Past Services

by Rev. David Usher

A month or so ago I attended the UU Ministers’ Spring Retreat. The program theme for the retreat was death. We talked together in pairs and small groups contemplating the end of our own lives, reflecting on the losses we’ve experienced, and grieving the violence in our nation that disproportionately takes the lives of black and brown men. And inevitably, we spent some time imagining what might happen to us after death.

Maybe sitting around discussing death for several days in a row sounds a little bit depressing. But it wasn’t at all. Instead it was delightful and clarifying. When I contemplate those last moments in my body – assuming I have the presence of mind to be aware of such things – I know that more than anything I do not want to have any regrets about how I lived my life. The retreat served for me as a reaffirmation and further clarity of my life’s priorities. It confirmed for me the choices I am making to be fully alive while I have the chance.

So today I want to talk to you about your life before death. I want to lift up the fact that you have the choice right now – and in every moment which you will experience as “now” – you have the choice to align yourself with the flow of life or to resist what is happening. You can make the choice to be awake and fully present to the experience of being alive or you can shift into autopilot and concern yourself with your various habitual worries. Every day you can decide to look your beloveds in the eye and really see them, right down to their dazzling, holy core or you can squander your precious attention on trivialities.

We are here on this planet for such a brief visit, friends. None of us knows when our life will be over. But we are alive now. What a tremendous miracle! And we have a chance in every moment to make the most of it.

Life is meant to be joyful and its purpose is Love.

The truth is that many of us, maybe even most of us, walk around a just little bit deadened, closed off, disconnected from ourselves and from others. Enveloped in a fog of fear. Choked by regret. Terrified of what the future holds.

We are afraid of some sort of Bad Thing happening.

But you know what? When I look back at my own life and I pick out a few of the “Bad Things” that have happened – events that at the time seemed unequivocally horrible – each of them provided me with a unique opportunity to grow and to learn something important that then helped guide me into the next phase of my life. My experience of life has been made richer because of them – even, or maybe especially, those times when my heart was broken and I thought all was lost. So it begs the question: are those events truly “bad” if as a result I now walk through the world with more appreciation for beauty and the simple gifts of friendship and love? Who is to say whether any particular event is truly good or bad? Anything that happens in your life, even loss, can be an opportunity to move into deeper connection and more love with the people around you.

Here’s the thing we all know. Fear strangles love. Anxiety scrambles our channels so we can’t think clearly. Guilt and shame bind us so tightly that we lose our natural ability to freely and easily reach out to one another in vulnerability and tenderness. Our egos are always on the lookout for danger. Bless their little hearts, they think the best way to protect us is by trying to get everything under their control.

If I could just get the pantry cleaned out… If only my finances were in order…. If only my kid (or my partner or my friend) would just make the right choice… If only the external world would just bend a little then I’d be happy and at peace.

But that’s not the way to peace, friends. Even if the house were spotless, and everyone you care about was making choices you approve of, even if everything you could point to in your life were in perfect order, it is unlikely that true and everlasting peace would descend upon you. The inevitability of change means that nothing stays the same. In time something or another will once again rear up and begin to vex you.

Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh writes, “We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.”[1]

He says we need to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. But how do we do that? I think first we have to understand it. The urge for violence comes from the ego – it is a protective reaction based on its own delusion of separateness and isolation. It is the part of us that fears humiliation and rejection and abandonment because, ultimately, it is the part of us that fears death.

But there is also something within each of us that resides deeper than the ego. This more subtle part rests in the awareness of our connectedness – to one another and to the source of life and love – to the experience of the Holy. We experience this blessed part of our being when we bring our awareness into contact with the present moment.

The answer is not about controlling the external world. What most of us do most of the time is attempt to relieve our anxiety through all the wrong methods. As the queen in the story I told earlier discovered, it is be far simpler to wear shoes on our feet than to attempt to cover the world in leather. It is our own responses to the external world that will ultimately smooth the path before us.

The other day I was late to meet a friend at her doctor’s appointment where she was going to be receiving the results of a biopsy. I could see that there were two open parking places on the opposite side of the road so I drove up a little ways and made a U-turn in the middle of the street. When I got turned around and was about to pull into one of the diagonal spaces a man appeared there standing in the middle of the space. He yelled over at me, “Hey, sorry dude. But I’m saving this for my friend.”

Okay, whatever, I thought. There was still that other spot. As I began to back out of the first space and re-park in the next one over this other car zipped in from the other side of the street. I had my blinker on and was heading straight into that space. There is no way the driver didn’t know I was planning to park there.

So here I had a situation in which a reaction of anger and frustration would be entirely warranted. I could have gotten mad and felt completely justified in telling one or both of the people off. But I’ve been practicing noticing and letting go of my ego’s resistance to what is happening in the present moment. So this time I shrugged and drove on and found a place to park around the corner. I met my friend in plenty of time and all was well.

Let me tell you though, it was an effort to shrug it off. I felt the tug of all that negative energy – the seduction of self-righteous anger. It wasn’t that I buried those feelings. I’ve just gotten better at recognizing when my ego wants to throw a tantrum.

Without ego there can be no injury. If a tree had suddenly fallen across the spot I would not have been offended. I would have accepted it as simply what had happened. But my ego, always on the lookout for insult, felt the need to defend “my spot” from those who would take it from me.

If I had chosen to stand my ground, fight and win back the parking spot I might have been able to tell a victorious story of vindication. But the truth is I’ve gone down that road before. I know that engaging in a battle like that, no matter how triumphant I might have been, would have left me with some amount of poison in my system for the rest of the day. It just wasn’t worth my peace of mind.

What we do with our attention matters. My true goal was simply to park my car somewhere so I could go meet my friend. I could have indulged my ego. I could have given in to my inner resistance but in that moment I chose to go with the flow of life. And it felt so much better.

I am both inspired and challenged by these words from the spiritual teacher Adyashanti:

“What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have, right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment? If you were able to give up control absolutely, totally, and completely, then you would be a spiritually free being.”

***

We can achieve a sense of peace not by gaining ultimate control but by realizing that true harmony is in the letting go.

Peace comes when love, and our sense of connectedness with the Source of Life, God, loosens the grip of fear. We can have faith that even if it doesn’t go well, even if we get hurt by taking the risk, there is a deeper safety that we can trust with our whole being.

Listen to this poem I love by Rashani called The Unbroken:

There is a brokenness

Out of which comes the unbroken,

A shatteredness out

Of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is sorrow

Beyond all grief which leads to joy

And a fragility

Out of which emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

Too vast for words

Through which we pass with each loss,

Out of whose darkness

We are sanctified into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

Whose serrated edges cut the heart

As we break open

To the place inside which is

Unbreakable and whole.

***

Friends, no matter what you believe about what happens after we die, what a tremendous blessing it is to have this one brief lifetime together on the planet.

If we are going to uproot violence from our hearts, this is how we begin. Start to notice in your relationships with your friends and family when your defenses kick up, when you are clinging, resisting, or hiding. You can decide to look past your ego and its seductive defenses, look below your inner resistance and see instead what is actually happening. You can choose anew each day, and in each moment to see into the hearts of those you love. But we need one another’s help, we cannot do it alone.

I imagine hell to be a place where beings writhe and moan with dissatisfaction, mired in fear, seeing no way out. Those times I’ve gotten stuck in my ego defense felt like being stuck at the bottom of a deep well. I was aware that I was in it. I could just barely see the light at the top of the well. But I couldn’t seem to get out on my own. I’ve found that when someone who loves me is willing to see past my ego’s struggle and fight to my true divine and loving self – and they reflect that back to me – I can begin to climb back up into the light.

I imagine heaven to be a place of peace and fearlessness. Here, now with these other beings we get to practice loving, forgiving and seeing beyond the ego to the spiritual truth of who and what we really are. I believe in my heart of hearts that life is meant to be joyful. That happiness is our natural state. We are here to learn to let go of our resistance and simply love one another. Let us choose heaven over hell!

May it be so, Amen, blessed be, peace

[1] Thích Nhất Hạnh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

by Rev. David Usher

Whose church is this, anyway? Whose would you say it is?

One answer is, It’s mine. It belongs to me, the minister. If ever you are having a really slow afternoon, I mean, a really slow afternoon, you might be tempted to read a church history, and if you do you will discover that they often read as if the minister was the only person who was of any importance, the only person who ever did anything. Chapters will be delineated according to the time-spans of the different ministries. That is, of course, a convenient way in which to mark off the years, and it certainly flatters the fragile sense of self-importance of us parsons. To add to our vanity, lots of churches have honour boards in a prominent place which list all the ministers they have had and the years they have served, and it is noticeable that they don’t list the chairs of the finance committee, or the person who devotedly arranged the flowers every Sunday for years, or the person who could always be relied on to say the kind word, or lend a hand, or do whatever small task might be asked of him or her, the people who, let’s face it, are the real glue in any congregation. Furthermore, and this is the clincher, it is my name and not any of yours which appears at the top of UUCM’s letterhead. I rest my case. This congregation is mine.

