Out of Many, One

“So you’re a preacher” he said. It was late about 9:30 in Chicago and it was cold, the January wind tearing at my jacket. I was standing on a train platform waiting for my two hour commute back to northern Indiana where I lived. I told him that I was a seminary student and yes, I was a “preacher”. “How about that” he said, “a man of God.” I didn’t have the heart to clarify just what kind of God he thought I might be a man of. But then again, it didn’t matter. “Just great, just great” he said, “I’ve always admired a man of the cloth”. He continued, “Just found Jesus myself” he said. I shifted, not sure if my discomfort was with the wind or where this conversation was going. My new found friend went on in great detail: he was a bricklayer, he was on this third wife, he had six children and was finally in AA. As he explained his conversion I couldn’t help but notice the sound of contentment in his voice, it was almost contagious. That was a difficult year for me: I was struggling over my new identity, with the death of a close friend and with this expansive faith of ours which required such a broad knowledge. I yearned, I admit, for a simple faith, perhaps the comfort of Jesus.

As we boarded the train together, he naturally sat down right next to me He pulled out a well-worn copy of the bible and recited his favorite passage from the Gospel of John, “No one shall come onto the father but through me.” I knew that for him this meant that he was already in the arms of a loving God. That in the end, with all his troubles, he would be all right. I have come in the many years since this encounter to feel and know what it is about a simple faith in Jesus that is so refreshing and comforting: If you believe you are saved than there is nothing this world can do to you to hurt you more than for a moment. This kind of faith is not about reason, it’s about feelings. Many of us don’t understand this allure.

But this man understood. He was quite sure of his own salvation. And equally worried about his sister’s soul. She was a Muslim. “What about you, Reverend? What church do you belong to?” he asked. “I’m a Unitarian Universalist” I replied, trying to let the 10 syllables fall out of my mouth slowly. He was quiet for a moment trying to recall where he had heard that before. Then the gleam of recognition, “Oh yeah, I got a friend who is into the Unity stuff – real spiritual.” Alas, we fall again to the arrows of misrecognition. I started to explain the difference, but his stop had arrived and he thanked me and got off. 

Perhaps just as well. I would rather have him leave with that warmth. Many days have passed since that cold night. Many more sermons, deaths, births and doubts and I am still before you, a humble servant of the spirit, searching as you are for that faith which will sustain us; the faith of a community like ours with so many different beliefs. A faith that out of our many paths we will find one faith, one theology, a meaning to which we are that draws us together in more than just a freedom to believe.  Because my friends the freedom to believe is not an end, but a means to an end, still and always in process before us. We come here out of many branching streams to find ourselves in the current of this beloved community bound by covenant to one another.

With Grace and Grit, John

The Promise of Forgiveness

On Oct 2, 2006, Charles Roberts IV, a milk tanker driver, distraught over the death of his infant daughter, pulled up to the West Nickel Mines Amish school house in Southern Lancaster County, walked through the door carrying a semi-automatic pistol and ordered the teachers out and the boys to carry in lumber from his truck before ordering them out. He then ordered the ten girls age 13 to 6 on the floor and barricaded the door. In less than 45 minutes just as the police stormed the schoolhouse Roberts shot all ten girls, killing five and wounding all the others before turning the gun on himself.  The horror of this shooting stunned a nation. The Amish, the most devout of the Anabaptist peace churches seemed the last safe place for children in America. There are no metal detectors, no phones and on that warm fall day the door was wide open.

The grief of such a tragedy effected everyone; the close knit Amish community of Georgetown, PA, the police, the non-Amish, Roberts’s widow, Amy, indeed the entire nation. And yet, within 24 hours, even before the girls had been buried, representatives of the Amish Community came to the Roberts home to express their forgiveness for Roberts. Reports of this forgiveness further stunned the country. Most of us found it the most courageous and powerful testament of faith and humanity they had ever encountered. More than one editor asked how would our lives been changed if George W. Bush had forgiven the hijackers attacks on 9/11.  Others were not so sanguine. Some commentators remarked that it was too soon to forgive such a crime.  That such forgiveness would only excuse evil acts. Some complained that the widow was not the one to receive such forgiveness. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the Amish of southern Lancaster county had forgiven the crime.

To be sure, they had not forgotten the tragedy. They had not forgiven his heinous acts, just the man. And the Amish never asked the families to offer that forgiveness (although every family would later proclaim they did eventually forgive Roberts). The forgiveness was offered by Amish leaders in the name of the church community itself.  And to be sure, it is one thing to forgive a killer who has taken his own life, quite another to forgive a killer who survives.

