Sermons

READING ~ from the world’s great religious traditions: Christian Beatitudes and a Buddhist wisdom story

The Woman Whose Son Died, Buddha and the Mustard Seeds

There was a woman whose son died when he was a toddler and she was stricken with grief. Carrying her dead son, she went everywhere asking for medicine to restore her son to life. People thought she had gone mad. But a wise man seeing her pathetic condition, decided to send her to the Buddha.

He advised her: "Sister, the Buddha is the person you should approach. He has the medicine you want. Go to him."

Thus she went to the Buddha and asked him to give her the medicine that would restore her dead son to life. The Buddha told her to get some mustard seeds from a home where there had been no death. Overjoyed at the prospect of having her son restored to life, the woman ran from house to house, begging for some mustard seeds. Everyone was willing to help but she could not find a single home where death had not occurred. The people were only too willing to part with their mustard seeds, but they could not claim to have not lost a dear one in death.

By and by the woman realized that Buddha had been playing a trick. This was impossible. But still the hope was there. She went on asking until she had gone around the whole village. Her tears dried, her hope died, but suddenly she felt a new tranquility, a serenity, coming to her. Now she realized that whosoever is born will have to die. It is only a question of years. Someone will die sooner, someone later, but death is inevitable. She came back and touched Buddha’s feet again and said to him, “As people say, you really do have a deep compassion for people.”

REFLECTION “May I Walk You Home?” ~ Rev. Margaret Beckman

Joyce Rupp and Joyce Hutchison have co-authored two small books. The first, May I Walk You Home, is a collection of stories and prayers to encourage and strengthen caregivers of the very ill. In their second book, Now That You’ve Gone Home, they again give us stories and prayers as an offering to anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one.

I’ve used these titles as a way to frame the two parts of this morning’s message.

REFLECTION “May I Walk You Home?” ~ Rev. Margaret Beckman

Picture this scene.

Jesus, Buddha and Krishna are walking arm-in-arm in a beautiful lush garden. They are talking and smiling. The caption reads: “We’re all just walking each other home.”

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Spring Conference of the Maine Unitarian Universalist State Advocacy Network – MUUSAN. Our keynote speaker was the Reverend Elizabeth Nguyen, UUA Senior Strategist with Side with Love. Her talk was “Sometimes there is only the hard way.” As an introduction to her subject, she told us that in her home is an altar. It is crafted in the tradition of her ancestry. She is Vietnamese American. On her altar are photographs and memorabilia of her ancestors. She told us that keeping these symbols of her ancestors in her spiritual space reminds her that she is not the first and she is not alone. She is not the first one to suffer the difficulties of life. She is not the first one to work tirelessly for justice so that others may live more fully.

She is not the first one to lose someone she loves very much. Her ancestors did and experienced all these things. Knowing that gives her strength and the sure knowledge that she one in a long line of strong family. She feels their strength and presence. She is not alone. Her subject was justice work, and we all agreed that sometimes this work is hard, there is no shortcut and there is no workaround; it’s just hard.

I thought about that for a long time. The hard way is the only way for many things in this life, not the least of which is coping with the death of people we love dearly. Memorial Day is a time to share our grief, mourn together and remember those we have loved and lost.

You might think that I decided to talk about grief and mourning and remembering those who have died because of the deaths of loved ones members of our congregation have experienced in the last several weeks.

But, I began working on this Memorial Day service months ago. I almost decided not to keep my original sermon theme because it would be too hard ... too hard for me and too hard for some of you.

Memorial Day is about honoring our lost soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen and coast guard personnel. Memorial Day has also come to be a time to honor and remember all our loved who have died – recently and long ago. Too hard to talk about death and the ways in which mourning and grief come to each of us in the course of our days? Hard maybe, but not too hard. Grief alone is too hard. Mourning in silence is too hard. Sometimes, there is only the hard way. We are not the first. We are not alone. This is a day when we come together to share our grief; to mourn together so that together we might be comforted – as Jesus promised when he said, Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Words of the spiritual teacher, Ram Dass. “We’re all just here to walk each other home.” This is not a trite saying, it’s a valuable spiritual truth. As the Buddhists teach so well, nothing is permanent - - not happiness, not suffering, and not life. To really understand life is to come to grips with the fact that each of us will die. Everyone we love will die. Some will die before we do, and we will – if we’re fortunate – be able to walk with them as they go home. And – if we’re fortunate – loved ones will be walking with us as we go home. Walking each other home, however, is not something we do only in the final days of a person’s life. It is something we do every day with the people close to us. . . . Our family and our friends and all those who belong to this congregation, our shared beloved community.

To live a meaningful life is our spiritual quest. Almost no one does this alone. We companion each other through life’s hardships and triumphs and together we make life meaningful so that, when we come to leave this life, we might hear the still small voice whispering to us, “Well done, good and faithful child of the universe. Come home. Come home.”

