First Parish of Watertown

Sermon

Our lives seem to periodically swirl out of our control!
We lose our jobs, experience accidents, are victimized by others.
Our children suffer unfair and life threatening diseases or setbacks.
Our parents physically decline or die, leaving us to suffer alone.
We suffer unfair and life threatening diseases and adversities!
Our loved ones hurt us or leave us and we are left utterly bereft.
How can such a world be considered just or good or even fair?
How can we maintain stability, rationality, and a sense of peace
In the midst of all of this chaos that appears to be our lot in life?

One of the defining scientific discoveries of the late 20th Century was the emerging understanding of the interplay between chaos and complexity in the very nature and structure of the universe.
The bad news is we can’t escape chaos no matter how we try,
it is in the very fabric of reality, what separates life from non-life.
The good news is we can maintain our balance within this chaos.
For those of us who weren’t following the scientific developments, the book Jurassic Park introduced Chaos theory to us dramatically.
Foolish attempts to be the creator of order lead inevitably to chaos!

The Santa Fe Institute was at the core of this work, beginning in the 1980’s by trying to accurately predict the weather and creating theories of chaos and complexity that illuminate our life and death.
Chaos emerges wherever we try to artificially interject order. Yet the universe doesn’t totally break down (as we fear it will).
New complexity emerges spontaneously out of the chaos, and we must be open to perceiving and welcoming this new complexity.
We are not in control of our lives, too much order equals boredom and death; too much chaos means disruption, disintegration, death. We live in the interplay between order and chaos. We live our lives on the chaotic edge, where growth and freedom emerge.

Many of you know that I spent the 1980’s as a young executive, desperately trying to create order from the chaotic growth of young companies. We built great biotechnology companies, but only by letting go of even the illusion of control over their success.
So I offer five lessons this morning on maintaining chaotic balance lessons learned the hard way in the crucible of success and failure.
The first lesson is to accept chaos as intrinsic to our life, it is reality, accepting this reality frees us to truly live into our lives.
Our houses need repair, yards need tending, old cars break down. Marriages need renewal, children need tending, old relationships break down. We all experience deaths and renewal in our lives. Rejecting death from our life is like trying to grasp the whirlwind.
However if we let go, we can live happily in the eye of the storm.

The theologian Catherine Keller spoke last year at GA about her “theology of becoming” which she names the Face of the Deep.
She reminds us that even a child knows how to comfort himself by singing softly in the dark, finding a calm center in the heart of chaos. She writes: “Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginning of order to chaos.” We live in this flux.
We are not the proper center of our lives, grounding lies elsewhere.
So the second lesson is that we must find our grounding center, order in the midst of chaos. This is why all twelve step programs begin by placing ultimate control and meaning outside ourselves.
Creative serendipity allows new order to emerge when we let go.
We are not in control but must learn the rhythm of this dance.

Who knows this chaos better than a 13 year old coming of age?
My daughter Sarah, as she entered her teenage years, introduced me to certain Coming of Age movies that speak to this challenge.
Deep heartfelt movies like Dirty Dancing or Save the Last Dance.
In each of these deeply theological movies the protagonist, always a young woman emerging into her life, learns to dance to fully live.
The life provided by her parents becomes restrictive and boring. Or in Save the Last Dance her mother dies tragically in an accident. Life loses its meaning and importance until a dangerous young male antagonist teaches her how to let go and dance into her life.
In Dirty Dancing, Jennifer Grey embodies this human longing for growth and freedom, for learning to engage the chaos and live life.
She wants to come into the fullness and joy her life can embody.
Patrick Swayze here is an incarnation of the divine, a little scary, and yet exciting, luring her into the dance in the midst of chaos.
There is something wild and dangerous at the heart of reality, and we must learn to trust the wildness in order to dance through life. Patrick Swayze as your incarnation of the divine, somewhat dangerous, but luring you into greater joy and your emerging self.
In a sense we all are this young woman, emerging into the fullness of our lives; and we all are this young man, true incarnations of the divine in each others lives, so we teach each other how to dance.
Yet a key aspect of learning to dance is that she doesn’t get to lead,
we must learn to trust and to follow our partner’s lead in the dance.
And this is truly the nature of our lives, we do not get to lead, but if we learn to respond and match the rhythms, we can indeed dance!

Which brings us to poor Job; God’s whipping boy of biblical fame.
When God, through his agent Satan, robs Job of his wealth, his family, his health and his reputation, Job curses his own life, and ultimately challenges the very nature of God and all of creation.
The book of Job is a poem of moral outrage at this chaotic life.
This God that Job confronts is a particularly cranky incarnation, yet God cannot resist responding to Job out of the whirlwind.
“Where were you when I planned the earth?... Unleash your savage justice. Cut down the rich and the mighty. Make the proud man grovel. Pluck the wicked from their perch. Push them into the grave. Throw them, screaming, to hell. Then I will admit that your own strength can save you.” But of course our own strength cannot do any of these things, we are at the mercy of life’s chaos.
We don’t get to choose our life experiences, to lead the dance, but can only learn how to follow the lead of our antagonists with flair.
When we have the courage to define our relationships, we define our lives, and this is the third lesson for dealing with the chaos.
Catherine Keller calls this “the courage of our connections”.
By being in community we collectively respond to the trials of life.
We can learn together how to follow the dance in our unique way.
Job experiences great pain: material, physical and spiritual.
Few of us will suffer the trials of Job, thank God, yet each of us will know pain: some of it material, some physical, some spiritual.
Job is ultimately vulnerable because he has lost his family and friends, yet he finds the courage within to challenge life’s injustice.
Our families and friends represent our best defense against despair.
For most of us, it is our family and community connections
that provide us with a context to deal successfully with the chaos.
These connections are often our calm center in the heart of chaos.

