A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, September 15, 2002

Flawed humans though we are,
come Yom Kippur we have a moment
to turn God’s mirror on ourselves, if there is a God.
Or it is a moment to think about something
larger than everyday life,
to contemplate obligations to other people,
to regret our failures, to renounce our shallowness.
Within all the nattering activity, this day is a silent space.
In a whole year of watching the rain fall,
one day to dwell inside the water droplet,
small and fragile,
resolving to be better before the next deluge of daily life.

- Elizabeth Erlich,
Miriam’s Kitchen.

I sat up one nite walkin a boardin house
screamin/ cryin/ the ghost of another woman
who waz missin what I waz missin
I wanted to jump up outta my bones
& be done wit myself
leave me alone
& go on in the wind
it waz too much
I felt a numbness
til the only tree I cd see
took me up in her branches
held me in the breeze
made me dawn dew
that chill at daybreak
the sun wrapped me up swingin rose light everywhere
the sky laid over me like a million men
I waz cold/ I waz burnin up/ a child
& endlessly weavin garments for the moon
wit my tears

I found god in myself
& I loved her/ I loved her fiercely

Ntozake Shange
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.

Sermon:  Another Beginning

            In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard describes a young girl, born blind, who through surgery had recovered her sight.  Although she could now see, she was only beginning to learn to make sense of what she saw.  Seeing the sun behind a tree, she described "the tree with the lights in it."  Dillard searched for a long time, scanning the forests, but it was years before she looked up sideways and, startled, saw “the tree with the lights.”

            The Jewish New Year is a season of renewal, of beginnings, of transformations.  Rosh Hashanah is traditionally the anniversary of creation, and during its days people and communities renew themselves in spirit and in relationship to one another and to the world.  This is a time for seeking forgiveness, repaying and forgiving debts, coming into right relationship.  The anniversary is another beginning, another kind of creation, a new way of seeing and being.

            I was in some sense dreading this particular Yom Kippur, since I received the news not long ago that my Jewish grandfather, who had been hospitalized some weeks before, was dying, and my grandmother had, after 68 years of marriage, made the difficult decision to place him on comfort care and let him go.  My grandmother was handling it as well as could be expected - she still went to Rosh Hashanah dinners, spent what time she was able with him, and began to reorder her life.  We spoke on the phone about the meaning of this season, about beginnings and renewals, and a sense that while something was ending, something was also beginning.  Still, I carried a heavy heart.

            Renewal takes many forms, though.  Within two days of our phone call, my grandfather's pneumonia had cleared and he was on his way home.  "You should have seen how quickly he walked up those stairs," said my grandmother, and we agreed that he is, at heart, "a stubborn old guy."  He is now back to planning the seventieth anniversary party to be held in two years.  "When we talked about new beginnings, Grandma," I said, "I didn't expect this!  Not that I’m complaining"

            There are times when we wake up and the world is changed, and there are times when we wake up and see the world in a different way.  We open ourselves to possibilities, to realities, to ways of being that in the past we had closed off.  Anything might cause it, but all of a sudden, destiny is rewritten, and we are no longer bound to inevitable fate of personality or life.

            We look up and see not the sun behind the tree, but a tree with lights in it.

            Much change is outside of our control, but the most important changes are internal.  Sometimes the only thing that has changed is our way of being in the world.  Indeed, if the world were to change and we to remain the same, what kind of transformation would this be?

            Have you ever gone through an experience that left you undeniably transformed or renewed?  It could be something as simple as the discovery of a new love, or the sudden reminder of Autumn’s beauty.

            Have you ever seen the tree with the lights in it?

            Such experiences are powerful, and occasionally painful.  Sometimes we are jarred out of our complacency by hardship or tragedy.  When we face such difficulties in life or community, the question left is that of our response.  Do we hold on to our old ways of being, paralyzed by the fear that if we were to change, then we would somehow compromise our integrity?  Or do we allow ourselves to grow and change with the world around us?