If only. But, there is an element of truth in that. I do regard this congregation as mine because, for these two years while I am here, it is this congregation to which I am devoting my energies, this congregation to which I am bringing whatever I have of experience, of knowledge, of wisdom and of skill in the arts of ministry. It might be that I am “only” an Interim Minister, and you and I know that my time with you is limited, but even so, while I am here, I am yours and you are mine. It might be that I am in the twilight of my brilliant career, and after Grass Valley I will probably retire to spend my time sitting on the porch and looking vacantly into the middle distance and therefore have nothing to prove, no resume to garnish, but I want this ministry to be successful every bit as much as I have wanted all of my previous ministries to be successful. I want to believe, and I want you to believe, that when we part in June next year, this will have been a fruitful time that we have spent together, that you, and I, have grown not only in numbers, but in our personal spiritual maturity, in our collective organisational efficiency, and in our effective shared social agency.

But even as all of that might be true, you and I know that we ministers are nomadic souls, we come, we stay a while, and then we move on. Whereas some of you are made of more adhesive stuff. You stick around. And as I might say, “This congregation is mine,” so might each of you say the same thing, that it is your congregation. Indeed, I hope you do say that. And what would that mean? It would mean that this is the congregation to which you have committed your heart; it is the congregation where you have found a place in which to be your authentic self, where you can search for the theological truths that resonate with your intelligence and the aesthetic truths which nurture your spirit. It is the community in which you have found fellow feeling with others, whose friendship you enjoy, whose perspective on the world chimes with yours. When you come here, you are coming to the place which is your spiritual home. It is in this community that the coals of your individual faith are kept warm and alive, where the flame of your yearnings for peace, justice and the life of the spirit is enkindled.

And of course that is important. If you did not feel that this congregation was yours, then why would you come? If UUCM did not feed you, challenge you, comfort you, inspire you, you would not be here. You would not come back. You would seek elsewhere, or perhaps you would give up on religion altogether and spend your Sunday mornings reading the papers or mowing the lawn. The fire would cool and finally go out. Each of you wants to be able to say, “This is my congregation,” and to know deep in your bones that it is true.

But, but, when you or I say, “This is my congregation”, we each must do so in recognition that others are saying it too. Yes, this is My congregation, and it is yours, but it is also Ours. If you catch yourself, or somebody else, always saying “I want this, I like that, I preferred things that other way and I plan to keep complaining that things are not exactly as I want them, then I invite you to pause and consider this. I invite you to consider the idea that the very fact that you do not always like everything about this congregation or about the way things are done is, in fact, a wonderful thing, a thing to be grateful for. Why? Because it means that somebody else does like things that way. It means that this is a truly diverse congregation in which we are each learning the subtle but not straightforward art of being a community together, learning how to give as well as take, how to be gracious and generous in how we treat each other. And it means that none of us has the power to dictate everything, to demand that we get our own way, and are learning how to be humble about that. It is fine for each of us to say “I don’t like that”, if we are also open to the possibility that what I don’t personally like is actually for the greater benefit of the larger congregation, and therefore ultimately better for me too, as we each are learning not to place ourselves at the centre of the congregational universe.

The practice of consensus is usually misunderstood. People think it means unanimity, that nothing is decided until everyone agrees, and that everyone therefore has the power of veto. And some people love that, the stubborn, the ornery and the self-centred in particular, because then they can block anything they don’t like. But that is not what consensus means. Consensus, properly understood and practised, means that after full discussion, those who are in a minority recognise that they are in the minority and willingly agree to consent to the will of the majority.

Yes, this is My Congregation, it is also Your Congregation. And together, we make it Our Congregation. This congregation belongs to us, together. The etymology of the word “religion” is from the Latin word, religare, meaning to bind together. Religion is what unites us, makes us one. We congregate, we come together. Without others, it would not be a religion, it would not be a church, we would be lonely and isolated individuals who, like the embers removed from the fire, would soon discover the warmth of our faith fading. We belong to each other because we need each other, and particularly in this faith tradition, we belong to each other not to reinforce our own pre-existing prejudices but to be in authentic conversation with each other, learning that our way of seeing and interpreting the world is only enriched by the views that others have.

A little vignette. In my third year of ministry studies at Oxford, I was joined for two terms by my elder brother, also studying to be a Unitarian minister. There must be a defective family gene somewhere. He came from Sydney to Oxford with his wife and two young children, and lived in a charming college house. One February morning, heavy snow was falling. It was the first time his children had seen snow, and understandably they were excited. They rushed to a window and were peering out at the magical sight together. The younger one, aged three, moved to a different window and gasped. “Andrew, look!” she exclaimed excitedly, “it’s snowing outside this window as well!”

Each of us is looking at the world through our own window. The view might be affected by the shape and size of the window, but the world we are looking at is the same world. We would do well to marvel together at the world, sharing our perspectives, rather than arguing about the supremacy of our own window, rather than insisting that the world can be seen only through our window.

So this congregation is mine. And it is yours. Together, it is ours. But that is not all. It is also theirs. Who are the they? It is several people.

This congregation also belongs to those who have gone before us. We are not constrained by tradition, but we are indebted to it. This is an organic congregation, it grows and evolves as new people arrive and bring their own talents, preferences and enthusiasms, but we are also shaped by what has gone before. We honour those who have preceded us, not by slavish obedience to their ways that were relevant and meaningful to their times but, in the same spirit of openness, freedom and curiosity as theirs, forging our own ways relevant and meaningful to our own times.

And this is also their congregation, those who have yet to find it. As we were glad that others had preceded us, doing the work to ensure that this congregation was here for us to find, so may others be glad that we preceded them, keeping our doors and our hearts open to welcome them. May we be mindful in all that we do of the seventh generation. May the legacy we hand on to the future be that we were true to the calling of our own time, that they may be true to whatever is the calling of theirs.

There is someone, or something, else to whom this congregation belongs. Unitarian Universalism. UUism. Each Unitarian Universalist congregation is independent and autonomous. That this congregation chooses to be a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the national organisation, is a voluntary choice and can be rescinded at any time by a congregational vote. But we do proclaim the UU name, and certainly I do so with pride, and as such we are a shop-front to the world of UU principles and values. We must hold ourselves accountable to those principles and values. We must take them seriously, or we should abandon the pretence of subscribing to them.

So this congregation is mine.   This congregation is yours. It is ours. It is theirs. And it is Unitarian Universalism’s. All of those. The emphasis will change from time to time, but all of those stakeholders need to be kept in mind in all that we do together.

And there is one other who lays just claim on this congregation. God. This congregation also belongs to God. Now, I suspect that some of you have just broken out in hives that I should say such a thing. Don’t worry, tubes of soothing ointment will be available immediately after the service. I say it belongs to God without apology. No, I do not believe that there is A God, a being separate from time and space who presides over all and to whom we owe our obedience and obeisance. God, for me, is the best way I know of expressing that which is Other, that which is beyond and beneath and betwixt the compass of our human world, the magnet ever drawing us to mystery and miracle which our human reason cannot ever adequately explain or ultimately refute but which, if we are wise, we simply acknowledge to be so and gratefully acquiesce in the presence of.

This congregation stands not only as the shop-front for a denomination, a paltry claim if that were all, it stands as witness to what has been true of us humans since we first raised our eyes to the stars in wonder and awe, since we first felt a need for each other that went beyond carnal lust or communal safety but which spoke of love and deep connection, since we first heard the call of conscience that would not allow us to do what seemed immediately advantageous. In other words, this congregation stands for the eternal human quest to be in communion with the divine.

As we celebrate this morning the generosity with which you good people have pledged yourselves to sustaining the coming year of this congregation’s worship, work and witness, I want to say to you that your giving is to more than just the tangible, visible fabric of this congregation. Your giving of self is a recognition that we each are more than we seem, we each are better than aims and ambitions that end with self. We each are called to that which is ever beyond us, beckoning. We each are called to be part of the generosity of Life, we are called to share the abundance which is all around us and deep within us. And we each are blessed when that call is answered.

So may it be for us all. Amen.

by Rev. David Usher

There was once an old farmer, a poor man who had worked his fields all his life, day in, day out, without ever making any money, never doing better than just scraping by. All he had to help him in his labours were his faithful old horse, and his son. One day, his horse, which had pulled the plough so faithfully all these years, just upped and died. And the old farmer’s friends were quick to gather around to offer their sympathies on this misfortune. What a sad thing, they all said, that your faithful old horse has died. Well, replied the farmer phlegmatically, It’s too soon to tell.

But, as it happened, just about that time an insurance policy that the farmer had bought years before and had forgotten, well it matured, and he came into a little money, and with that money he could buy another horse. Isn’t it great, all his friends chorused when they gathered around to celebrate this piece of good fortune. You can get another horse. Well, replied the farmer, It’s too soon to tell.