The fourth lesson is learning how to let go and trust the process.
Richard Gilbert captures this in his story about going over the falls.
He writes: “there is something to be said for letting go, for risking the uncertain, for putting oneself in strong life currents with a mixture of faith and fear. Unknown pools sustain us, buoy us;
Forgotten instincts stretch our spirits to the surface
where the air is clear and the water cold and refreshing.”
I too have lived this mixture of faith and fear, and lived to tell of it.
When my sister Pat married, it was to a young man who lived up on the coast of Maine. He taught us how to harvest fresh mussels from the ocean tide pools, and how to leap from the cliffs along the shore. His favorite diving spot was from a cliff that seemed ten stories above the sea and plunged into the deep dark ocean depths.
He encouraged us to try it and showed us how with a death defying plunge hurling himself out from the rocks into the deep sea below.

As a risk taker of course I had to try it along with my siblings.
I remember my heart racing as I climbed the ascent, my stomach churning as I looked into the abyss, and that combination of joy and fear as I threw myself out into the air and plunged to the sea.
Upon struggling back to the surface, I swam to shore and climbed back up to plunge once again. With repeated experience it became clear that the exhilaration came from letting go and simply falling.
Life is like that, to enjoy the chaos we must learn how to let go,
to plunge into each experience with every fiber of our being.
Though I must confess, as much as I enjoyed the experience of those dives into the sea, I shredded the underside of my toes from an instinctive effort to claw onto the rock just as I leaped into the void. At some level, I continued to fear falling and the rocks below, yet letting go is necessary to experiencing this life’s dance.

In February, Loretta and I went to Tahiti to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. One night on Moorea, our hotel offered a pool side demonstration of Tahitian song and dance and I snared us front row seats. About two thirds of the way through their performance, the lead dancer approached us and invited me to join her on the dance floor. Now this may not be a big thing for you, but for this middle aged white guy this was a plunge into the unknown. I never guessed I would dance the Tahitian hula before the assembled hotel guests but she guided me through it. Loretta later pointed out that as a young executive 25 years ago, I would have died before you would have convinced me to risk the dance floor in such a public fashion. Yet there is a certain joy and exhilaration that comes from letting go and following your partner in the dance. We do not get to be the lead but we can dance.

So this is the fifth and final lesson: when our lives swirl beyond control, we lose even the illusion of control, when we don’t get to lead but only to follow as well as we can the gentle or tumultuous dance that represents our very lives; then let it be a joyous dance. Let us engage fully with life and enjoy where the chaos takes us! Like the flaming chalice, symbol of our faith, we flame anew.
We can face the God of the whirlwind and come away laughing. Trust the process. Creative serendipity, which some call divine, will somehow emerge and guide our steps so we can truly dance.
Chaos engaged leads inevitably to new complexity and new life, new opportunities for joy, for growth, for relationships in our life.
It will not always be easy, nor pleasant, or even free of pain, but let it be a dance, not necessarily the Tahitian hula, but what it will be for each of us to enjoy and fully engage with our lives. Amen.

Opening Words - from The Sacred Journey - Frederick Buechner

God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say. Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of our years, but often it takes many years and many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is. Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus as alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing.

---

Sermon

My sermon title today is taken from a children¹s book. It is the story of a beaver who lived alone and was quite lonely because he had no friends. One day he sat next to a pond, and was crying as he thought about his life. But he stopped crying immediately when the boo hoo he uttered was followed by a voice from across the pond which also sounded strangely like, "boo hoo." After they exchanged hellos, the voice from the other side responded to little beaver¹s confession that he was alone and needed a friend with the exact same dilemma. The beaver decided to go in search of this other animal who was sad and needed a companion. Slowly the beaver paddled around the pond searching for the certain someone who needed a friend. First, he found a duck who said he was not the voice, but also confessed that he needed a friend. He joined the beaver. Next they found an otter who was not the voice, but like the duck needed a friend. Next they met a turtle who again was not the crying voice, but joined their group of new friends. Finally they met an old beaver who in his wisdom said the voice was the Echo. He said the Echo was sad because the beaver was sad; and, in fact, always reflects what you feel. The little beaver still wanted to know how he could find the echo, and be his friend because neither of them had any friends. The beaver soon found he was mistaken when all his new friends spoke up. He was so happy he shouted, "I have lots of friends now." And the voice across the pond shouted back, "I have lots of friends, now!"

Our story based on the book Little Beaver and the Echo has a simple theme; when we meet and listen to others we find they are lonely and in need of friends, in need of people who will hear what they have to say. Even though it started with an echo, beaver listened to all the animals, and heard their need for emotional attachments. We all want someone to tell our story to. We want to tell someone what we have discovered. We want to be accepted by others for all we are and yearn to be. It seems we feel better about ourselves, and develop our minds for thinking and our hearts for caring to the fullest extent when we have been listened to. We develop and flower as people because someone, often someone we love, took the time and effort to listen to us. I have been thinking about this a good deal in the context of education. As a child, I rejected the Bible as science when my Sunday School teacher refused to listen to me tell her about my discoveries about dinosaurs. All fabrications she told me. She would tell me what I needed to know. I got the message that she would not listen to me.

