Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Charles J. Stephens

Opening Words: “For a New Beginning” by John O’Donohue.

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Meditation:   “Hope” by Philip Booth

Old spirit, in and beyond me,
keep and extend me. Amid strangers,
friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
see clear, reach deep. Open me to find due words,
that I may shape them to ploughshares of my own making.
After such luck, however late, give me to give to
the oldest dance. . . . Then to good sleep,
and – if it happens – glad waking.

Readings: “Passage Without Rites” by Philip Booth
Homing, inshore, from far off-soundings.
Night coming on. Sails barely full.
The wind,
in its dying, too light to lift us against
the long ebb.
My two fingers, light
on the tiller, try to believe I feel
the turned tide.
Hard to tell. Maybe,
as new currents pressure the rudder,
I come to sense
the keel beginning
to shape the flow of the sea. Deep
and aloft, it’s close
to dark.
No stars yet. Only the risen nightwind,
as we tack into its warmth,
tells us
we’ll make our homeport. Strange,
angling into the dark,
to think
how a mainsail’s camber reflects
the arc of the keel,
their dynamics
reversing whenever we tack.
You call from below,
hand up coffee,
check the glow of the compass, and
raise an eye to Arcturus,
just now
beginning to shine. All over again,
all over, our old bodies
breathe
the old mysteries: the long night
still to go, small bow-waves
playing
a little nachtmusik; stars beyond stars
flooding our inmost eyes.
And voices,
now, come out of the dark,
deeply sounding our own.
“The Pulse of Morning” by Maya Angelou (also called “The Rock Cries Out To Us Today”)

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spelling words
Armed for slaughter.

The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.

Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.

The river sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.

They hear.
They all hear
The speaking of the tree.

Today, the first and last of every tree
Speaks to humankind.
Come to me, here beside the river.

Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.

Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name,
You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
Then forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of other seekers–
Desperate for gain, starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot.
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am the tree planted by the river,
Which will not be moved.

I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours–your passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need.
Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.

Lift up your hearts.

Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.

Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me,
The rock, the river, the tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes,
Into your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
NEW BEGINNINGS
Sermon by the Rev. Charles J. Stephens
May 3, 2015
When I chose the theme for today’s sermon, my thoughts were focused primarily on the beginning of May and the positive symbolism of new beginnings. My intent was to celebrate the glorious warmth that inspires the buds on trees, the blooming of early spring flowers and how pleased I was that my honey bees survived the long cold winter and are already busy gathering pollen. And what more glorious spring weekend could we have expected than what we are experiencing?

The pagan celebration of Beltane falls on 1st May with the evening of 30th April being known as May Eve. It’s origin is an ancient fertility festival tied together with the Celtic God, Bel, a God of light, fire and the Sun. Fires were and still are an important element of Beltane celebrations. The tradition was that people would leap over a fire to ensure their fertility. Cattle were driven through the ashes or between two fires to ensure a good milk yield. A Maypole was made from an erected Birch trunk or sometimes from a living Birch tree and fertility dances were performed around it to ensure good health and abundant crops.

May, Mayday, and Beltane inspired poetry about exciting new beginnings and the anticipation of abundant crops and fertility of every kind in the year to come. The poem “Very Early Spring” by Katherine Mansfield illustrates the joy of new beginnings brought by spring:

The fields are snowbound no longer;
There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.
The snow has been caught up into the sky–
So many white clouds–and the blue of the sky is cold.
Now the sun walks in the forest,
He touches the bows and stems with his golden fingers;
They shiver, and wake from slumber.
Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls.
Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears….
A wind dances over the fields.
Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter,
Yet the little blue lakes tremble
And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver.

My sermon focus was clear, that is until Monday night, when riots broke out on the streets of Baltimore, complete with ransacked stores, raging fires and general unrest and destruction. I had heard about Freddie Gray’s horrible death. I had seen on the news the well organized and peaceful protests not only about Freddie Gray’s death but about other unarmed black people around the nation being killed by police officers.

The protests called for the end of generations upon generations of oppressive treatment, but the African-American Baltimore resident who I heard interviewed was right, it was the violence, a symptom of growing unrest of many in the African-American community that caught the attention of the press, the nation and, I confess, my attention.