Pretty soon, though, it became very evident that this new horse, fine looking beast that it was, had no heart for the drudgery of pulling a plough. It just refused to be yoked into that kind of menial work. The farmer’s friends were quick to gather. What a terrible shame that you spent all that money on a horse that is useless in the field, they cried. Well, replied the farmer, It’s too soon to tell.

So the horse was released to roam free in a field, and the farmer noticed how fleet it was, why that horse could run faster than any other horse the farmer had ever seen. The farmer decided to enter the horse in a local race. And sure enough, the horse won, and with it, a handsome purse. The neighbours were there like a shot. How fabulous, they exclaimed, that this horse is a racehorse, you have won all this money, and will likely win even more money. This horse will make your fortune. Well, replied the farmer, It’s too soon to tell.

Now the farmer’s young son decided he wanted to ride this frisky and fleet racehorse, so one day he saddled up and away he rode. Unfortunately, the only horse he had ever ridden before was the faithful old plough horse which, at best, could summon up a gentle canter. But now he was on a horse racing at a full gallop, and it was not long before he fell off. He broke his leg badly. There was immediately a knock on the door. The neighbours. Oh, how awful, they wailed, that your son has broken his leg, he is permanently crippled, and will not be able to help you in the fields as he did before. Well, replied the farmer, It’s too soon to tell.

Soon after, war broke out, and all the young men in the county marched off proudly to fight, all, that is, except for the crippled farmer’s son. And all of those young men, in one terrible battle, were killed. And the grief stricken neighbours came to the farmer, How lucky you are that your son did not go off to fight and die. And the farmer replied, Well, It’s too soon to tell.

Easter is supposed to be a difficult season for Unitarian Universalist preachers. Given that we likely do not subscribe to the notion of Jesus’ physical resurrection from death, as celebrated in mainstream Christianity today, what is there for us to say? I recall a ministerial colleague in England once telling me that he had only one Easter sermon. He said it was a really great sermon, and whenever he preached it he got a rapturous response, but after he had preached it, he had nothing else to say because essentially this sermon said, It didn’t happen. Jesus did not emerge from the tomb. End of story. Really, is that all there is say about Easter? The dreariness of denial. What joy there?

On the other hand, I have no patience with the Unitarian Universalist approach which ignores the Christian story of Easter entirely and regards it as a purely Pagan celebration of the return of the flowers and birds and the delights of spring, tra la. Of course, I know that Christianity appropriated the Pagan festival of Oestra for its own purposes. Of course there is rich symbolism to be tapped about the miracle of rebirth in nature after the darkness of winter, even as new life is said to have emerged from the darkness of the tomb. But remember, I grew up in the southern hemisphere. There it is autumn now, not spring.

To ignore entirely the magnificent story of Jesus in the Easter event just because we don’t accept the orthodox imposition of what it means is, I believe, needlessly to impoverish ourselves of something deeply, deeply profound. Above all else, the story of Jesus in the Easter event, is one of the most compelling narratives of what it means for us, you and me, here, today, right now to be fully alive to our own humanity; what it means for us, you and me, here, today, right now to be fully open to the divinity which might yet shine within us; what it means for us, you and me, here, today, right now to embrace life in all of its uncertainty and unpredictability, it grubbiness and its grandeur, and to stand firm in faith that life is good, and we are blessed beyond words to be part of it. Even if, especially if, we can never know for certain what any of it means. Even if, especially if, we can never eve know if it means anything at all.

All of us live within a context which is always and ever too large for us to comprehend. What is the meaning of your life? Never mind such a big question about your whole life, what about that thing that just happened to you yesterday? Was it a piece of fortune good or bad? Was it cause for celebration, or consolation? The job you applied for and did not get, which for a time left you discouraged and deflated. It seemed at the time like such a bitter pill of disappointment. But then, you applied for something else, and you got it, and it turned out to be so much more rewarding and fulfilling than the other job would ever have been. The new relationship, in which you first feel such giddy delight, but which later turns sour and you wonder why you ever allowed yourself to be seduced into something in the first place which later caused you such anguish. Is any decision we make, any event which befalls us, is it for good or for ill? Well, it’s too soon to tell.

That old farmer, I think we can safely assume, was not there in Jerusalem on that fateful Friday when Jesus was crucified, but if he had been, and someone had come up to him and said, Isn’t it terrible that all of our hopes in this man have been so cruelly dashed, or even if they had said, Isn’t it good that we have finally got rid of that troublesome preacher, I suspect that old farmer would most likely have replied Well, it’s too soon to tell.

It is always too soon to tell whether our present endeavours will be for the longer term good or ill of ourselves or others. It is always too soon to tell if the processes of the present are laying welcome or unwelcome foundations for the future. And that is one of the key messages of the Easter event. That it is too soon to tell. For in the depths of our greatest despair can be born our greatest hope; in the midst of seeming death can be found the ultimate triumph of life; in the most impenetrable darkness even the smallest candle can cast the most happily received light.

Who could have foretold, that first Easter in Jerusalem, what far-reaching and profound consequences would ensue as the result of the life and death of that obscure peripatetic preacher from Palestine? Who could have foretold that two thousand years later, that that life and death would be commemorated by millions, billions around the world?

The miracle of Easter is made more so, not less, by believing in the full and unambiguous humanity of Jesus, human, just like the rest of us. Had Jesus been a deity, God incarnate sent knowingly to die for our sins, then the ordeal of his crucifixion, unpleasant as it would have been, would have been little more than a passing inconvenience, a temporary discomfort before he returned to heaven. Even I, I think, vain as I am, might be willing to endure such passing unpleasantness if I had a guarantee, signed by God, that I would enjoy the eternal adulation of the people.

But if Jesus was fully and solely human, as I believe him to have been, like us, then therein is the true power and impact of the Easter story. Easter is not about the victory of God over death. It is about the victory of us living fully in the face of death, living fully beyond death. We too, like Jesus, are fully and solely human. We too, like Jesus, are frail, faltering and fearful, yet we, yes, even we, can, like Jesus, become divine in the way in which we come to terms with our humanity, come to terms with our finiteness, even in the face of what seems like defeat and annihilation.

The story of Easter which profoundly moves me tells about a man who had been cruelly betrayed and abandoned by the very people had once professed their ardent discipleship, a man who knew he was soon to die a grisly death, who feared that everything he had believed and hoped for was soon to die with him; and yet who went to his death with a prayer of love in his heart and forgiveness on his lips.

We can never know what will be the impact of our lives, the sum effect we have upon the gradual unfolding of the human enterprise. It is always too soon to tell. We cannot know in our own immediate time frame. Kings and warriors who thought themselves mighty and proud in their own time have disappeared to history without trace. And an impoverished itinerant preacher who never travelled beyond his own immediate country, who wrote no books, who died in humiliating circumstances, is remembered and revered twenty centuries later. We are told that Jesus’ last words were “It is finished”. Even he didn’t know. It was too soon even for him to tell.

Each of us has to come to terms with our own mortality, our own finitude. How to do that has been one of the most penetrating and persistent of all religious questions. Given that we have to die, how are we to live? It is never for us to take full and final measure of our own lives. The miracle, to which the Easter event of Jesus gives abundant testimony, is that death does not negate life; despair does not negate hope.

The challenge which is ever before us, is to believe, and to continue to believe, in spite of all the disasters and ills which might befall us, in spite of our littleness and our frailty, in spite of our humanness, that how we live our lives is of supreme value, how we relate to other people and to the world matters and matters deeply, and that what reconciliations we make with ourselves and with our God affect the entirety of creation beyond our knowing. We can never know the full story of our own lives, because that story continues to unfold long after our deaths. We cannot know, because it is too soon to tell. It is always too soon to tell. But we can have faith, because the time for faithfulness is always now.

by Rev. David Usher

Today marks the official launch of UUCM’s Generosity Campaign.  And what is that, do I hear you ask?  Well, it is two things.  It is the opportunity for you, and you, and you, for each and all of us, together to fund the dream of what we want this congregation to be.  Nobody else is going to do it.  Whatever we want this congregation to be is for us to dream, and then for us to make real.  And, AND, it is the opportunity for us to grow in our spirits.  It is the opportunity for us to experience, deeply, what each and every single religious teacher and tradition has said: that only through being generous can we feel our spirits grow.

Let me say right now, honestly and without dissembling, that I think you are an excellent congregation.  No, really.  You are.  There are many fine things happening here, because there are many fine people to make them happen.  Look around you.  Go on, look around you.  What do you see?  Do you not see people you are glad to know and whose friendship you cherish?  Do you not see people who are doing good things in the world – helping to feed the hungry and homeless, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, speaking out in the name of justice, befriending the stranger, comforting the broken?  Do you not see people of talent, of intelligence, of goodwill, people with a deep yearning for peace and justice in the world and also for a resonant coherence in their own lives?  I hope that is what you see.  It is what I see.