I became a Unitarian Universalist because I found people in other faith communities would not listen to my discoveries or my questions. They would tell or drill their perceived truths into me. Bronson Alcott, the great Transcendentalist educator was a pioneer in listening to children in the classroom. He said we must teach through the give and take of conversation, and that people will primarily learn through their own experiences. There were two things Alcott believed. First, he said we think too lowly of human nature and we do not trust that children can perceive the truth or tell the truth. Second, he believed that children are less defiled in regards to perceiving divinity in the world. As a result he published a record of conversation on the Gospels, believing that children might have fresher, more astute perceptions about Jesus than their elders. In my class on Transcendentalism three weeks ago, I characterized conversations as one of the four spiritual disciplines of the Transcendentalists , along with journal keeping, reading and reflecting, and walking.

It is often said that we are a wordy people who like to talk, but do we listen? Margaret Fuller used what she had learned with Alcott to bring together groups of women in her famous Conversations. For the first time in history women were free to articulate their need to be heard as people. Fuller encouraged these women to express their own thoughts and beliefs without having them censored by the culture or by men. Their lives, their experiences, and their minds were considered important and needed to be expressed for their own development, and not as a reflection of someone else's.

Fuller and Alcott were not the only ones who believed we needed to develop a faith whereby we listened to everyone, including those like women and children who were traditionally suppose to be seen, but not heard, and certainly not taken seriously.

William Ellery Channing articulated a Unitarian philosophy of religious education in the 1800's that we have followed ever since. In that much quoted passage, which you will find in our hymnal, he wrote that we must not stamp our minds upon the young, but stir up their own. But in his own personal life Channing showed how difficult it is to balance expressed desire with behavior. When the young Louisa May Alcott moved to Boston, Channing was the first preacher she heard. Although she was impressed with his sermons, she became disappointed after visiting him. She wrote: "the conversation, if you could call it conversation, was always on some high theme. But in truth it was not conversation; it was simply a monologue by Dr. Channing himself. " Alcott said this made her very dissatisfied when she left. She wrote, "He did not pay the slightest attention to anything you said. If you asked a question, he very probably did not answer it; he went on talking on the thing which interested him." This is the great personal challenge we all feel. When can we put aside our personal agendas and truly listen to the other person?
It pays to listen. Consider the case of famous explorer Henry Hudson. He was so focused on his own agenda, so focused on finding the Northwest Passage that he never noticed that his poor sailors were starving and freezing, and needed to stop their unending quest. Hudson was shocked when the weary, frustrated sailors set him and his son to drift away in a small boat to die at sea. Hudson kept yelling back at them , "what do you mean by this?" They could have easily answered, you never listened! And so they drifted out of sight to die in the bay that would one day bear the name Hudson.

Well, hopefully most of us listen a little better than that. Or do we? How often are we engaged in conversations, and we experience one of the following: Perhaps the person we are talking to is looking around the room to see who else is there to talk to because they obviously do not want to listen to us, and there might be someone more important there. Or perhaps they simply want to tell us all the wonderful things they can about themselves or their child so that we will think how wonderful they are. But what about hearing from you? Perhaps they disapprove of what you are wearing or who you are with or where you have been, and they cannot listen to a single word you have to say because they are busy listening to their own thoughts or beliefs about people who are somehow different from what they perceive as being right. My father had an awful time listening to me in college because he couldn¹t get beyond my long hair. But I didn¹t hear him either, probably because he had no hair. Teachers have a difficult time listening to my son because they believe that someone who cannot get his thoughts down on paper or complete an assigned task is lazy, and so they don¹t hear him when he says he cannot do it, or it is too hard. There are many different ways in which we fail to listen to each other.

I would suggest that we tend to forego our ability to listen to each other in three ways. The first way prevents us from even getting to a conversational level. We judge before the conversation takes place. Let¹s call this listening to the culture. In their book Proverbs of Ashes, Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker hypothesize that the Christian church¹s understanding of the passion of Christ, especially when it is interpreted like Mel Gibson, glorifies suffering and teaches that the suffering servant, who in this case is a victim of terrible violence receives redemption for his suffering. One might say that the focusing on suffering and violence as redemptive things, as spiritually positive experiences to endure, have led to a tacit approval of suffering in the belief structure of the church. One could even go so far to say that the interpretation is that this beating as modeled by Christ, mean your own sufferings are ultimately good for you. We interpret this in the popular culture as suffering will make you a better person, but we also know it could just as easily make you a more bitter person or a more fearful person. So we truly need to hear each person¹s experience of a particular time in our lives. Every woman, for example, does not experience birth as the most spiritual experience in her life. Some find it a terribly painful ordeal, and some who don¹t experience it at all, or lose a baby feel ignored or feel like failures. We need to hear all the stories. Too often other people want to tell how how we should feel, or react to certain situations when they have not even heard our story. Pain may not be redemptive, but it certainly is lessened when it is listened to and not judged or silenced.

The cultural view we bring to each conversation is conditioned by what is important or meaningful to us. What do we hear from each other once the conversation begins? Did you ever have someone tell you something like their recent experience of going to a restaurant, and you quickly lose track of what they are saying because all you can think about is the experience you had some time in some place. Let¹s call this listening to express your own agenda. It is remotely possible that someone else has something to say, or even a question to ask about a subject of which you have some knowledge. In some instances the conversation may drift to the movies. Remember the scene in Woody Allen¹s film Annie Hall where some know-it-all is boring his date with his stuffed shirt knowledge about Marshall McLuhan (the media is the message guy), and lo and behold, Marshall McLuhan himself is there to get the ultimate revenge against this guy who can only hear himself go on and on about how much he knows or how smart he is. Whatever the subject might be, you¹ve got something to say, and very little to hear. This is what frustrated Louisa May Alcott about Channing. He just wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about, and didn't¹ even have time for her question. Perhaps it was that cultural listening gap, too, as she was a young woman who in his mind perhaps did not have a question worthy of the great man, and therefore could be dismissed. Who do we easily dismiss in our conversations as having nothing worthy to say because our agenda is what counts?