Like me, you have heard the claim that when one door closes another door opens. Well, it’s true to a certain degree. But it is not quite that simple nor that immediate. William Bridges was an expert in transitions and the author of Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change and The Way of Transition:Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments. Bridges emphasized that when something ends we don’t go directly to a new beginning. First, we end up in a neutral waiting period of transition, there is the end or death of something and then a time of disorganization and eventual renewal. A period of messy transition seems to be fundamental to nature and a central theme in mythology, theology, and poetry.

We, here in Maine and probably around the nation would easily identify the past months of March and April as a time of waiting if not climate disorganization. And having served as your Interim Minister over the past two years of Transition, I think we can understand what Bridges meant about there being a time of waiting and some disruption before we get to the new beginnings.

Together we have waded through some messy times between the end of one ministry and the anticipation of a new ministry, one that we had hoped would start this summer. But things became delayed and you find yourself in an unexpected and unwanted waiting period.

As Maya Angelou wrote:

“History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.”

And still, we need to avoid the tendency of trying to move rapidly from an end to a new beginning as quickly as possible. This period of limbo can be the valuable opportunity for each one of us as individuals to gain deeper understanding of self and the new beginning we desire.

Again from Maya Angelou’s poem

“. . . In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.”

We may not be totally sure of what might be, but things need to change, equity and justice need to be available to people of all races, colors, creeds and sexual orientations. And yet we don’t often hear those who deliver the news discuss the facts that the peaceful protestors are marching not for violence but because of decades of inequality and the present crushing and violent weight of poverty that dominates black neighborhoods, leaving little opportunity for poor people to get ahead. Newscaster Wolf Blitzer from CNN saw the rioting and rather than analyze and discuss the causes, asked accusingly, “Where are the police?” Did he mean the same police that have been indicted?

An executive of the Orioles baseball team gave a clear answer to those who wondered how this could have happened in Baltimore. He simply said: “its inequality, Stupid.” It is decades upon decades of inequality. Many of us saw the movie Selma, that graphically reminded us of how firmly inequality has gripped our country over the decades.

So I hope and dream that we are in the messy transition time between an ending of the oppression and inequality that has gripped our society for so long and the new beginnings that will usher in at time of justice, compassion, and equality. It is hard to know for sure if the tide is changing.

I liken this hope to a portion of the poem, “Passage Without Rites” by Philip Booth, where he wrote:
“My two fingers, light
on the tiller, try to believe I feel
the turned tide.
Hard to tell. Maybe,
as new currents pressure the rudder,
I come to sense
the keel beginning
to shape the flow of the sea. Deep
and aloft, it’s close
to dark.”
We have to believe in this promise. I think it is the parents and poets and perceptive children who feel the turning of the tide and sense new currents putting pressure on the rudder to direct us as individuals, as a congregation, as small communities, and as our larger society to a place of greater equity and harmony.

As the poet Rumi wrote,

It is your turn now,
you waited, you were patient.
The time has come,
for us to polish you.
We will transform your inner pearl
into a house of fire.
You’re a gold mine.
Did you know that,
hidden in the dirt of the earth?
It is your turn now,
to be placed in fire.
Let us cremate your impurities.

It is time that we let love move us so that we can hear the whole music of our diverse society and see clearly the value of justice and equality for all people. It will be then that we reach deep into ourselves and begin building bridges between our divisions.

Closing Words: Sprout by Sue Ludwig

I am in search of my life.
Not the one I was dealt,
But the one I want to have.

Not the one
Repeatedly stomped into the ground
Popping up
Where I least expect it,

But the one where
I wake up each day
Excited to be on a path
Blooming with
Maybe nothing I expected
But everything I wished for.

I have been tending to the hard work.
I have unearthed and tilled
And reseeded the dead areas.

I am beginning to see sprouts.
Little glowing green life
Pushing against gravity,
Weight of earth
To find light.

They are in search of their life.
They know more than I
How to shed the confines
Of the seed,
Thank it for its lesson,
And grow.