What the public did not know is that forgiveness is one of the highest virtues of Amish culture. Taken from the Gospel of Matthew, wherein Jesus dying on the cross says “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do” and the sermon on the Mount in which Jesus commands his followers to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. In other words, forgiveness for the Amish is rooted, deeply rooted, in their faith. Amish talk of the mortal prison of vengeance and anger but the most compelling reason the Amish make such a cardinal virtue out of forgiveness is quite selfish, as one Amish minister put “How can we be forgiven is we do not forgive?”  the fate of their mortal souls, the Amish believe, is rooted in forgiving those who trespass against them.

Forgiveness is not the same thing as a pardon.  And for the Amish, forgiveness does not mean a criminal should not be punished. In fact, those straying from the order within the Amish community are forgiven but not always pardoned, unless they choose to repent for their transgressions. Nonetheless, I offer this radical form of forgiveness as a beginning to considering the complexity and the promise of forgiveness in our own lives.

While the Amish root their impulse to forgive in a faith in God, I contend that we too might consider such an impulse, not as commanded by scripture, but as compelled by the Unknown God, Spirit, Force, Humanity that dwells within us; the inherent worth in all. We may not forgive the acts of evil but we can forgive the actors.

Our theology points towards the circle of life.  When one part of our circle is damaged, it does no good to commiserate about the damage; this only keeps the circle broken. Finding the strength to deal with these issues as maturely as possible, starting with watching what we say and do, goes along way.  Often times the best thing we can do for ourselves after a painful tragedy is to carry on with the mundane and joyful details of life that remain.  This does not belittle or bury the sorrow but places it where we can work on it best.

Of course, and I want to stress this, forgiveness is not always immediate nor does it entail forgetting.  Women who have been abused may never be able to forgive their abuser, and they should seek and receive justice for the crimes committed against them. But as I have known all too often in my own life, holding hatred keeps us imprisoned, indeed victimized for the rest of our lives.

The 19th century French Poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote “Hatred is the most deadly of poisons; it is made of our blood, our health, our sleep and two-thirds of our love.”

In the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hassana has ended and we are just about to welcome Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in preparation for which Jews are commanded to forgive those who have wronged them. Indeed, forgiveness, as complex and heart wrenching as it is, is the only means to atonement,  At- One – Ment with God, with our integrity as human beings.

With Grace and Grit - John

In The Memory of Trees

I had the opportunity to spend some time in the woods that bear John Muir’s name north of San Francisco.  I wondered what would happen if we tugged so hard on growing our nearby cities if this beautiful wood so close to the metro Bay area.  Would these giant trees, those towering redwoods fall to climate change?  Already, we could see the remnants of the giants fallen.  How many years had those trees been standing there, what had the seen, what could they tell us?  Muir woods was dedicated by Teddy Roosevelt almost a century ago, more as a preserve for game than beauty.  Those same trees stand there today.  What would they tell us if they could speak their being? “Memory doesn’t come of the blue” writes Thomas Moore (in Enchantment of the Soul) “it requires a temple carefully built and maintained.”

Our temple is falling down.

If trees could speak from memory they would tell us they are broken, in fact, we are broken.  We have lost the interconnection with all life as we are called to affirm in our last and seventh principle, ‘respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are apart’.  The trees would re-mind, remember for us, that we are not so different than them. 

All life springs from the same stuff, mother earth, human, humus, humility.  All the same.  Trees are often sacred simply because they can remember for us… not directly but as the symbols of it.  If trees could talk they would tell us to take this much more seriously than we do.  If trees could talk they would remember that we are extensions of them, walking, talking, acting, trees.  Where we, like all life are sacred. Whales and men. Elephants and children.  All of us are part of the stuff of stars.  And that is what connects us to this day of memory.  After this service we will remember those who have died, those who have left us for another dimension. Regardless of whether you believe in an afterlife at all, our memories endure, our lives endure in how they have affected the world in which we have spent our time. You see, even though trees fall, their energy endures, in the humus that they become in the new trees that are gone.

I received a card from a member who is not able to come most Sundays.  It was a picture of the Redwoods and a simple note, “some things endure” the meaning of which I took to be his life’s work endures, our time together endures, we may change form but we are, and always have been part of the great web of existence.

Perhaps God, if such there be, hoped we would see the sacred in every living creature.  The Garden of Eden not so much a place but a memory of how it was supposed to be.  But at least once before we failed.  And the Hebrews teach us that God forsook our world and built another kind of ark, an ark of survival, to float above the world washed clean.  No ark can be built for us now.  We are not going to float above our errors, this blue boat home is our only craft to sail the wide ocean universe, upon its infinite fathoms.   The trees remind us that we too are rooted, even as we move, on this same fragile planet, sharing life as one.

“Dorothy Day said:                 

People say, what is the sense of our small effort,

They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.

Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.