The other problem here is that we may intend to try to listen to the other, but their agenda becomes a hot button for an issue of ours, which soon supersedes what they have to say. Let¹s say for instance I have a child who is a high school junior, as I once did, and my friend who I am conversing with also has a child who is in high school. She is telling me how worried she is about how many parties her child is going to and how much sex and alcohol are involved. My response to her might be a launching pad for my own agenda rather than an open ear to hers. Rather than helping her express her worries by listening to her with an empathetic ear, I can only focus on my own child, and what his behavior is. I may begin to obsess about my own parental role, and completely ignore the fact that I have a friend who needs to be heard. Every story or experience that someone else tells becomes a reflection of my experience that I then want to tell them about. We begin to be listening partners when we don¹t let our agendas or our needs become the sole focus for our place in the conversation. We are there for the other, as much as they are there for us.
My beliefs and my agenda all play a role in my ability to hear what you have to say, but there is a third way of preventing true listening that we must be aware of. I suspect we typically see this with parents and their children, which is how it is depicted in today¹s reading from Jules Feiffer¹s play Grown Ups. So far we have seen our agenda impinging on hearing the others concerns, and we have seen our cultural view predetermining what we expect to hear from the other. The third kind of listening is making up an agenda for the other, and expecting it to apply to their lives. We may see this when we are having a conversation with someone and they say to us, "you look worn out. I think you need some rest. Go take care of yourself." In this context we might want to wonder why they don¹t ask the very question that they seem to have already determined. Are you feeling worn out?, and then actually letting you answer it, before they judge whether you are worn out or not. Like the predetermined cultural listening this kind of listening has the judgment of this is who you should be, and this is how you should act. But rather than simply judging what they hear or expect to hear, what the other wants to accomplish here is to set our agenda.

In the reading from Grown Ups, Marilyn tries to tell her parents about her experience, but what do they hear? First, what they hear is selective. She mentions Philadelphia, and they stop listening to question what she was doing there. Maybe they feel a young woman should not be in Philadelphia. Helen is also thinking about something else, the chicken. So there is a distraction, too. Still trying to tell a story, her father wants to continue to focus on her being in Philadelphia, and so tries to strike up another conversation. Then he wonders about the grandchildren. Mom continues to be distracted, and asks when she is going out of town. And Dad is focused on how dangerous it is to take a bus. Never mind what happened on the way back from Philly. So they won¹t listen to her. Dad wants her to be thinking about safety and the kids. Marilyn has an experience but she never gets to tell it. The parents also have a preconceived notion of her not being able to tell stories, and as a young woman she has been socially conditioned to listen to others, while her brother tells stories so that he will not have to listen. As a young man he is conditioned to have people listen to him. Bronson Alcott long ago said, give each other the chance to tell your experiences, your stories, your lives. He knew this is what connects us to each other, how well we listen. He wanted children to do it. Fuller wanted women to do it. In her book You Just Don¹t Understand, Deborah Tannen used the Feiffer selection to show that men have long tried to command attention, but she and our UU forebears both have said, let everyone have a chance to be heard. We need to understand that all need to be listened to.

Many years ago the theologian Martin Buber wrote that he believed that a god event happened when two people truly listened to one another. He called it an I thou experience as opposed to an I - it, where we treat the other as an object. The object may be someone we mold in our image or who we use as a reflection of our own beliefs or agenda. I think he was right when he told us how important true listening is. We all have distractions in our lives, but we also have the opportunity to create times when those distractions are put aside, or at least put to bed. And then we can truly be with another and not worry about what¹s next or what else I should be doing, or what¹s on my mind, but truly open ourselves to a kind of divine listening where it is not about me, but about you, and what happens between us. Buber once wrote about a dispute between another thinker and himself over the use of the word God. At the end the other man came over to him and place his hand on Buber¹s shoulder. He said, "Lets be friends." This was the sign that both had been heard, and that the word God mattered little, for the hearing of each other had been the experience of what one called God and the other did not. The true listening was the divine event.

---

Closing Words - "Winter Into Spring" by Lynn Ungar

The trees, along their bare limbs,
contemplate green.
A flicker, rising, flashes rust and white
before vanishing into stillness,
and raked leaves
crumble imperceptibly
to dirt.

On all sides life opens and closes
around you like a mouth.
Will you pretend you are not
caught between its teeth?

The kestrel in its swift dive
and the mouse below,
the first green shoots that
will not wait for spring
are a language constantly forming.

Quiet your pride and listen.
There- beneath the rainfall
and the ravens calling you can hear it --
the great tongue constantly enunciating
something that rings through the world
as grace.

Opening Words - from Mark Harris

We welcome Easter morning as a festival of the living body.
May its story remind us never to separate ourselves from our life in the body.
May we feel that body and spirit are one; that flesh is good.
May we be in touch with our hands and feet; every living, breathing part of ourselves.
May we love the body: as regenerating myth, as reproducing seed, as immortal release into the great beyond and back; each one of us the word made flesh.
Praise the body!

---

Sermon

On March 11, 1965, James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston died from the wounds he received from a beating with a club by a white thug who had only minutes before emerged from a bar in Selma, Alabama.