But, Houston, we have a problem.  It is a problem which, I am embarrassed, no, ashamed to admit.  Here is two statistics which I hope will embarrass you as much as they do me.  Across all denominations in this country, we Unitarian Universalists rank second in average income.  And a very close second at that.  Our average per capita income reflects the fact that we are blessed indeed, that we enjoy bounty far beyond our share.  And where do you think we rank according to the percentage we give to our own faith?  That’s right, dead last.  Dead last!  There is a serious non-alignment between the values we espouse, great values, noble values, values which the world is in desperate need of more of, values which we know can and do not only transform lives but save lives; and the resources we give to make those values real.  Rich as we are in gold, why are we so poor in spirit?

For the sake of the world, and for the sake of our own souls, we cannot, must not let that continue.

As excellent as this congregation is, it is seriously under-staffed.  Why?  Because it is seriously under-funded.

We say we want a first class religious education programme for our young people, a programme which includes things like the Our Whole Lives sexuality curriculum, and yet we assign pennies towards it.  Be in no mistake, Our Whole Lives, OWL, saves lives.  It saves the lives of young people wrestling with their sexuality, and for whom OWL is the precious lifeline that reassures them that, whatever their sexual identity, they are loved, they are welcomed, they are valued for who they are.  Whether or not we offer OWL might be the difference between a young person in this town, in this very congregation, choosing to end their life in despair or go on in hope, as it has been the difference for countless others elsewhere.  Truly.  It is wonderful that this congregation is a Welcoming Congregation, deliberately choosing to be open to gays and lesbians and bi-sexuals and the trans-gendered.  But that crucial witness is not a one-off deal.  That witness must be on-going.

We say we want excellent music to enliven our worship, but apart from Jim, our fine pianist, we rely on the efforts of volunteers to make it so.  Music is essential to the worship life of a congregation.  Music with variety, energy, passion, all skilfully executed.  I mean no discourtesy to the efforts or skills of those volunteers from our congregation who do contribute to our musical life, and do so with great talent and to our great appreciation, but if we want a consistently excellent music programme, we have to pay for it.

We say we want to be a force for good in the wider community, but to be so in addition to our own engagement it requires organisation and administration, and yet we engage someone to administer our affairs on just a few hours a week.  We cannot grow to be who we would wish to be without effective and adequate administration.  We say we want excellent ministry, and yet we do not offer a salary which is likely to make that happen.  I am not complaining about my compensation.  I am in the fortunate stage in my life where I am free from most of the financial obligations of raising a family.  But if you want your next settled minister to be as excellent as you want them to be, you must offer a salary commensurate with that excellence.

And all of this is possible, easily within our grasp, if we Unitarian Universalists would only match how we say we value our faith with the resources we have so abundantly at our disposal.  If those in other denominations can show how they value their faith, why cannot we?

I need your help here.  I am going to ask you a series of questions.  To which, I trust, the answer will be Yes.  A resounding Yes!  Let’s practise.  Here is the first question.  Will you respond when I ask you a question?  And the people said Yes!

Do you want this to be a place where the worship inspires your questing minds, soothes your troubled heart, worship which celebrates life in the fullness of its joy and wonder?  And the people said Yes!

Do you want young people to feel a fully integrated part of this congregation, to learn the subtle art of what it means to be a person of faith, to know that their spiritual health and well-being is as important as ours!  And the people said Yes!

Do you want music to make your blood pump, your heart rejoice, your spirit soar?  And the people said Yes!

Do you want to be involved in the work of the world?  This very weekend, hundreds of Unitarian Universalist leaders from throughout the country have gathered in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of that infamous chapter in This country’s history.  Two of those white protesters murdered at Selma, the Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, were Unitarian Universalists.  Selma was fifty years ago.  Selma is today.  Just this past Friday, in Madison, Wisconsin, another unarmed young black man was shot and killed by a police officer.  Tomorrow evening, here at UUCM, we will host an open meeting with our local Police Chief, to help ensure such a thing never happens here.  Do we want Black Lives to Matter?  And the people said Yes!

Not far from here, undocumented immigrants are incarcerated for no reason other than wanting a better life for themselves and their children, an aspiration upon which this very country was founded.  Do we want equality and economic justice for all people? And the people said Yes!

Do we want a planet fit for our children, and our children’s children, to inherit?  Do we want to treat this earth as our precious home?  And the people said Yes!

Do we want our lives to matter?  Do we want congruity between what we say and what we do, do we want to be agents for good in this world, do we want our hearts to be opened in generosity?  And the people said, Yes!

Here’s a challenge I offer you.  Let’s be conservative about this.  Our total attendance today, at both services, will be, say, 100 people.  Let’s suppose we each buy just one fancy coffee a day, at a cost of $2 a time.  What if we each pledged to give up just one coffee a day during the week.  We can still go wild on the weekends.  If we were each to do that, that is $1,000 a week.  $50,000 a year!  This congregation would be transformed, if each of us would give up just one cup of coffee a day which, let’s face it, we don’t really need anyway.  Our physical health would be better.  And so would our spiritual health.

I mentioned in my sermon a month or so ago that I tithe.  I give away to causes which are important to me, 10% of my income.  I give 5% to Unitarian Universalism in its various forms, local, national and international, and 5% to other causes.  I have done so for the past seventeen years, and it is the best thing I do with my money.

On April 19th, I will be making my pledge to the financial well-being of this congregation as part of my continuing attention to my own spiritual well-being.  On that Sunday you are going to be asked to make your pledge to support the work and worship and witness of this, your congregation, in the coming year.  When it comes time for you to make that pledge, I ask you to think about what this place really means to you.  Think about how it has enriched your life, how you want it to enrich the lives of others around you, and others who are yet to walk in the door seeking a religious home as you were once seeking.  Think about the debt we owe to Leal Portis and the others who, twenty one years ago, planted the seeds of this community the fruit of which we now enjoy.  Think about how you match your values with your actions, your words with your deeds.  Think about how you can make your dreams for this congregation a reality.

Will you do that?  Will you?  It is my charge and my challenge to you, that when on April 19th you are asked that question, you, the people, will say Yes!  So may it be.  Amen

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by Rev. David Usher

Sermon from Sunday, December 7, 2014

I wrote this sermon on Thursday. I started the day by walking down the hill to church. There was a brief lull in the rain, and I can always use the exercise. And while I was walking, I was very aware of how totally safe and secure I felt. Yes, of course I could have tripped and hurt myself, it was possible that a meteor might have fallen from the sky and landed on my head, but I was willing to take that chance. I felt safe as I walked down Walsh St to church.

I felt safe for several reasons. I felt safe because this is Grass Valley. A small town, a place of low crime, even though the local Police Department deems it necessary to have an armoured tank to help it enforce law and order against the jay walkers and those who overstay the in-town three hour parking limit. I felt safe because I am a man 6’2” tall and 220 pounds, and therefore less likely to be mugged than if I was physically frail. But, most of all, I felt safe because of my skin colour. If a police patrol car had happened to pass me on Walsh St, it is very unlikely that the officer would have stopped me, very unlikely he would have searched me, very unlikely he would have pulled a gun and shot me, very unlikely he would have got me in a choke hold if I had challenged his right to accost me for no apparent reason. In fact, I have been stopped by the police once and only once. While driving late at night in Adelaide, when in my twenties, I was stopped and breathalysed. In Adelaide the police conduct random breath tests. They set up a station and stop maybe one car in ten. I had not been drinking. I had no reason to be fearful. The episode was courteous and proper. I was sent politely on my way.

Here is the thing. All my life, I have lived in a world made and governed by people like me, for the express benefit of people like me. All of my life, I have lived in a world in which I have enjoyed every privilege and advantage. I am male. I am heterosexual. I have had a strong, healthy and fully-abled body. I was born in a country of affluence and prosperity and political order, fortuitously at a time when, as a strong, healthy, heterosexual man, I was not expected to go to war to kill or be killed to satisfy a politician’s whim. I am intelligent, and have had the benefit of an education at one of the world’s premier universities. And though, during my childhood my parents were financially strapped, I was never hungry, never homeless, never without, and now I am blessed with an abundance far, far beyond my due. And, more than any other factor, I have had the benefit of my skin. All of my life, I have lived where my skin has been a suit of armour, protecting me against prejudice, granting me privilege and access. Yes, I am a foreigner in this land, but nobody knows that until I open my mouth. There have been no barriers placed in my way because of the accidental particularities of who I am. Doors have not been closed to me, they have always been opened.

All of my life, I have been able to breathe. I have been able to breathe the fresh air of privilege and power, and the immediate companions in my life have been breathing that same fresh air with me. All of my friends, the people I know and love best, are middle class, educated, cultured, affluent, propertied, comfortable and content, for the most part share my political leanings, and all of them are white. I do know and love some whose sexual orientations differ from mine, but that is pretty much the limit of my emotional stretch, and even with that I have had a journey to travel which perhaps might be the subject of a sermon at another time. I did not intentionally set out to live in such an exclusive, isolated bubble, but there it is. I have and I do.