There’s too much work to do. “

There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

The trees remember for us, but we must remember for them.  What if we could actually live like we are all interconnected?  What if this great recession was an opportunity to enliven a great expansion of concern?  Avoiding box stores, shopping locally, buying as much of your food from home vendors.  What if we started our own produce table right here?  What if we gleaned our gardens and brought the food – whatever was in season – and put it up for the taking, a small monetary contribution to the church?  What if we didn’t have a lawn?  The trees survive, they always do.  What if we lived in the earth as much as upon it?

We live on the earth and we are also so much a part of the earth, that is what endures. It’s not so much that we lived but rather what we did with the life that we had.  It doesn’t have anything to do with God or heaven or hell.  It has to do with life, the spirit of life, that makes us the same as the trees and this entire planet.

 

With Grace and Grit, John

Free to be WE

The following is from a sermon I preached to my congregation in California after I had informed them that I was taking up a new calling with the Unitarian Church in Westport, CT.

"I believe that it has been the WE of all of you that has given me the faith and you the strength to journey into the next phase of life as a congregation. It is no accident that I will also receive my Doctor of Ministry degree next month, on the thesis that we can as different as each of us is; create a common theology, a faith stance to save the world from the relationships, the WE that we are. I believe that all of us have a theology that defines who we are and how we can make our world a more beautiful place. I believe that too often Unitarian Universalists are overly concerned with the horizontal relationships of meaning; giving breadth to our spiritual understandings and welcoming those who are different into our midst. Rarely do we give adequate attention to the vertical dimension; exploring how our individual and communal meanings deepen our purpose to a greater power. Giving name to those individual theologies will be part of our journey together. I am, broadly speaking, a natural theist, an enchanted mystic with leanings towards the Holy. Through my spiritual practice and luminescent experiences I have felt the presence of a power in my life much greater than me. I reluctantly call this power “God” or God/Power. However, because I also believe in the use of reason to explain the universe, I am unable to define this God/Power beyond these fleeting encounters. I do believe God/Power is made manifest through what Henry Nelson Wieman terms the “creative interchange” we have with one another. We can, and often do, create deep meaning and hope out of our relationships with one another when it seems impossible to do so by ourselves.

I believe God/Power holds an attraction that pulls each of us towards each other in what the feminist theologian Monica Coleman terms “Gods calling”. The attraction of God’s calling is therefore calling us forward into the world as agents of change and hope. And yet, my explanation for our place in the cosmos is tentative at best since God/Power exists beyond the rational. My theology rests in my belief that we are here to make our world a better place within the larger cosmological context of an expanding universe. While I can’t say with certainty that the “universe is good” I can say that we have a responsibility as co-creators with God/Power to make the universe, or at least our little corner of the universe, better. This is what I mean by the freedom you all have to become a new kind of WE.

 

There are theological values we can hold up in common: Hope, Love, Grace and Beauty to name a few. Whether individually or collectively, I often describe our religious tradition as “more process than product”.

Theology does not tell us what to believe –that must be determined through a careful reflection on our experience, reason and intuition – but rather what we should do with what we hold ultimately meaningful. If I believe that OUR calling is to co-create God/Power in the world, then I am equally called to create that good which I believe represents that God in the world. I am called to create a theology with a congregation that can reach beyond such relativism to the bold possibility that we are here for a greater and more unifying good than ourselves as subjective beings in the world.

You gifted this theology, this faith to me and I will take that precious gift and share it with the world.  Even more importantly you have that theology with you and you will give it meaning as you stretch into a new vision of yourselves as congregation.

It is no secret that we have suffered some deep loses over the years.  Amidst our dreams of building a new world, among the weddings performed, the babies named, and meals served, we have seen many of our most precious people die. I have conducted 52 memorial services in ten years.  By any measure that is staggering amount of loss. Most of those we bid farewell to were older but a few were younger. I remember a 43 year old woman who had just married her lesbian partner and died three weeks later. I remember Bruce Barr, a 48 year old father of two, who died of oral cancer even though he never smoked.  It is a tremendous privilege to have journeyed with these beloved ones at the end of their lives. Many of our elders are grieving that I won’t be here to journey to the end with them. But amidst all that loss I learned one more precious lesson, one more gift that is embedded in the WE.

It came from Dr. Bob Bloomfield.  Dr. Bob was a pillar of this church. A successful family physician he had done so much for us at the end of his life. He started our senior pow wow that, despite its culturally inappropriate name, has helped seniors navigate the terrain of old age with grace and courage.  Just before Dr. Bob died he and I had a long and private conversation in the hospital.  He told me he didn’t think he would survive this next surgery. I didn’t argue with him, it was a long shot. He said “I have lived a long and good life, John. I think I have done some good in the world.   But I really didn’t know what good was until I started coming back to church when you arrived.  Good lives inside the love we share with one another. Good is its own reward.  And I see now what you meant by our ministry together saving lives.  I always argued with you that it was too strong a phrase, that doctors save lives but not ministers.” I smiled. He went on “But a life is not just our bodies, a life is our happiness and our purpose. WE as a church have saved some lives, Rev. John, starting with my own.”  Dr. Bob died the next day.  WE are and always have been stronger than any ME. Long after I am gone, you will still be that WE, you dreamed you would become. So stay my dear people, stay and help make that WE together, freely now and for those hundreds who will come. Our time is precious; let us fill it with Love.  Amen.