On a windswept desolate hill sometime around the year 30 C.E., a political rabble rouser named Jesus whom they called the Christ was crucified along with others by Roman soldiers acting under the authority of Pontius Pilate.

Last Monday I attended a talk Wellesley College given by the Rev. Clark Olsen, the son of Andrea¹s grandmother¹s sister, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who in March 1965 was in Selma, Alabama. Both he and James Reeb, and hundreds of ministers responded to Martin Luther King¹s call to come to Selma to march from there to Montgomery. King felt men and women of God would not be beaten as other lay marchers had been only days before on Bloody Sunday attempting to begin this march, which was organized in the wake of the murder of civil rights worker Jimmy Lee Jackson. Initially Olsen was not going to respond to King¹s call. As minister of a congregation in Berkeley, California he felt he had obligations to attend committee meetings, and besides it was expensive. When a parishioner volunteered to pay for his flight., and he realized that a committee could be missed, he made the fateful decision. When Olsen arrived in Selma, he was too late for the training session in non-violent protest. He saw two people he knew, Reeb and another colleague at the chapel gathering place, and suggested they go to dinner. They ate their meal at a black restaurant, and then made another fateful decision, taking a short cut back to the chapel. This route was not through the black section of town which they had come, but it passed by a poor, white enclave where a certain local bar was situated.

The one they called Jesus was known to have consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors, the despised of society. They had celebrated his entry into Jerusalem by throwing down palm leaves. This had alerted the authorities to his presence in the city on the high holy days of Passover. He had protested the hypocrisy he found in the temple, and had told stories of loving your enemies and forgiveness for those who hurt you and persecute you. He said the last shall be first. Both the chief priests and the Roman authorities were disturbed by his teachings which seemed to be causing some disturbance among the throngs who waited in anticipation in the marketplaces and squares. On the night of his capture he waited with his followers in a garden. It was reported that one of his friends betrayed him.

They walked from the cafe down the street, and turned into the white section of town. Three men set upon them from the street. James Reeb was hit with a wooden club, maybe a two by four, on the side of his head, fracturing his skull. Mortally wounded, the bleeding in his brain would kill him two days later. Others may have seen it. But no one was talking. The people felt these northerners were no better than those ³colored² who started all this disturbance. They were outsiders coming in, causing this problem, wanting to change things. This is what they get. One friend fell to his knees to protect his head. He was beaten. Olsen ran down the street but was caught two blocks down. He was hit, and lost his glasses, but was not seriously hurt. Olsen saw it all. The attackers left. Mission accomplished.

Jesus was taken into custody. The stories say he was brutalized by the authorities. He was whipped and tortured. Then he was condemned to death. They made him carry the beam he would be lashed and nailed to, as it was affixed to a stake in the ground where others had died before; Golgotha, the place of the skulls.

Reeb was helped to his feet by his friends. They tenderly placed his arms around their shoulders, and walked back to the chapel. They stayed by his side. The ambulance ride to Montgomery was harrowing and frightening. Olsen scared speechless, Miller bruised and beaten, and Reeb moaning for his life. A pick-up truck rode up behind them filled with men with white bread bodies and piercing eyes. Would they force the ambulance off the road? Would the ministers end up dead in a ditch? Finally, a police car appeared. Would they help them reach the hospital, or would they also try to prevent them from reaching their destination? How did this ever happen? Would anyone help them? What were they doing there? It had been two hours of nightmare, and it was two hours too late for James Reeb.

The march to Golgotha was horrible. He could barely stumble along the path, as his injuries were quite severe. His followers had all run away. One had betrayed him. Did they expect he would miraculously save them all? But others stood by. They say one offered to help carry the cross. And the disciple named Mary, and his mother, also Mary stayed at his side, never left him in his hour of pain. There was another, a stranger who was also being crucified, one of the forsaken ones who recognized his compassion. Then he died. Another rebellion put down. Mission accomplished. Finally, there was one named Joseph who offered to care for his body, and offered his tomb, where he could be laid to rest. There were those who loved him, who made the choice to affirm their relationship for him in his greatest hour of need.


Why did he die? He was not leading some march singing we shall overcome racism. He was not leading an army into battle. He was really a nobody. Trained as a Presbyterian, he was an associate minister in Washington for a brief time, and now here he was working in Boston for the Quakers on some housing project. He chose to live in Dorchester among the people, the despised ones. We call him a martyr because he died so that others might live in freedom, but he didn¹t want to die. He had four little kids and a wife. The Unitarian Universalist Association didn¹t think much of him. He was no hero to them (did they even want him in their ministry?) until he took a club to the side of his head. Small decisions. To go at all. To eat out. To turn right to the part of town where no white civil rights worker should be seen. Insignificant acts. Carried along by a stream of happenstance. A hero in death, but nobody in life. Except to those who loved him, and stood by him in his hour of need. Except that his belief in doing the right thing, to stand up for racial justice carried him to martyrdom.

Why did he die? That¹s what Christians are contemplating today; for 2,000 years in fact. A recent film has concentrated on the violence of his death, and in its graphic depiction of human cruelty has tried to affirm a theological belief in his suffering for our sins. It is a faith that seems to suggest that God had a plan for the world, and needed appeasing, needed to send someone to redeem us. In one review of the film, the writer said this is not your grandmother¹s tea-cosy Unitarian faith. The implication might be that the violence human beings inflict upon one another is too blood curdling for us. We turn our face from Good Friday, in order to affirm life without confronting human cruelty and sinfulness. But I think what we turn from is not the human proclivity to hurt one another, but the religion that puts its faith in a mighty power that controls everything. We find the risen Christ of Easter a reflection of a mighty Lord who will make everything alright, who will say your sins are forgiven, who will sit in the sky as magisterial power offering instant miraculous cures. This is the Christ proclaimed by those male disciples who ran away, by those men who said we have the one truth about this story of a Jew from Nazareth who was a nobody. We will make him Lord of all.

