans but to the Jews themselves. That Jesus’ wisdom teachings are now being used by some for hate is beyond heartbreaking, I think it’s heresy to the original meaning of his life’s work.

Because I believe that Love is the wisdom of our inherent nature,  I believe that Love is the peace of our essential aliveness and that with Love, we possess a conscious, intuitive intelligence of what’s right. Does that mean it’s easy? Ohhh, it’s SO hard. It may be our true nature, but for most of us, our essential selves have been overwritten by inherited patterns and cultural attitudes. When we live from these patterns and attitudes, largely unconscious, it’s like the algorithms of  AI that have warped our original operating instructions. (I used to use the metaphor of the grooves of an LP, but I didn’t want to date myself.)

I believe that we can evolve, by making those seemingly infinitesimally small “right actions” that  align our lives with Spirit. Moment by moment, thought by thought, action by action, our inherent wisdom, peace and aliveness can be integrated into our nervous systems on a cellular level. Noticing, over and over again where Love leads, brings us to a life lived in intimate relationship to the fundamental, foundational and unconditional essence of the world.

So what if…. what if people are different so that we can grow into our understanding of our sameness. What if… what if Love is our true language? I know that most of the time we’ve been taking two steps forward, one step back. But I believe that within the sad reality of violence, injustice, and fear, we are participating - however imperfectly - in the inevitable process of co-creating One World, One Heart, Sacred Unity within diversity.

Put simply, by Mark Twain: “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

Scott Russell Sanders writes in his book, A Private History of Awe:

In the world’s religions, the animating power may be called God, Logos, Allah, Brahma, Ch’i, Tao, Creator, Holy Ghost, Great Spirit, or a host of other names. In physics, it may simply be called energy. In other circles it may be known as wildness. Every such name… is only a finger pointing toward the prime reality, which eludes all descriptions. Without boundaries or name, this ground of being shapes and sustains everything that exists, surges in every heartbeat, fills every breath.

May we start here. May we begin again now. May we look around us and see the sacred everywhere. May it be so. Amen.