Who Was Jesus?

Jesus was a thirsty man.  He was and remains a “spirit person”, a demi-god like figure like the Greek God Dionysus and the Egyptian God, Osiris who came to earth to bring completion and wholeness to humanity. The so- called Gnostics believed that the end of the world Jesus spoke of was only a death unto the suffering of life, believed that Jesus was part of a complicated myth of redemption.  Once we find our way home, once we stop our wandering we will cast aside our wandering status and become whole.  Jesus claimed that he was sent by “Abba” (Jesus’ Aramaic word for God which means “Daddy”) sent as an messenger to be a spiritual bridegroom to resurrect the marriage between the Goddess earth and the God father sky in the guise of love for humanity. The cross references to language of the gospels with the imagery of Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern religions is startling. Some of the symbols such as the chalice, used for the Last Supper come right out of the goddess cults of Canaanite Mesopotamia two thousand years before Jesus was born. The essential message of this myth is that Jesus was himself a Jewish version of the mythological “savior” which pagan religions had recognized for thousands of years and that he came to symbolize the initiation and transformation of the sinful into a cult of love. A myth which claims that Jesus never really died, because he never really lived. And that his relationships to the marginal in his society and to women, the poor, the sick, the outcasts - was meant to deepen the spiritual understandings of patriarchal Judaism. Somehow say these folks, the early church took this story and tried to make history out of it, and in so doing missed the boat entirely creating some twisted and sick commercial deal: One dead Jesus for our eternal salvation.

There really was a man named Jesus who had tremendous charisma and power, who wandered in search of the lost and lonely, those seeking refuge to find a new home where they could be fed. I really don’t care if he lived or died or even if he ate his Wheaties each morning. What I care about is what he means to me and to you and to millions of others who are looking for a forgiving hero, a symbol to give their life meaning.

Who was Jesus? He was the healer. The one who defied expectations and laws to simply touch and heal those in need. One of my other favorite stories is when he healed the blind man on the Sabbath. Or the chronically menstruating woman on the Sabbath, or the lepers all on the Sabbath, why? Because compassion for those who are suffering knows no conditions. Beyond the laws, the customs, the prejudices, and the national hatreds, Jesus represents the Buddha heart of love, just do it! Just love. Jesus as healer holds great meaning for me personally. I reminded of him each time I give a wino five bucks.. I know he will spend it on drink, so what? For a moment there is peace.

Who was Jesus? Perhaps he is the redeemer, not for our depraved nature but for our brokenness, which is really all the word sin means. We are all broken. All in need of forgiveness. Jesus taught us though that we need not follow the laws and make a submission to some “higher power” but simply believe that we are worthy in and of ourselves and that no fault, no mistake is so great that it cannot be forgiven. He called it faith. A faith that we can always be made whole again. And yes, while he called for a reversal of the world order, was he not also calling for a reversal of the human condition. Even the richest amongst us suffer, how can they find forgiveness. The real power of Holy Week is for me, not in the orthodox sense of payment for guilt, but in the transformation from triumphant life, to falling down, to even the death of my ego, and the grace which gives me life again. I have fallen, you have fallen, we all we stumble, but a new day will come and we will start again.

Who was Jesus? Perhaps he is the one who suffered. We spiritual liberals like to poo-poo the symbol of the cross as barbaric, and it many ways it is; the Roman cross was the most barbaric form of death imaginable. But its symbolism is powerful to those who ARE suffering. Not because they have good company in Jesus, but because they understand that God suffers with them. The shortest two line in the entire bible are when he was dying on the cross: He wept. And before his last breath, he moaned, I thirst Here was a man who understood what the Buddha had understood. Life does hurt. There is pain. But there is a way beyond that pain. Here the feminine side to the mysteries of Jesus come through in shining glory. Jesus was the first world prophet to EVER welcome women into his community. Why? Because women understood the essential nature of suffering as something we go through not around. Women understood forgiveness. The feminine archetype of Jesus, claimed the great Carl Jung, was in his acceptance of suffering, not in resignation, but in forgiving recognition.

Who was Jesus?  Perhaps he was a peaceful warrior. The power and mystery of non-violent resistance and loving thy enemy has been shown to be the most sustainable and effective agent of change on earth. South Africa, India, our own civil rights movement. What would Jesus do with Sept. 11th? Hold the suffering, speak out in love? Who can say? The most courageous billboard I saw after the 11th was at a little Christian church down the street from our house. It read: “Jesus said ‘Love thy enemies’.