Clark Olsen never went back to Selma. He told how Reeb¹s death help bring about great social change. It was a catalyst for President Johnson to push the voting tights act through Congress. His death meant one step closer to equality, one more step toward justice. Today, a black man is the mayor of Selma, Alabama. Reeb¹s martyrdom changed a nation, and we Unitarian Universalists have held him up ever since as a hero. Yet he never intended to be a hero. All he envisioned was a fairer world, and he took a small step toward achieving it. And something happened. Loved by his family, by his friends, but few others. He laid down his life for integrity. Olsen returned to Alabama for the trial of three men. They were acquitted of this murder by an all white, all male jury. The then white mayor of Selma said it was enough that they had to do through a trial, imagine how tough that was. The one time that Olsen was moved to tears in his talk the other day was not when he described the assault on Reeb, or even in the great civil rights change his death fomented. No , Olsen broke down when he described going into the court room, when he had to point a finger at the man who assaulted his friend. He is the one, Olsen said. He did it. He killed my friend, and I witnessed it, and lost the relationship forever.


Who killed Jesus? The popular film we have spoken of helps the 2,000 year old anti Semitic charge against the Jews resurface. One of my students last fall told me that the ancient hymn Jesus Christ, Our Lord by Clement of Alexandria originally started with the words gentle shepherd. When the hymn was translated from the Greek to the Latin, gentle shepherd became mighty Lord, which it remains today. Those disciples that Easter morn wanted a risen Christ to make up for the shepherd Jesus they ran out on, the nobody who they deserted. They needed forgiveness of sins in their theology because they committed the greatest of human sins. They ran out on one they said they loved. The women in the famous story, the ones who value the relationship with Jesus, stayed by his side, even unto death. They choose eternal love unto death, and the disciples eternal power after death.

James Reeb was a nobody who came to Selma because he was called to be there. He chose to live a life of integrity. After he arrived he went to dinner with his friends. A small thing. One little act of integrity leading to another seemingly insignificant thing. What about you or I? If we observe wrong doing or discrimination, what might one word do, or one act lead to? If we refused to participate one time, or asked one question, what would come next?. More questions? More actions? And might it turn the world? Who is to say? Jesus was a nobody who said your relationships are more important than your power. The humble ones are the people who enter the kingdom of heaven, not the great and mighty. The church may march in pomp and power; the world may tell us that pomp and power are what¹s important, but the person in whose name they proclaim such power would have none of it. Unitarian Universalists know that it is a violent world, and people commit terrible acts of inhumanity - the world is full of war and sorrow and pain. We also know that little people disappear under the heel of power.

Easter is a message not that the mighty shall prevail, not that the violent and the power hungry shall win. Easter is a message that nobodies win. People who value relationships and love and equality win. The buried treasure story tells us they found true treasure by working together, caring for the earth, and by using their skills. Our Easter message is not that one waits for miracles, but that we create them every day of our lives. We saw today that because of fear, a man may die. A man may die so that one day whites and blacks can live in harmony, but one day a black man will be mayor of Selma, Alabama, where in 1965, they beat and killed a white Unitarian Universalist minister who believed black people must be free. All he did was show up. Just being on the line, he overcame our human fear and prejudice. The resurrected one lives in that black mayor today. Whether it is in Jesus or in James Reeb, the Easter message is if you love others, and live with integrity, speaking and living the words of truth and justice, some day, even as you die, the grass will grow green, hearts of stone will turn warm, and love will come alive in this world. Even the smallest of acts of integrity point the world towards justice and love.

---

Closing words by Sheenagh Pugh

Sometimes things don¹t go, after all, from bad to worse.
Some years, muscatel faces down frost; green thrives;
the crops don¹t fail, sometimes one aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest one;
decide they care enough, that they can¹t leave some stranger poor.
Some become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss;
sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen:
may it happen for you.

Opening Words - "Te Deum" by Charles Reznikoff

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largesse of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day¹s work done
as well as I am able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

---

Sermon

As a child the poet Naomi Nye once asked her mother as they traveled
along a road in a car while watching palm tree after tree float by the
windows in an endless pattern, "how do you know if you are going to die?"
With strange confidence, her mother answered, "When you can no longer make a
fist." I immediately associated this little story with anger, not just
because it made reference to making a fist with that image of punching back,
but it seemed to me a defiant affirmation of life in the face of the
inevitable, a time when anger was its most righteous. It is like Dylan
Thomas saying "rage, rage against the dying of the light" because he does
not want to give up this good earth. I will fight for life until the end.
If we think of fighting for life in this way, probably most of us realize
that anger is typically described as one of the five normal stages of
preparation for death we all must encounter. In this case we use anger to
assert that something fundamental about life is unfair, and it is also
something we assert to ultimately accept that which has made us angry, yes,
we finally agree, I must finally let go and accept this fact of life.