I suspect for all of your lives, you also have been able to breathe. You have felt protected, privileged, even pampered by a society made by people like you, for the express benefit of people like you. Perhaps, like me, you have been in a bubble all this time. And what makes living in a bubble so dangerously seductive is not to realise that you are in a bubble. To assume that your limited one-dimensional experience of the world IS the world. Like The Truman Show, not to be able to see beyond one’s own limited perception, and therefore to assume that your perception and experience is the objective reality.

From my lifelong position of privilege and power, living now in the cosy comforts of Grass Valley, I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to be an African American or other oppressed minority in this country, particularly in a city torn by economic hardship.

I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to live in a country whose every message is that you are not worthy.

I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to be afraid every time a patrol car cruises by, every time you walk down the street, every time you encounter an institutionalised bureaucracy, knowing that you will be regarded with fear, suspicion, dismissiveness and scorn.

I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to have your voice so systematically silenced, I, whose role it is in part to speak.

I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to know that you have a strong chance of being incarcerated for long, long periods of time for doing what, if you were white, you might receive a mild slap on the wrist.

I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to be caged by the colour of your skin in a country which touts itself as the land of the free.

I find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to have doors slammed in your face, again and again, to be excluded, to live on the margins, to be told you are unworthy, a menace, an embarrassment.

I find it difficult to imagine the exhaustion, the despair, the frustration and the rage which a lifetime of being treated thus must engender.

I find it difficult to imagine not being able to breathe because of the choke hold society had around my neck, even as the choke hold around Eric Garner’s neck squeezed the life out of him, a choke hold in plain view of a camera, seen now by millions, but not enough to indict a white police officer who was, after all, only murdering an unarmed and innocent black man.

And, perhaps hardest of all, I find it difficult to imagine how for so long I could not have been more aware of my own bubble.

I find it difficult to imagine how I could not have known that, while I could breathe so freely, others could not.

I find it difficult to imagine how, even though I did know, yet I have largely remained silent and self-satisfied.

And because I find it difficult to imagine each and all of those things, I must not presume to judge the actions of those for whom that is their experience.

I must not presume to be the voice of the otherwise voiceless, for whom riot is the only language they have still at their disposal.

I must not presume for others.

I must not presume that I know best.

These past few weeks have borne tragic witness to two outrageous examples of white police officers being granted immunity to kill black men; two outrageous examples of justice not being done; two outrageous examples of the societal message being reinforced yet again.

If you are black, you do not matter.

If you are black, you are not safe.

If you are black, you have no voice.

If you are black, the system which is supposed to protect you will be the very system which will not only deny you protection, but will be that from which you need to be protected. The system that can punish and persecute and even murder you with impunity.

These have been only two such examples, but they have caught the spotlight. In 2012, no fewer than 313 black men, women and children were killed by armed police officers, security personnel or self-appointed white vigilantes, and in all cases their killers have not been convicted. Why? Because black lives don’t matter. Because a black man, by virtue of simply being black, makes us afraid and therefore we are entitled to “stand our ground” and kill him, our instinctive self-generated fear justifies us even if he is unarmed, even if he is guilty of no crime, even if has done nothing other than being himself.

And there have been voices, voices of white men, voices of powerful white men, voices of powerful white men who make the rules, calling for peace, calling for calm, calling for order.

This is not a time for peace. This is a time for disruption.

This not a time for restoring order. This is a time for changing the order.

And, most especially, this is not a time for those who are so used to speaking, and pronouncing, and pontificating to continue to do so. It is a time for those with voices to stop talking and to start listening.

Two thousand years ago, there was something known as Pax Romana. During the Roman Empire, those who lived in Rome had a very clear understanding of what constituted peace. They wanted to live in the secure knowledge that they need fear no external enemy, because the Roman legions which dominated all of Europe would keep such enemies at bay; and that they need fear no internal disruption because the forces of government would quell any civil disobedience. As a free Roman, of the patrician class, you could enjoy your Pax Romana to your heart’s content.

But, your peace was secured only at the price of others’ suffering. Your prosperity was bought with the economic subjugation of other peoples who paid a heavy price to their Roman masters. Your freedom was bought by others living under the yoke of slavery. Your security was bought by others living in fear of invasion and domination. Your reliance on the judicial system was based on the assumption that the system was designed to protect you and your property.

 

The adage says that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I cannot remember who it was, but someone in my living memory said that what really corrupts is not power, but fear of the loss of power. The system of white male supremacy has held sway for a long, long time, and those who fear its decline will inevitably retreat to the bunker and become more and more desperate in their attempts to shore up their crumbling power base.

All of us are beneficiaries of a system loaded totally in our favour. How willing are we to relinquish some of our power and privilege? How willing are we to examine our own prejudices that sees a black man instinctively as something to fear and therefore to put down, marginalise, even to kill if we so choose?

I am not immune. For many years I have had an interest in the judicial/penal system. At various times in my ministry in England, I have been a volunteer visiting prisoners, a volunteer for the probation service, a volunteer assistant prison chaplain, and most recently a magistrate who, in the UK judicial system, is a lay judge. I recall one particular incident. It was my first time as an assistant chaplain in a medium security prison. How many of you have ever been inside a prison? If you are like me, at least initially you enter with some apprehension. Perhaps your mind is full of scenes from movies about what you might expect. Anyway, I entered this prison, I went through all the security checks, and I was led to the chapel where I was going to lead a discussion with about thirty prisoners. I had assumed there would be warders in the room to protect me. Instead, I found myself in a room with no windows, one door, the nearest warder at the end of a long corridor, and thirty prisoners. All of them black. Some of them very large and very formidable looking. I am not proud to admit that little scenarios about my imminent demise instinctively ran through my head.

And what happened? Nothing, of course. My biggest challenge was keeping order in the discussion, so keen were they all to participate. I have led many an adult RE class in my time as a minister, nearly all of them with people like you. Educated, intelligent, cultured, privileged. Let me tell you, no class I have ever led with the likes of you has come close to having the power of that class. I have no idea why those men were in prison, I made a point of never finding out, but for them faith was not something to be politely discussed over coffee and cookies, faith was what kept them whole; it was what kept them human in an environment which did everything it could to strip them of their humanity.

What is there for us to do in the wake of Ferguson, in the wake of Staten Island, in the wake of every time the system perpetuates an injustice which has been centuries in the making? There is much which needs to be done, and it will not all be done overnight. But perhaps, perhaps, one small first step for people like you and me – privileged, powerful and protected as we are – is to realise that the problem is not just the occasional trigger-happy rogue cop; not just a prosecutor who performs with such blatant bias and a judge who allows him to do so; not just anything pertaining to a single instance. The problem is that we are part of a system that allows and condones and even encourages such things.

Quite a few years ago, Plato observed that “Justice will exist only where those who are not affected by injustice are filled with the same amount of indignation as those offended.” And in more recent times, James Baldwin wrote that “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” Well, we do have power. We were born to it. So the question is, Are we willing to remain ignorant by wilfully remaining within our bubble? Are we to be the enemies of justice, or its friends?

I can breathe. You can breathe too. While, all around us, others are suffocating. Others are dying the long, slow death of injustice and oppression. Just as long as I have breath, just as long as you have breath, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about it?

by Rev. David Usher

Sermon from Sunday, November 16, 2014

Looking at Things

Port Augusta is a dusty, dreary town at the top of Spencer’s Gulf, two hundred miles to the north of my home town of Adelaide, South Australia.  It markets itself as the gateway to the north. Gateway to a whole load of nothing would be nearer the truth.  Two thousand miles north to Darwin, two thousand miles west to Perth, and virtually nothing in between.  To this dreary town some years ago there came a fourth rate circus, one charm of which was a sad collection of exotic animals including an ostrich.  This circus was a ragbag affair, but if you have the misfortune to live in Port Augusta, you are grateful for any diversion.  Anyway, one day the ostrich got loose and, with the whiff of freedom in its nostrils, it made off into the scrub.  The circus folk and some of the locals gave vain chase for a while but soon gave up, and a few days later the circus moved on to ply its tawdry trade in the next dusty town and the worthy citizens of Port Augusta returned to their heat and beer induced torpor.

I knew nothing of this story when, a year or so later, I was a nineteen year old jackaroo on a sheep station a hundred miles north of Port Augusta.  Also on that station were two brothers, Ned and Dan, grizzled old bachelors who had spent their lives knocking about in the outback.  Soon after I had arrived at the station, Ned and Dan had gone down to Port Augusta for the weekend.  Six months later, they rang up to say they were ready to be collected.  I was despatched.  I found them, ashen faced and wasted from their six months in the town’s bars and brothels.  They looked and smelled terrible.  Driving back in the summer’s heat, I was leaning out of my open window to catch whatever fresh air I could.  Dan, on the passenger side, was fast asleep.  Ned, in the middle, was awake but enduring cold sweats and groaning quietly.  I had never seen anyone with the DTs, but I figured I was now.  Suddenly, out of the scrub and directly in front of us from right to left, dashed an ostrich.  I almost hit it.  An ostrich!  In Australia.  Emus, yes, aplenty, but an ostrich?  I turned to Ned.  “Did you see that?”  He was shaking, his eyes bulging.  “Thank God you saw it too,” he said finally.