Who was Jesus?  He was forgiving of all us who search for home.  Jesus reminds us that we all wander but we need not be lost.  That those who are suffering, the poor, the undocumented, the unjustly imprisoned, need our help.  We are all yearning for a life of the soul, searching for that deeper meaning which gives our life purpose.  There is a little bit of Jesus in each of us, wandering in search of meaning and hope; seeking forgiving, seeking wholeness, seeking home.

I met Sister Mary Alice over 30 years ago working for a credit union. She had come in to take out a personal line of credit to help someone with their medical bills. Part of my job was to ask her why she needed this money. I mean, didn’t they have other means. She had one of those truly brilliant faces, she smiled and her eyes twinkled. It was the first time I have heard what has become a rallying cry for universal health care “Without insurance, life turns out differently. This was her insurance for this family. ‘This family’ were Salvadorian refugees. The father had diabetes and she was paying for dialysis so that he might live a few more years. I was a little more arrogant back then “But sister” I asked, “Why are you paying to help them?  They aren’t even legally here.” Still smiling, she touched my hand “Because young man, Jesus forgives all of us, Jesus would want me to do it, I am called to do it.” I shook my head and approved the loan.
Only recently have I come to understand which Jesus she was speaking of  in this story. It’s not about reason or certainty, it’s about faith. And faith, a faith in life and life’s promise, a faith that each of us and the entire world is worthy of forgiveness, is what Jesus is really about.  We are all looking for the kingdom of  love  again.  Jesus is calling on us to remember who we really are.  

With Grace and Grit, John

Against Spiritual Tourism

I don’t watch a lot of television, but I have been recently enamored with the situation comedy “Parks and Recreation” a biting satire about life in a small town Indiana Parks and Recreation department, complete with an under functioning, arch conservative director, Ron Swanson, who would just as well like to see government privatized and an erstwhile assistant director Leslie Knope played by Amy Poehler who wants nothing more than to make her department a paragon of public virtue and service.  At one point in the story, Leslie, heartbroken asks Ron why her current love interest is so interesting but so emotionally distant.  Her boss, in a moment of uncharacteristic sensitivity explains it all this way:

‘He’s a tourist, Leslie. He vacations in people’s lives, takes pictures, puts them in his scrapbook, and moves on. All he’s interested in are stories. Basically, Leslie, he’s selfish. And you’re not. That’s why you don’t like him.’

The problem with tourism, whether it is visiting a destination, having an experience or searching for life’s deeper meanings is that it lacks authenticity and commitment.  After all we just go there, we don’t live there. A tourist isn’t invested in the outcome of what they are visiting; they are just consuming that experience. There is no authority in just visiting anyplace or experience. It is empty of the larger meaning that comes from being a living part of where you are. Like all tourists, we vacation in other’s people lives and traditions but we don’t live there.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I actually love being a tourist. I love to travel and visit places I have never been before. But I am very clear about my role in a new place or new experience; I am there to learn and appreciate. I am there to spend my money which their economy depends on. I am not there to change their world to what I think it should be.  I have a hard time with the so called eco-tourism idea. You can and should be a responsible tourist, but to pretend that your cleaning up the jungle is actually making a difference is ethnocentrically arrogant.  Rarely, do these eco tourist companies actually ask the people who live there what they want.  Instead they make assumptions about what we, the well healed tourists wants.  Our desire for a certain outcome while self-satisfying and perhaps even laudable lacks the conviction and authority of the people who live and experience that part of the world.

So it won’t come as surprise to you then that I am not fond of anything that resembles spiritual tourism either. Even worse than assuming what people need by those who don’t live their lives are those who sample from the spiritual buffet and dabble in Buddhist Chanting, Christian Taze, Sufi dancing, gospel singing and any number of traditions to which the tourist has no intention of learning more deeply and committing their lives to.

Sadly, this is what America’s religious life has largely become.  We visit a shrine or a church or a temple and we partake in the gifts of that experience but we are unwilling to stay especially at the first sign of difficulty.  Such consumerism borders on voyeurism; a sort of looking in from the outside without owning the inside. It lacks depth and meaning. It lacks the authority that comes from actually diving in a little deeper.  I was thrilled to have the Tibetan Buddhist group here two years ago as they spent a week making a beautiful sand mandala. I thought it deeply powerful to witness the ritual destruction of that mandala during a Sunday morning service. But how many of the 240 people from our neighborhood who came to that ritual sweeping away actually came back to our church? I wonder how many became Buddhists.