We all feel anger as long as we live, and we often ask when should I keep
it in, when is it speaking righteous truth, and when should I just let it
go. During the last couple of weeks Andrea and I have had to deal with our
share of anger emanating from a tenant controversy at our house in Maine.
Our insurance company was forcing was to remove a wood stove from our
tenants apartment. Even though we installed a furnace a few years ago, and
said the stove was no longer in use, that was not sufficient. The stove had
to go. I tried to make arrangements with the realtor who handles our
property to remove the stove, but our tenant Sandy, was concerned how the
place would look with no stove, and a hole in the chimney. She went to see
him to gain assurance that he would cover the hole. He is a man who has
incredible class prejudice, and does not even realize it. He telegraphs
that anyone who is struggling or poor is clearly to blame for their state,
and therefore an inferior being, only worthy to rent to if you must.
Apparently she did not return his phone calls quickly enough for him, and
when she went to gain reassurance that the space would be cleaned up, he
refused to shake her hand. There was an angry outburst. She removed the
stove from the apartment and would not let him in. She called us in tears
because he treated her like a piece of dirt. He called to say, this is a
very angry woman. I don¹t know what her issue is, but she is very angry. I
am not going to take it anymore. I will no longer manage your property.
Anger - red hot, ending in flames.

We are nearing the end of the season of Lent. While modern people do not
easily embrace the idea of giving up very much, the approach of the
Christian holy days with Palm Sunday today naturally leads to serious
reflection on our lives. Ancient peoples practiced self-denial in order to
make themselves more holy, and we consider what part of our lives needs
balancing or restoration in order that we might feel better about our own
spiritual development. The emotional balance I seek in my own life always
begins and ends with anger. Today I want to reflect on what many of us
learned about the expression of anger, how it is most frequently expressed
in our culture today, and what use it may have in our own lives.

Let me begin by saying that when my tenant and the realtor were both
expressing their red hot anger at each other, I was uncomfortable. Anger is
a difficult emotion for us because many of us learned that anger is bad.
Martha Nussbaum in her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions reminds us that emotions like anger are value laden. They express
our ways of understanding the world. In my case I learned that the people
around me made value judgments about the expression of anger. If you feel
it, don¹t express it. You can control it, so keep a lid on it. If it gets
out of hand, everything around you will fall apart. In one word: don¹t. So
while we may have felt anger, we could only have angry eyes, and not words,
and certainly not actions. Unfortunately the inability to express anger in
words frequently leads to pent up anger, which we all know, can turn to
rage. My boys frequently get angry at one another often over some slight
such as who got the toy that the other wanted. We counsel them, "use your
words rather than your fists."

There is a tribe of Eskimos who Nussbaum refers to as true Stoics. They
make a moral judgment about all anger, which is that it is always
inappropriate. It is absurd, they say for an adult to care deeply about
slights and damages. They say it is a sign of immaturity that makes the
possessor very childish. It is true that for many childish slights it is
better for us emotionally to work it out with our words - some means of
compromise or sharing. We are looking to establish norms of human goodness,
and so we learn to be nice to each other and not express any overt anger.
We can understand the cultural context, too. Eskimos live in close
proximity, and need to let go of small slights. You cannot get away from
those you disagree with since there is no place to go except frozen tundra,
whereas the wild west could be wild because there was plenty of open range
for cursing and expressing those angry emotions. The problem is those Eskimo
have the emotions but it becomes an issue of how or where they can be
expressed.

Our religious traditions have also instructed us that expressing anger is
bad. The God of the Hebrew scriptures is often depicted as someone who is
capable of great anger towards the people. We see with the story of Noah
that because the people have not been righteous enough, God becomes angry
and destroys the world with a flood. God is both creator and destroyer
here, rather than two separate beings as depicted in a similar Babylonian
myth. Terrible catastrophe is followed by a new covenant with the same
being who caused the catastrophe to occur out of anger. I think it is
helpful that these qualities are merged in one being as they depict how we
reflect the gamut of emotions in ourselves. We are all potentially creator
and destroyer, and need to find ways to manage our anger. When we were
children we learned to count to ten, and later we punched pillows or found
other physical outlets. As God¹s image evolves in scripture he becomes less
and less destructive, and more a warm family member, but a useful
expression of anger also disappears from our religious understanding of
wholeness. The meek and mild Jesus that many of us were reared on
underscores this failure to find a place for positive uses of anger.
Christians have struggled with those places where Jesus expresses anger.
The recent cinematic Jesus is the suffering one who takes his punishment in
horribly violent ways, but does not strike back. Yet the scriptures show
Jesus in one place acting furiously at the money changers, and in another
cursing a fig tree for no apparent reason, but just to make it wither.
Jesus is usually praised for his lack of anger - he either does not have it
or it is completely under control. We learned that lack of anger meant
emotional perfection. With the temple story, it is said that the people were
bad, and would not listen, and so he is trying to improve them. And what
about the cursing of the tree? Is he testing his power? What about anger
over something he said or did? It might have helped me understand some of
the anger I saw expressed or felt myself that seemed to have no rhyme or
reason. Why couldn¹t Jesus just be angry?

A more recent cultural understanding of Jesus has made him more familiar
with anger. The political radicals of the 1960¹s made Jesus the zealot who
advocated the overthrow of Rome. He was the rebel who eventually inspired
the Latin American liberation theologians. This Jesus was angry at the
establishment, and wanted it overthrown, and so the money changer scene was
depicted in a new light. Now it reflected that he said it was next to
impossible for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven - something about a
camel and the eye of a needle. So ,too the Palm Sunday main event was
overthrowing the normal pattern of a monarch entering a city. Here the poor
king enters on a donkey, and has palms rather than gold carpets strewn
before him. His anger was good. It was a righteous anger that sought truth
and justice.