Many things we get to see only fleetingly, out of the corner of our eye, as if through a glass darkly.  We think we have seen it, if only a passing glimpse, but can we be sure?  We turn for a closer look, but it is gone.

While working as a jackaroo on that sheep station, one of the best experiences of my life by the way, I learned to do something remarkable.  I learned how to see. I learned to see things to which I was at first blind.  As a novice musterer, riding around on my motor bike in paddocks of fifty square miles and more, my trusty sheep dog straddling my lap and petrol tank in front of me, I struggled to locate any sheep at all.  I would ride right past them, or even if I was stationary and staring intently at the distance, I could see nothing.  Only with practice did I learn how to see the creamy grey specks on a distant hill, or the tracks in the sandy dirt.  Back then, I had excellent 20/20 vision. Even so, I had to learn how to see things.

What do you fail to see, though it be right in front of you?  What do you need to look at differently?  Lucy M Green’s poem, Looking at Things, talks about how she learned to look at things so that she could something different in them.  Something magical, mysterious, beautiful, bewitching.

Wonder awoke in me

When, a child, I discovered feathers,

Marvelling at their softness, their delicacy of outline,

But still more at the sheen and ripple

Of changing colour, blue, and green and gold,

Gleaming across the peacock feathers I found –

Not the great eye-feathers only,

But tiny ones catching the light, to change as I turned them;

Yet never could all the colours be caught together.

The magic was in the moment, the glimpsing,

The passing enchantment,

Sweeter perhaps for the very swiftness of loss.

 

Shells with their circles of pearl

And hollowed, satin-smooth curves

Had their transient rainbows for my delight,

Shadows of rose and blue and pale sea-green;

Even the milky moonstones

Took on soft colours, like the ring of haze round the moon.

Mystery held them, as the colours were glimpsed, and then vanished.

I treasured the pearly shells, and the feathers,

Even as later in life I found joy

In the blue or gold fire of opals, caught for a moment;

Still more in the rainbow mist

Of a great waterfall, seen from afar,

Incredibly distant along a Norwegian valley;

Or the colours mingling in the flung spray of a wave.

 

It is given to us to see only one aspect in the moment,

One fact of the prism,

One colour of the spectrum.

That is enough of joy, but also enough of blindness

To bring humility, and kindle in us faith

That one day we may see life in its fullness

In the constant light of eternity.

Then may we know the whole of love blended in beauty,

Even as here on earth we see, for a passing moment only,

The rainbow with every colour alight in joy.

When you look at the world, what do you see?  Do you see loveliness and joy, radiance and delight?  Or do you see misery and pain, suffering and despair?  Beauty or boredom?  Both are there.  Which you see depends on the eyes with which you are looking; the openness of your heart; the willingness of your mind to engage; your imagination to be transfixed.

Whether we are looking for sheep in the dusty outback, or at the sheen of a peacock’s tail feather, we can learn to see that which we are seeking, however fleeting it may be.  Faith is learning to see.  We can learn to discern beauty amidst the drab, to discover hope amidst the gloom, to see cause for courage when our hearts might otherwise falter.  Faith is learning to see, to see even that which is fleeting, ephemeral, and darkly through a glass.  Even that which is not there, but which our imaginations make real.  And in seeing beauty, we are made beautiful.  In seeing hope, we are made hopeful.  The world reflects who we are.  Faith is how we see the world, it is how we see our place within the world.

What do you see?  What do you see?

What do you see when you look at Unitarian Universalism?  I confess that sometimes my eyes grow dim from having had it before me all my days.  There are days when I see only its faults and failings, the pettiness of our squabbles about things which really do not matter, when meanwhile there is a hurting world out there which needs us to be our best selves, not our worst.  I grow complacent in my familiarity with the faith which has always been there for me.  But sometimes I am glad and grateful to have the cool embers of my complacency shaken when I encounter someone who has just discovered Unitarian Universalism for the first time and who is on fire because of it.

Like the time six years ago when I was part of the faculty for a leadership conference sponsored by The International Council of Unitarians & Universalists, held in Kenya for new Unitarians from that country and from Uganda, Burundi and Congo Brazzaville.  Yes, you heard correctly.  Congo Brazzaville, a place less likely it is difficult to imagine, but where it took root because of a chance conversation in a hotel bar.  The Africans at that conference really were on fire, confident that once others heard this liberating message they too would embrace it; and convinced that it was their privilege and their duty to do all they could to let others hear that message.  Not only that, though they each were individually poor, barely able to keep themselves, they were committing a significant percentage of their meagre resources to those who had even less than themselves.  It was absolutely central to their understanding of what it means to be a Unitarian that they had to do the work of social justice, giving up to half of their income to it.  I was embarrassed, no, I was ashamed at the realisation that my eyes had forgotten to see what had been right in front of me all the time.

This faith is precious, a pearl of great price, yet it is also precarious if we fail to perceive and appreciate its preciousness, not just for ourselves but for as many others as possible.

And what is that faith?  What is the faith that has the power to transform lives, giving them meaning and value amidst the sometime sea of secular senselessness?  What is the faith that has sustained me through the many years of my bounty and particularly last year when I was given a diagnosis which rudely and unexpectedly confronted me with my own mortality, when I was challenged to take stock of my life and give thanks for it?  I mean, really give thanks for it.

It is not a faith in the weary outdated mantra of Freedom, Reason and Tolerance.  Perhaps those words resonated and inspired in previous times, but they are weak virtues today.  Freedom?  Freedom from what?  Have you been persecuted recently for daring to believe according to your own conscience?  Been to any good heretic burnings lately?  Reason?  By all means let us not be unreasonable, but are we creatures of the mind only?  Have we no heart, no passion, no enthusiasm?  Are we no better than a philosophical debating society?  Are we not meant to engage the whole person?  And Tolerance?  What a hollow word, making a virtue of what is usually mere indifference.  No, if we continue to proclaim Freedom, Reason and Tolerance as our banner cry, we should not be surprised that the world heaves a weary sigh in reply.

I offer you a new Unitarian Trinity.  Personal Authenticity.  Religious Community.  And Social Agency.

What we offer is the opportunity for personal authenticity in matters or faith.  At whichever wells we draw our spiritual water, whichever teachers we learn from and whichever path we follow, we offer the gift of being true to our own deepest selves, fearing not to doubt or to believe.  I am occasionally surprised after I have preached a sermon to be congratulated on my courage for having preached as I have.  I have never, in my thirty plus years of ministry, had to summon courage before preaching a sermon, because interpreting life as I understand it, in love and humility, is what as a Unitarian minister I have been called to do.  I might incur the displeasure or disapproval of individual congregants, but I need not fear censure from higher authorities for transgressing doctrinal instruction.  And you in the pew, you need not acquiesce meekly to my words.  Though, I can tell you, I have had some congregants in my time for whom some meek acquiescence would have been no bad thing.

We offer Religious Community.  I know it is the fashion today for people to opine that they are spiritual but not religious.  If you knew the number of times I have heard that, usually from people who have not had a religious thought since their pet hamster died.  What it usually means, from what I can tell, is that they have an occasional vague fuzzy feeling, but really can’t be bothered doing anything about it.  Unless you happen to be truly exceptional, and, I’ll wager none of you are, it is a nonsense to claim being spiritual without being religious because being spiritual requires work, practice, the repetition of discipline.  Being spiritual draws you to being religious.  That is what religious community is.  The place and the people in which and with whom to practise faith.  The genius of our religious community is it is where you are expected to be true to yourself, but to which you commit your energy, your time and your money as a real expression of your personal authentic faith.

And we offer Social Agency.  How lazy and self-serving we have become by telling ourselves that Unitarian Universalism is all about finding your own truth and nothing more.  If the world is not a better place because of your faith, what value that faith?  Yes, we are permitted, encouraged, required to find our own truth.  But we are also required to do something about it.  Last week my story was an updated version of The Good Samaritan.  Loving your God, and loving your neighbour.  Above the entrance of many Unitarian churches in the UK, and perhaps in the US also, are the words “Dedicated to the worship of God and the service of man.”  We might now quibble about the niceties of language, but the essential sentiments remain true.  We gather to be in communion with that which is divine, and the service of humanity.  To love God and our neighbour.  You don’t get one without the other.  It’s not an either/or; it is a both/and.

That is a meaningful and relevant new trinity of our faith for the present day.  Personal authenticity.  Religious Community.  Social Agency.  Through them we are connected to that which is greater than our own small selves, sustained by that which abides even as we might perish, lifted up when otherwise we might remain fallen.  It is certainly the faith that held true for me in my own dark hours.  They say there are no atheists in planes that are going down.  I thought my plane might have been going down, but more than anything, I remained joyful that I had known what it is to fly.