The power of any religious practice lies not in what you “get” out of it in the short term, but what meaning it gives your life, how it changes you in the long term.  I have known hundreds, perhaps even thousands, who have come through the doors of our churches hungry for spiritual nourishment. That is, after all, one reason why we exist; to nourish the spirit. But sadly, they don’t understand the give and take of spiritual practice. It’s not just about you, in fact, it’s really not about you at all.  You are just the recipient of a by-product of participating in a religious community.  And then, at the first disagreeable moment, a congregational meeting, the minister says something you don’t like, the music disagrees with you, or they aren’t serving sushi for lunch, you leave.  It’s like spiritual pornography, all images, no real love. 

No, my friends, the real love, the authority of a spiritual practice, comes with the commitment. And it becomes the very bedrock of what holds you through the storm and brings you out the other side. Do you think Martin Luther King could have done what he did if he did not have the faith of Christian and the blessing of his church, who he served faithfully for years behind him? His authority came from his spiritual practice, his committed spiritual practice, not from being baptized the day before he marched on Selma.  Meaning is made from the authority of our spiritual commitment.

With Grace and Grit,  John

We Are The Hands of God

I went into the ministry looking for God. It wasn’t until I started working with a Catholic priest doing work with AIDS patients that I really understood God. I was in my first ministry in South Bend, IN. A Catholic town in the shadow of the University of Notre Dame. I had largely written off the Christian concept of God.  For much of my early adult life I believed that Christianity was mistaken in its insistence that we are all fallen and that only by believing in the saving power of Jesus Christ can we be saved. This redemptive theology struck me as self-serving at best; of course they would say that, I thought, it ensures more followers through no fault other than being human. It wasn’t until I worked closely with a Franciscan monk who was tending to the spiritual needs of AIDS patients in the early 1990’s that I realized I might be wrong. Brother Mike (I will call him) spent his days hearing the confessions and laying on hands of healing to those in the final days of their lives. This was in the early days of the epidemic when little was known about the causes and treatment of AIDS/HIV. The cultural condemnation of AIDS patients was based on the mistaken assumption that these gay men were being punished by God for the sins of sexual deviance. The fear was palatable and to minister to these men was considered risky. I was working with Brother Mike as part of my outreach as a new minister.   As we went from bed to bed, I would listen as Mike heard their confessions. Most of those confessions were heart wrenching. Some of these men told of sleeping with scores of other men.  Some told of using dirty needles for their drug addiction.  Some were monogamous and clean but their partners were not. Brother Mike offered no judgment. He heard their confession and he held their hands and he forgave them their sins, intentional or otherwise, that is such a part of human nature. As he did this, I watched waves of relief roll over these tortured men. I realized they were sacrificing their pride in confessing. I realized Mike was sacrificing his judgment and maybe his welfare in this ministry. I realized that together each was sacrificing the illusion of control before the inexorable march of fate, life and death. Sacrifice is part of our human religious project. There is power in letting go. There was power for me. Suddenly, I saw in those men and in Brother Mike the suffering of humanity that we need to let go into the hands of God. I was freed from the illusion that Christianity was all a sham; I saw how a personal savior can actually save a life. I haven’t become a Christian but I understand the power of Christianity. I was willing to give up my antagonism for a new found respect. Not agreement but respect. By giving up my condemnation of Christianity, a condemnation that supported my liberal theology, I was adding to my faith in pluralistic theology that includes the redemptive impulse of Christianity. And it was here that I found my God: the force of love in our lives that becomes manifest in the hand of ours that serves.  I have come to the conclusion that we are then the hands of God.   With Grace and Grit, John

All at the Table

Many of us reacted with outrage at the verdict to not indict Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO last week.  While that verdict may have been a foregone conclusion,  it still spoke to the outrage of racism in our country; not just in the outrage of African Americans who face the danger of being killed every day but of the white outrage of citizens who expect more from their government. The answer to this outrage is to hasten a change, not just in laws and policies but in the way we deal with others.  It’s not so much class warfare as it is a journey of the soul. The stories that were not shown from Ferguson teach us that there are many ways to get to the table together. Blacks and their white allies standing guard over businesses to prevent looting, and the scores of young people, black, white and brown who came in after the riots to clean the streets. You see, we can hasten what I believe is a coming change. Just as the immigration issue will be sorted out by a changing American population, so too will there be justice.

After the Ferguson verdict, there was a spate of people standing on Freeways and stopping traffic.  In Los Angeles, police arrested 131 people, after stopping up traffic for miles on the 101.  In San Diego a group of UCSD students stopped the I-5 for twenty miles before the police negotiated for them to get off (interesting that in LA they were arrested and in SD they were urged to move on).  I was interested in the commentary especially from young people, including people of color, Michael Brown’s age.  While they understood the outrage, and they understood that by only inconveniencing the status quo would change occur, they also believed it was naïve and hurtful to target innocent working people who were only going to work. “The people who make the laws” one young person explained “don’t drive on the freeways.”  “Besides” said another, “we are all going to get to the table someday. The rich white oligarchy will crash in the revolution of the coming generations. That is what the hunger games movies are telling us.”