Each of us has experienced the death of a loved one, or perhaps the death of many loved ones. Grief is not something that happens when a loved one dies and then at some point we get over it. Grief can be a lifelong companion – sometimes close at hand, sometimes at a further distance, but almost never does it leave us entirely. Grief has a way of catching us unawares, often at first and then not so often, but occasionally quite dramatically.

As most of you know, my mother died April 27th – a month ago now. Mom was 92 years old and she had a pretty good life. I am right now thinking about her and missing her quite a bit. I’m not surprised about that. In fact, in many ways, I am comforted by these feelings of love and loss. What has surprised me is the companion grief I am feeling about my father’s death. Dad died over six years ago, and I have gotten pretty used to the notion that he is gone. Yet, now it seems that I am feeling that separation even more keenly than I did six years ago. Maybe it’s the “pile-on” effect. Maybe it’s the realization that now I have no living parents – I’m an orphan – and somehow that is a grief revisited in a new guise. I am surprised by it; and I notice it. So, I’m thinking about my parents quite a bit as we come through this Memorial Day weekend. Many of you will have a similar kind of story about how you are experiencing love and loss.

When we gather to honor and memorialize the recently deceased in a funeral or memorial or burial service, I will say to those gathered together, that death does not have the final word because we keep our loved ones alive in our memories and in our hearts. I will remind them that it is Love that endures for Love believes all things, hopes for all things, and endures all things. Love alone never ends.

There is a Love that hold us in our grief and in our quiet times of memory and reflection. It is a Love not of our own making and it comes to us when we are open to its presence. We share the same Life, the same Light, the same Love.

You are right now barely hearing anything I say because you are thinking about the loved ones you’ve lost. I want you to keep thinking about them.

I want you to feel the loss that comes with death. It’s our way of holding on to the love we share. We’re going to sing in just a minute here.
The words are simple. You will find an insert with the music and the words.
As we sing, we will pass a bowl of stones.

Take one, more than one if necessary, that represents the people who have died that you are feeling especially close to right now.
Place your grief into the stone. Let whatever feelings of loss and sorrow you have come to you.

Just hold the stone in your hands and feel its strength and its shape and its beauty. Let the stone be small piece of the Everlasting Love that holds us together with the source of all.

HYMN THERE IS A LOVE HOLDING ME.

READING “Coming To” by Philip Booth

Coming to woods in light spring rain,
I know I am not too late.

In my week
of walking down from White Mountains,
I dreamt I might die before familiar woods woke me.

Come slowly,
the way leaves come, I’ve arrived
at their turnings: from bronze, gold, wine,
to all greens, as they let sun in
to tug them toward light.

Come again now
to woods as they’ve grown, hardwood
and soft, birch, hemlock, and oak,
I walk into my boyhood,

back to
my mother,
the mother who took me in hand
to steer me across back fields to the woods.
Over and over, she slowed to give me
the local names: swampmaple, shadblow,
hackmatack, pine.

Given those woods,
trees renewed in me now, I’ve begun
to know I’m older than all
but the tallest stands.

Under trees,
I discover my mother’s old namings
beginning to bloom: bloodroot,
hepatica, bunchberry, trillium;

in air
so quiet the flowers barely move,
I shiver a little, over and over.
I listen to tout lily, violet, jack-
in-the-pulpit, spring beauty.

I let my head bow as I name them.

REFLECTION “Now That You’ve Gone Home” ~Rev. Margaret Beckman

Mourning and grief give way to celebration and praise. We grieve the death and we celebrate the life. These are two aspects of honoring our loved ones. Grief and sorrow alone keep us locked into a place where we cannot truly appreciate the lives people lived and the impact they had, and continue to have, on us. On Memorial Day, we celebrate. We remember.

I remember going to the cemetery with Mom & Dad on Memorial Day. We visited the graves of our ancestors. We trimmed the grass around the headstones. We heard stories and asked about each of people whose names we read out loud; some we remembered, others we never knew, but all are among the ancestors that brought us to this place.

Now, I will go to that same cemetery and I will visit the graves of my parents whose remains are now laid to rest beside other family members gone in years past. There is a great sadness that wells up in me when I think about the fact that they are truly gone from my sight and no longer live in my physical presence. I remember. You remember your loves ones. Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we sigh the deep heaviness of utter weariness. Sometimes we laugh. Often we smile, just smile to know that memories will see us through and Love holds us forever in its care.

Together we love. Together we grieve. Together we live. We remember them.

Maya Angelou wrote a poem which she dedicates to Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock. I want to share that poem with you.

READING “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou
(This poem is dedicated to Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock)

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

If you want to hold on to your stone, that is very fine.
Some of you will want to let yours go.
If you let it go, return it to the basket on your way out of the Meeting House.
As you do that, bring to mind a joyful, wonderful memory of your loved one and smile and rejoice and be happy in the memories that live in your heart.

We’re going to sing now. The words are simple. You know them. You don’t even need the book, though it is right there if you want it.
Comfort Me. This is a lullaby and a prayer and a thanksgiving.
We can sing it with sadness or tenderness or longing or joy.
Whatever your heart needs on this day, sing.
And maybe when we get to the end, we will lift our voices in the sheer joy of being together.