Having faith is not about what you believe.  Having faith is about how you see the world.  Is the world mere emptiness, in spite of all there is of beauty and charm and miracle and wonder and delight?  Or it the world precious, in spite of all there is of pain and anguish and bitterness and ugliness?  Having faith is about how you see the world.

It is given to us to see only one aspect in the moment,

One fact of the prism,

One colour of the spectrum.

That is enough of joy, but also enough of blindness

To bring humility, and kindle in us faith

That one day we may see life in its fullness

In the constant light of eternity.

Then may we know the whole of love blended in beauty,

Even as here on earth we see, for a passing moment only,

The rainbow with every colour alight in joy.

 

 

by Rev. David Usher

Sermon from Sunday, November 9, 2014

Who was Jesus?  What really do we know about him?  Strip away everything that has been claimed about him, all of it by people who never met him and all of it articles of faith rather than statements of fact, and what do we know for sure?  Nothing.  There is virtually nothing we know for sure about the life of Jesus.  Can there ever have been a person in human history about whom so little is known as fact, and yet about whom so much has been claimed as faith?

There are those who say that, given that we know so little, it is more reasonable to suppose that actually he never existed at all, that he is the product of fancy and fabrication by those who came along a long time later and who had their own particular agenda to promote.  That requires more of a leap of denial rather than any leap of faith in believing in the historical fact that there was such a person as Jesus, about whom we know so little.

All four of the gospels which were included in the Christian canon, a decision made for theological and political reasons several hundred years after Jesus is believed to have lived, by bishops and other churchmen who wanted to present a very particular point of view, all four of them were written a long time after Jesus had died.  Scholars agree that Mark was the first to be written, probably around the year 65 CE, a generation later.  It is believed that Matthew and Luke were probably written about the same time as each other, perhaps around 90 CE.  And John?  John is not like the other three, it is more a sermon than a gospel, and most likely written around 120 CE.  That is almost a century after Jesus had lived and taught.

There is only one other reference to Jesus.  The historian Josephus makes a passing reference to someone who most likely was Jesus, but as Jesus was a common name, who can say?  In any case, Josephus says little more than that there was such a fellow teaching and preaching and causing trouble. And that is it.  Nothing else.

Now, imagine this.  Imagine an event that happened a hundred years ago.  There is such an event the centenary of which we will soon be observing – the beginning of the first world war.  Now, at least we know that that did actually happen, but suppose your great, great grandfather was a soldier in that war.  And when he returned from the trenches of Flanders and France, he told his friends about some of his experiences in that horror.  He never wrote anything down.  He told his stories over a pint, and not as a chronological record of events but as episodes, isolated incidents, things he recalled, images which had seared themselves into his memory.  And then when his friends were having a pint with others, those others recounted what they had heard, and they then told their friends, and so it went on.  Nobody ever wrote anything down until, say, the nineteen sixties when someone had the bright idea of assembling these stories and anecdotes and memories into some kind of coherent narrative.  They had this bright idea because they had decided that your great, great grandfather must have been not just a soldier but a hero to have done what he had done.  Fought selflessly for a cause greater than himself.  Endured terrible hardship and privation.  Been willing to sacrifice his own life that others might live and live better than they might have done otherwise.  The motivation to write all this down was sparked not by the desire to tell a story objectively and factually, but to portray someone in a particular way.  As such, certain things are highlighted, others ignored.  The ordering of events would have a structure, a direction, a theme to convey your great, great grandfather as a real hero.

And as for dialogue, do you suppose that anything which was written down as part of this story, written fifty or more years after they had been said, and having been orally relayed through numerous re-tellings, do you suppose that any of the dialogue would be word-perfect transcripts of what was actually said.  Could any of you write down exactly what you said in a conversation even yesterday, let alone what someone else had said a hundred years ago and which you had never directly heard?

And yet, here we have four gospels, and precious little else, which tell us all we can know about Jesus and who he was, what he taught, how he lived and how he died.  All of them written long after Jesus had died, by people who had never met him, who were relying on stories passed down orally through the decades, and who had no intention of writing a factual account about Jesus but were writing a powerful polemic to persuade people that Jesus had in fact been not a normal person, not even a hero, but God!

During the nineteenth century, there grew a fashion amongst Biblical scholars, German scholars particularly, to attempt to write a Life of Jesus. Using all four gospels they tried to mesh the various stories and episodes reported therein into a coherent biography of Jesus life, charting his course from birth to childhood to his adult ministry and finally his death.  Many attempted it, with varying degrees of plausibility, until at the end of the century Albert Schweitzer wrote a compelling book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, in which having reviewed all of these attempts he concluded, “Guys, give it up.  It is impossible.  The historical Jesus is lost to us.  Unless some new evidence comes up, we can never know.  Jesus now is a man of faith, not fact.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Biblical criticism, again led by German theologians, adopted a more nuanced approach to the Bible.  Instead of assuming that the Bible had somehow fallen from the sky, the complete and unchallengeable word of God miraculously written in our native tongue and every word true, these scholars looked at the historical and social contexts, they analysed the stories as literature, written by men who had their own agendas.  In more recent years there has been The Jesus Seminar, in which scholars have assessed each of the reported sayings of Jesus and speculated on their likely authenticity.

And, for all of that scholarship and as welcome and as helpful as it is, Jesus remains a figure of faith, and what is most important is not how much of the stories and sayings are “true”, but how we relate to them.  How do they impact and influence us in our attempts, today, to be faithful.

In other words, the real question is not who was Jesus in real life two thousand years ago, but who Jesus is in your life now.  Who is Jesus to you?

Given that the only way to discover who Jesus might be in your life is to be found in the gospels, and given all the doubts and uncertainties regarding the veracity and accuracy of those scant sources, I have to say that I marvel at the answers some people discover for themselves.  Since coming to the States I have been reintroduced to the phenomenon of TV evangelists.  There is no enema more powerful.  And Christian rock, so saccharine it is guaranteed to induce diabetic shock.  I have to wonder, are they reading the same sources that I am?  Or are they overlaying so much of their own cultural stuff, their need to use Jesus for their own purposes, that they have lost all sight of what lies in the texts.  Or perhaps it is I who is guilty of projecting my own cultural and religious stuff onto Jesus.  Who knows?  Perhaps each and all of us read into the scriptures what we want to read, and conveniently ignore the rest.

But, if I try to peel away the accretions of the millennia and everything which has been said and claimed about Jesus, though I choose not to call myself a Christian, I still find him to be a compelling figure, more compelling for me than any other spiritual teacher.  Conservative Christians often use the acronym, WWJD.  What would Jesus do?

It is a question I find helpful.  If I want to learn the challenging spiritual art of forgiveness, I turn to his example.

If I want to understand the nature of the radical inclusivity of love, who better to turn to?  If I want an example of faithfulness even unto death, is there a more powerful example?

This is the Jesus who stands out for me and who speaks to me.

He is a man of conviction and courage.  He is not afraid to speak his truth, usually in love but sometimes in anger, regardless of how well others might receive his words and regardless of the consequences to himself.

He is a man of compassion, who is not bothered with imposed religious conventions when they mask the personal realities in a situation.  He wants to be in real relationship with his God and how that God is manifest in the world and in people’s lives, not with rules and forms and ritualised pieties.

He is a man who cares not for distinctions between men and women, Jew and Gentile, native and foreigner, gay and straight.  The next time you encounter a Christian using their scripture based faith to justify the violence and virulence of their hatred towards gays, tell them that you agree with everything Jesus said condemning homosexuality.  Which, you guessed it, is precisely nothing.  Indeed, in John’s gospel there are frequent references to him “lying down with the disciple he loved” which it is not unreasonable to suppose might be allusions to a same-sex relationship.  There is only one thing which Jesus repeatedly condemns and warns against.  Money.  Hands up those of you with a mortgage, or a bank account, or a pension plan, or even two coats when others have none.  Hands up if you would be unwilling to give it all away.  Not some, but all of it.  Come on, hands up.  Well, you are all going to burn.  But don’t worry.  I will be turning to toast right alongside of you.

He is a man who is counter to the establishment but who identifies himself with what he is for rather than what he is against, whose message is of inclusive love rather than excluding hate.

He is a man who is serene in the face of danger, who behaves with honour when in the company of rogues, who speaks his truth even when to do so invites ridicule or worse.

He is a man, a human in whose life shines the light of the divine.  A man no more God than you or me, but who, more than you or me, was aware of and in touch with the divinity within him even as we might learn to be aware of and in touch with the divinity within us.  He was awake to his divinity, while most of us slumber.

Most of what the church teaches about Jesus I find positively unhelpful, especially all the injunctions to worship him as God.  He wanted people to worship God, not him.  Frequently in the gospels he implicitly and explicitly chastises those who tried to deify him.  Don’t worship me, worship God!