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first, proclaimed Jesus. Jesus, the apocalyptic Jewish peasant who invited everyone to his table at thanksgiving realized the inevitability of balance in the cosmos.  Change occurs because empires must fall. It is in the nature of empires to topple, wrote Howard Thurman, and so it is with us here:  The Table For ALL is coming.  Maybe not in our lifetimes but it is coming.

Blessing to you this advent season,  John

Called to Tranformation

I hesitated stepping through the door of the old temple in Mysore India.  I was twelve years old at the time, the air was hot and humid, the smell of dung and incense thick enough to almost see. I hesitated as if some unknown force was holding my shoulder; there was something very powerful beyond this door, something perhaps I did not want to see. It was so overwhelming I can feel it still.  I swallowed my fear and stepped in.  It took a few moments to adjust to the darkness of the unlit ruin.  No longer home to Brahmins and bulls but monkeys and mangrove leaves.  The carvings of Shiva, Ganesh, Sita, Rama all stared down at me.  I walk into the next room and knew before I stepped in what I would see there, and then the next, and the next, each time knowing before seeing what was beyond the corner.  I started to race through the rooms, feelings of joy and sadness, knowing each corner before I turned to it.  And then I knew it was time to get out of there.  Breathless, I stepped back into the bright sun.  I ran to find my mother.  She was outside. I tried to explain to her that I had been in this temple before, not as this boy but before.  She smiled and silently thought I needed psychiatric help. 

Perhaps I did.  Crossing that threshold moved me in several ways; the first was to confirm for me later my belief in re-incarnation.  The foreknowledge was so strong that I had to have been there before.  But my personal belief in re-incarnation is a post for another day.  Perhaps even more importantly, that earliest religious experience led me eventually to enter our ministry.  I have been following a calling to the religious life ever since; the worn wooden threshold of my first business, the oak transoms of our first house, the worn marble of my first church, the bright finish of a new door in our new church building in Frederick, MD, the familiar chalice mats of our own sacred ground here at Pacific Unitarian Church.  Crossing any threshold is an act of transformation in courage and hope.  And I am so deeply blessed to have been transformed by so many.  And I invite you into that transformation today.

My entire ministry can be summed up in that one word:  Transformation.  My calling as a minister is to transform congregations into beloved communities of hope and action.  My calling is simple.  It’s the work that takes a bit more time.  Because transformation is something we all think we need but few really want.  It’s scary and hard and dangerous. And its some of the most important work we will ever do.  How are you called to transformation?

With Grace and Grit, John

The Grace of Place

Last week I testified before the Los Angeles Port Commissioners in support of the independent port truck drivers on behalf of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (C.L.U.E.).  These drivers almost all of whom are immigrants are required to lease their trucks from the trucking firms, pay all the expenses and are paid on miles driven regardless of how long they have to wait in the port to be loaded.  The result is that they often work for less than $80 for a 12 hour day, and if "their truck" suffers a breakdown, the truckers can end up owing the trucking company money.  I testified that this is not only illegal but immoral, amounting to indentured servitude.

As I sat there in that large and well appointed council chamber, I heard trucker after trucker testify to this injustice.  And then, I heard the people of the port community testify on their behalf as well.  Everyone of them would preface their remarks with a lineage: "I am a fifth generation San Pederian, my ancestors came from Italy, Bosnia, Croatia, Greece."  It was as if those who ancestors immigrated to the port, were standing in solidarity with the next generation of immigrants who came to work hard and make a living.

I was unsure of where the Port Commissioners stood on this issue.  Finally, after the public comment period closed, the commissoners spoke.  Three of the five echoed their concern for the drivers; a bold move given that the shipping and trucking companies paid for much of the infrastructure that these commissoners depended on.

I realized that at the end of the day, it is the grace of a place that has been home to some of these families for generations that inspired the commissioners to speak out on behalf of the truckers.  While it remains to be seen if anything will change, I could feel grace abounding in that room.  Hope abides.

With Grace and Grit,  John

Beyond the Gates of Struggle

Struggles whether for a group of people or for us individually, is part of the human condition as the Buddha observed 3000 years ago.  Struggle born of not having enough, struggle born of worrying about the future, struggle born of disease and heartache.  Struggle is real but it is not the totality of our existence.  Struggle is the gate we pass through in order to make ourselves anew.  I think too often we see our future as the gate itself instead of what lies beyond it.

Anne LaMotte put it this way:  “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

You wait and you watch and you don’t give up.  That’s  what moving beyond the gate of struggle looks like.  Last week the Los Angeles City Council increased the minimum wage for hotel workers to $15.37 an hour, the highest in the country.  You think that just happened?  Nope.  That was the result of thousands of people storming the gates of struggle to get to the other side. 