If anger became a good thing in the 1960¹s, it has become a globalized
right ever since. Our opening words from Charles Reznikoff may surprise us.
We are expected to want that seat on the dais, and if we don¹t get it, then
we become angry at what we don¹t have. We say we would be less angry if we
were satisfied with our lives, but no one seems to be satisfied. It is
unfortunate because there was so much good righteous anger that was born
from unjust circumstances such as racism and the oppression of women. More
recently we have seen this in the battle for same-sex marriage. These
issues have taught us that anger can be responsible and right. Emotions like
anger are no controlled by suppression, but must be part of ethical decision
making. Anger can help us act and make good decisions about what is right
and just. We learned that anger was often appropriate when people were
abused or mistreated. A person who is angry feels like some damage has been
done to them. We believe it has been done willingly; they hurt me. Now it
is important for our well being to express this hurt as anger. Usually the
anger has a blameworthy cause, in others or in ourselves. I feel wronged,
and want it corrected.

We can see that often anger has been legitimate. It is good that our
culture has come to understand that anger should not be judged as bad.
When we feel and own the emotion, we then can find ways to constructively
express it. Whereas I grew up in a time where, especially for women, it was
inappropriate to express it at all, and men had to repress it until it only
came out as rage, now we see anger as legitimate, and not something we can
control with a cool stoicism. Unfortunately, we seem to vent our anger over
trivia. It is apparent that now we often see it as cure for all our
disgruntlement. Whether it emanates from a culture that expects that
everyone needs to work constantly to fulfill all their desires, or
advertises us to death with expectations of big cars and multi-media toys,
we act like we are insatiable. Life just isn't¹ good enough for us anymore
unless we all have the trophy home and the extravagant travel plans. These
are the expectations, and so we feel angry and inferior if it appears we
can¹t have what we think everybody else has. This is born from the feeling
that we have a right to anything we want, and if we don¹t have it, we become
angry.

I think this fixation with slights prevents us from legitimately working
on those things that truly make us angry. Perhaps our anger is a symptom of
deeper hurts, but when the pure expression of anger becomes everybody¹s felt
right, none of us learns ways to constructively understand or learn from our
anger. It is enough just to express it. The problem with claiming any need
or desire denied as a cause for anger shows how clearly wrong headed we can
be on issues of individual freedom and justice. It is unusual these days for
anyone to be angry at themselves for their own mistakes. Sure we have a
right to feel angry if we have been wronged by another unjustly. But did my
tenant ever consider how she didn¹t return phone call, or did the realtor
ever consider how rude he was. No. They felt wronged, and thus justly angry.
What if we were to ask, whose fault is it? In an angry culture we strike
back rather than consider what role we have played in the interaction. Look
at road rage. I often find when someone cuts me off, rather than acting
contrite, they prefer to offer an extended digit.

Anger can be a perversion of true love and true justice because it can
be focused exclusively on how wronged we feel. We become so convinced of the
rightness of our own position we cannot see justice for anyone but us, or
feel love for anyone but the one who is wronged. Terrorists specialize in
anger, and unfortunately a response of anger escalates the anger out of
control. Often we fail to see any righteousness to their position because
we would be angry if we had to give up anything we have, but they are
righteously angry because we have everything. Mostly we fail to understand
that. We are like the Englishman in Pearl Buck¹s novel who is nice enough
but does not even understand that he sees a chink. And he certainly would
not see it as his fault that he fails to understand how prejudice he is. He
is angry because he has felt put down and powerless, but the Englishman
would be surprised at his anger. He would say, he has no cause.

This points to the blindness of anger. We sometimes joke in my household
about how I walk around under a black cloud. Anger is my hot button issue,
and I have always had trouble dealing with anger, expressing it
appropriately, and even understanding when I felt it. Having to referee
three boys and understand their emotions has helped me understand anger
better, but I think most crucial of all is how my anger effects others. Here
there has been a certain inability to understand first how anger effects me,
and second how that emanates out to the world. In the reading from Susan
Griffin she tells us how she loses her sense of self- empowerment when she
defines the person she is angry at as her enemy. Soon she defines herself
entirely in the context of this outside enemy. It becomes the locus for her
very reason for being. I am going to live based on my anger towards you.
There is nothing positive in any of this, and the anger manages her life.
This monstrous force becomes her life.

My life has never been dominated by anger for another person or thing,
but we can see that our anger prevents us from knowing our role in a
relationship. Even though the Englishman is not angry in Pearl Buck¹s
story, what is crucial is that he is not able to see his effect on the other
person. This is what occurs with anger. We are so obsessed with our issue or
our feeling of being wronged that we fail to see how our anger effects those
we love. They want to know what is going on inside. They want to know if
there is something they did. While expressing anger more openly may seem
like a positive step in our culture, that expression has often failed to
take account of how anger effects others relationally and communally. We
should tell those we love about the anger we feel, but not assert its
rightness, as we once asserted its wrongness. Its rightness emerges in the
context of the relationship, not in how I feel. Anger spills onto others and
hurts them, and makes them not want to be around us. We should own it for
ourselves, but not make those we love own it for themselves. Anger needs a
safety valve. We should never be in love with our anger. From the terrorist
we love to hate, to the venom we sometimes let fly on those we love. Let us
learn to understand our anger not in freedom for ourselves, but in justice
for all, so that together we might go forward in love.

---

Closing Words - "Beginners" by Denise Levertov

But we have only begun
to love the earth.

We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life

How could we tire of hope?
- So much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

How it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet -
There is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt that we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much in bud.