I do not always find it easy to penetrate many of the teachings of mainstream Christian churches, they are often a barrier through which I cannot pass.  But when I do pass through that barrier, I find a man whose clarity of voice speaks directly to my heart and spirit.  I do not call myself a Christian, because I cannot accept what the Christian church demands in belief about Jesus, namely that it is through him and him alone that the way of wholeness is to be found because he was God incarnate who died exclusively for our sins of those who profess belief in him.  Others are able to believe that.  I am not.  I find those beliefs not only intellectual untenable but ethically indefensible and counter to my experience of the world in which people of different faiths and of none are amongst the finest exemplars of humanity.  The beliefs about Jesus having been God I dismiss.  But I am happy to say that in the person of Jesus, I find a man whose spiritual path I would follow to my great spiritual benefit.  What would Jesus do?  I would hope I might do the same.

And you?  Who is your Jesus?

 

by Rev. David Usher

For a while when I was in the UK, I belonged to an organisation called Modem, a clever acronym standing for Management and Organisational Development in Ministry. The purpose of this outfit was to bring the skills of management into closer harmony with the mission of ministry, and vice versa, to bring the spirit of ministry and faith into the workplace. I am interested in such things, and I learned some interesting and useful things.

Some of those things were some fairly basic principles of good self-management, like how to manage your time efficiently. Things like – handle a piece of paper only once. Sounds straight forward, I know, but when some while ago I heard that for the first time, it was a revelation to me. Up until then my modus operandi was to handle it a dozen times before I would finally deal with it. If I received a letter to which I had to write an answer, first I would read the letter, then put it aside to answer later. Then I would pick it up several times as I stumbled across it amidst the litter on my desk, and maybe read it again each time. When I couldn’t put it off any longer, I would finally write my reply, but of course I would have forgotten the content of the original letter by then so I would have to read it again. Then it would lie around on my desk for another week or so, getting in my way, covering the other piece of paper I was looking for, before I would file it away. In such a way could a great many hours be happily wasted, keeping me from doing anything productive. But being told to handle a piece of paper just once opened a door for me to become much more efficient in my administrative abilities.

Then there is filing. Or rather, then there might be filing. I know that there are ministers who have amazing filing systems. Not just for committee minutes and that kind of thing. But sermons, for example. And sermon illustrations. There are ministers, I am reliably informed, who, if you mention a theme to them, can go to their filing system and pull out their little index card, or in these modern times go to their computer file, on which will be written every reference to that theme they have ever made in forty years of preaching. I wish I could do that. Instead, J don’t know how  many wonderful readings or references I have come across and used in my twenty years of preaching, and I have no idea where to find them again.

And lists. Let’s not forget lists. I love making lists. Are you a list maker as well? I come into the office on a Monday morning, and I make a list of the things I need to do that week. I come into the office on other mornings, and I make a list of the things I need to do that day. Letters to write, services to prepare, meetings to prepare for, phone calls to make, people to visit. Lots of chores manage to appear on successive lists – I don’t always get them done on the day I initially think I will – but at least they have been on my list. And it really is quite satisfying to cross something off the list. There are days when I have a page full of things to do, and at the end of the day every single one of them has been crossed out, and I go home thinking I have achieved something that day. But my capacity for self-deception with lists is remarkable. I make my list, and then I work steadily through it, crossing off each thing done as I go. But then I will do something not on the list. So, after I have done it, what do I do? I write it down on the list so that I can have the satisfaction of crossing it off again.

So, anyway, my brief association with MODEM was very useful, very helpful, and believe me, I can always use some more assistance in learning the art of efficient management and administration. There is virtue in good management. There is no inherent virtue in mismanagement. There are ministers who scorn the very idea of using the words ministry and management in the same sentence. Not me. I would be glad to be able to do some things better. And do more things in less time.

But, two things I do know. The way to salvation is not through an efficiency drive. And being busy is not the same as accomplishing something worthwhile.

The Managing Director of a large company was given a ticket to a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, but when he found he could not go, he gave the ticket to his Vice President for Operations. The next morning he asked his VP how he had enjoyed the performance. Instead of getting a few observations about the symphony in general, and the experience of being there, the VP handed him a formal memo. Which read as follows.

Time and Motion Study of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony For considerable periods, the four oboe players had nothing to do. Their number should be reduced, and their work spread over the whole orchestra, avoiding peaks of
inactivity.

All 12 violins were playing identical notes with identical motions. This seems an unnecessary duplication, and the staff of this section should be drastically cut, with consequent substantial savings. If volume of sound is really required, this could be accomplished with the use of an amplifier.

Much effort was involved in playing the 16th notes. This appears to be an excessive refinement, since most hearers are unable to distinguish such rapid playing. It is recommended that all notes be rounded up to the nearest 8th note. If this were done it would be possible to use amateur musicians instead of experienced and expensive professionals.

No useful purpose is served by repeating with horns the passage that has already been handled by the strings. If all such redundancies were eliminated, the concert could be reduced from two hours to twenty minutes, with great savings in salaries and overhead.

The symphony had two movements. If Mr Schubert didn’t achieve his musical goals by the end of the first movement, then he should have stopped there. The second movement is unnecessary and should be cut.

In the light of the above, one can only conclude that had Mr Schubert given attention to these matters, he probably would have had time to finish the symphony.

Well, maybe he would have, but would anyone have wanted to listen to it?

The thing of course, is this. Just as music is much more than the efficient arrangement of sounds, so living well, being present to the moment, is much more than the efficient management of time. As is living faithfully, living spiritually, living as if life mattered far more than wasting our powers through getting and spending.

Isn’t it curious? There is one thing I never put on my daily or weekly list of things to do. I never write – Do nothing. Yet, often, that is the most important thing I should be doing. Nothing.

Bill Bryson has become a very popular writer with his eccentric mix of travel and witty observation. In one of his books, I forget which one (see, if! had written it down and put it on an index card, I could have told you the title ofthe book, the page number, everything) in this book Bryson tells of an incident which happened once to him. He was living in Hanover, New Hamsphire. He had abandoned Britain where he had lived for twenty years to return to his native land, and had chosen Hanover as a suitable place to hang his hat. A great choice. Hanover is a delightful New England town, home of Dartmouth College.  Anyway, late one afternoon, he was beavering away at his computer, furiously writing something or other which he should have sent off days before. He was feeling oppressed by a deadline. His son called to him to come outside a play catch.

I can’t, I’m busy.

Come on, Dad.

I can’t, I have to finish this piece.
Aw, gee, Dad, come on.

Those of you who have been a parent, or for that matter a child, will recognise the exchange immediately. For some reason, even though he really did have to meet that deadline, Bryson relented.

OK, he called back.

And he and his son went outside for an hour of playing catch. Which they did. No big deal. It was something he had done a hundred times before with his son. Except that this time it was a big deal. It was a gorgeous, crisp late afternoon, with the brilliant sunlight filtering at a sharp angle through the dazzling hues of the New England foliage. The kind of New England autumn day which takes your breath away. And there he was, playing
catch with his son, doing what American Dads have done for generations, the simple rhythmic bonding of throwing and catching a baseball to and fro.

And Bryson was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with the beauty of it, the wonder of it, the appreciation for the miracle of being alive and so blessed, that there he was amidst the glory of creation, doing something elemental with his child. It was an afternoon to savour in the memory for a lifetime, so perfect was it, so vivid to all his senses, and most especially to his sense of joy.

But, you know what, says Bryson? I nearly missed it. I nearly missed it by thinking that hunching over my word processor was more important. Words that I, and anybody who might read them, would soon forgot, compared with that magical moment with my son which I will never forget. I was almost too busy making a living to be aware that I was alive.

If you never look up, how are you going to see the sunsets? If you never stop, how are you going to smell the daisies? If you never give thanks, how are you going to know how much you have to give thanks for?

There is no such thing as being too busy to stop. Usually it is not that you are too busy to stop. It is, more likely, that you have forgotten how. Or are afraid of the stillness. Saying no to the rush, stepping off the carousel on which everyone else is mindlessly going around and around, takes a lot more courage and self-confidence than might be imagined.

There is the story of the priest who prayed faithfully for an hour every morning. That hour or prayer in the morning, he explained, put him into the right frame of mind for the rest of the day. Except, of course, when he had a particularly busy and frantic day ahead of him and he didn’t have time. Then he did not begin by praying for an hour. He began by praying for two hours.

You don’t need me to tell you how busy your life is, you don’t need me to recite all the things you have to do, the many things on your daily list, you don’t need me to tell you how frantic it all can be, how the joy of it can drain away in the weariness of work to be done. But remember, the life of the spirit is not subject to time and motion study experts. It is often not the more you do, but the less you do, which is important.

This is not an advocacy for laziness. But it is a reminder that we neglect our spirits at our peril, and we cannot tend our spirits if our shoulder is always to the harness. So don’t just do something, sit there. Waste time. It might be the best thing you can do with it. But here is a question. Suppose the next time I write down my list of things to do, I put on it, Do nothing. How much nothing will I have to do before I am allowed to cross it off?