There is always another side to struggle.  With a little stubborn hope we will get there.

With Grace and Grit,  John

Holding Up Astonishing Bridges

“Just as the winged energy of delight

 carried you over many chasms early on,

 now raise the daringly imagined arch

 holding up the astonishing bridges.”

The soaring imagery of Rilke’s poem might strike some of us as fanciful and unrealistic.  I would ask you to begin with me remembering what it was like to play as a child.  Imagination was and always will be our very best friend.  It was mine.  My younger brother didn’t arrive into our house until I was seven and so for the first years of my life, and many more beyond that, I kept company with an imaginary friend.  I called him Rocco.  I don’t know why I called him Rocco, except perhaps I knew such a friend in a previous life or I lived in a town inhabited by Italian and Irish immigrants who came to build the Hudson River rail line.  But Rocco was, and occasionally still is, my confidant and the wings of delight.  I speak to him out load still to this day.  And in those early years we imagined ourselves, building cities, saving families and soaring on imaginary wings over the chasms of reality that all too often weigh us down, certainly by the time we become adults.  In many ways my entire ministry has been about re-awakening in others those early winged energy of delights in simply living and being together that take us over the drab chasms of bills, children, parents, jobs and relationships.  The actions we are called to do, the company we enjoy are the wings that help us soar to deeper understanding over the chasms of barren reason and a world in such pain. 

And lest you think that this is just not the reasonable faith of Unitarian Universalism, let me remind you that Emily Dickenson, Buckminster Fuller and Kurt Vonnegut were all Unitarian Universalists. Count among you, poets and dancers and musicians and cooks and caretakers and story tellers along with engineers, and teachers and creators.  All of us have been holding up the most astonishing bridges.  While we might lose sight of how good we are at meaning making by what troubles us, I only ask that you look deeper; each of you is an original blessing of creation.  And we are not alone; indeed we ride in the wake of an emergent spiritual renewal.

With Grace and Grit, John

Love Beyond Belief!

It’s been a long and hot summer.  It’s been hard for many of us personally. as well.  And then there is the world theater, the Gaza strip, Ebola, Ukraine and the gruesome event in Iraq under ISIS.  One young person this week asked me if this is the world as it will be.  I answered I didn’t think so, but for now this is the world as it is.  Much of this heartache has been brought on by religion or politics masquerading as religion. 

It’s a challenging time to be a religious person these days.  Faced with fundamentalism on the right and the lack of relevancy on the left is it any wonder that so many see religion as the enemy of civilization.  A wonder perhaps but sadly so wrong.  The reality is that every day millions of good meaning people with nothing but their religious faith do all they can to make the world a better place.  These acts of justice, and so many more are done in the name of religion.  Our religion.

What is broken for me, and the vision I see for our future, is not religion but the beliefs that invade our religions.  Here I am not talking about restrictive teachings about homosexuality and abortion so much as the myopia that keeps people of different beliefs from talking with one another.  I remember keenly when I was trying to enlist the help of one fundamentalist church in building with Habitat for Humanity.  The associate pastor told  me that not only would they not associate with me, a heathen and atheist (neither of which is true, well… at least I am not an atheist, a heathen I might be) he would not allow his people to support an organization which believes there are many paths to God, quoting the Gospel of John 14:6  “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

As the president of the UUA Peter Morales claims:  “Belief is the enemy of religion… Religion is not about what you or I or Baptists or Catholics or Jews or Muslims or Hindus believe… We are so immersed in a culture that views religion as a matter of what people believe that we think this the way it has always been. It isn’t. As Karen Armstrong wrote …all of this emphasis on what someone believes is actually very modern and very western.” ("Beyond Belief", preached UU Church of Arlington VA, Feb. 2014)

We get so lost in our beliefs.  We get lost in our doctrines or even our cherished principles. This is not what religion is for.  Religion is for living out our faith of what is right and good in the world.  And more importantly, to do it with people who are not like you.  Because here is the brutal fact:  If we don’t start working aside other religious people to change the world, we will die in our little ghettos of belief.  We like being around people who are “like us”.  But young people who may even share our values aren’t coming here to be around people who go to church.  They are out in the world making a difference.  One of the organizations I work with, the Chalice Oak Foundation, a social justice group recently advertised for a new Executive Director, we got over 10 applications, all of them young people under forty, all changing the world and all but two having no religious affiliation at all.  Being around people just like us is killing us and our world.  We have to get beyond belief, and get into relationships with Jews and Muslims and Baptists and Buddhists and yes, even Mormons. On 9/11 many of us good meaning religious people will be out working for the common good; showing the world that we can love beyond belief.  Will you join us?

With Grace and Grit, John