            It sounds easier than it is, I know.  I have a bumper sticker on my refrigerator that says, “Oh no, not another learning opportunity!”   Even when life is going very well, there are times when we can be overwhelmed.

            I felt that way early last August.  I had picked up and moved 500 miles to become the new minister of a dynamic fellowship, four times the size of my last settlement! It was and is a wonderful feeling, but it was also a tremendous change, and it was up to me to meet that change by looking inward, taking moments of reflection, and discovering how this beginning in my career would become a beginning in spirit.  (I’m settling in well now.)

            Communities, too, experience new beginnings.  Just as I knew another beginning in coming here, you know another beginning in welcoming and installing a new settled minister.  But that is just one of the fast and furiously paced changes at BuxMont during the last few years – with three ministers, two DREs, a new building, and now even new banking opportunities!

            If we take these kinds of changes as reasons to grow, then we find renewal along with change.  We allow ourselves to experience the recreation of the newness of things.

            The festival of Yom Kippur, though, does not come whenever we have a large scale change in our lives.  It comes once per year, an encouragement to stop and look more deeply at ourselves, to atone for our wrongs and renew ourselves, not because the world has necessarily changed, but because we are growing, living people.  Yom Kippur means, “The Day of Atonement.”

            I know atonement is a difficult word for Unitarian Universalists.  It ranks right up there with “sin.”  But there are advantages in words like “atonement.”  For example - most denominations have readings in the backs of their hymnals labeled “confessions” and some labeled “absolutions.”  Looking over our hymnal one day, I was startled to discover we had confessions but no absolutions!  There I was, a UU minister, and I found myself saying, “What kind of religion is this?  We get to hit ourselves over the head with our personal or collective guilt, but we never have the chance to say, ‘that’s okay, I forgive you; I forgive myself?’  In some peculiar way, had we out-Calvined the Calvinists?”

            Okay, so maybe it was just an oversight.  But it points to a deep seated need in religion and in life.  We have covenanted as Unitarian Universalists to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every human being.  Part of renewing our sense of dignity and renewing our lives is finding some process of atonement, some way of coming to peace with our errors and our wrongs.

            If you take the word atonement apart, it isn’t nearly so threatening.  It is simply at-one-ment.  It is the re-establishment of relationship where there has been alienation.

            There are times in every life when we feel alienated from people we love, or people around us, or ourselves, or from the world as a whole.  Perhaps we feel alienated from God.  Maybe we have been wronged, or we have behaved in some way that embarrasses or shames us.  Maybe we simply have not lived up to the expectations we place on ourselves.

            The miracle of Yom Kippur is that we can renew our lives, our souls, our spirits.  We can discover within our flawed selves something greater, that begins to meet our aspirations.  It is only a beginning; we have far to go.  But it can be start of something great.

            We cannot experience this if we do not make a point of recognizing our failures, our flaws, our imperfections.

            It is true for us as individuals and in community; if Yom Kippur teaches us no other lesson, it teaches us that depth of spirit requires that kind of honesty – with ourselves and with others.  We cannot atone for that which we do not see, nor can we forgive what we refuse to admit.  And if we neither admit nor atone, nor forgive, we will forever be separated from that greater “at-one-ment” that is the goal of this day.

            Ntozake Shange writes eloquently of her profound experience of alienation from the world and from her own spirit.  “I wanted to jump outta my bones & be done wit myself.”  And yet, through that experience of alienation came a moment of profound connection, deep at-one-ment.  “I found god in myself & I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.”

            With all the imperfections, all the pain of abuse coming from without and within, she found god in herself and loved her fiercely.

            That kind of renewal may come at the most unexpected times.  I think of the beauty so many of us found in community last year in the weeks following September 11.  We were in shock – so much so, perhaps, that some of us were a little numb to the horrors going on around us.

            This week I’ve intentionally watched some of the retrospective TV coverage of the attacks.  I realize that I’m doing this at a time when many are just trying to avoid it – but I didn’t have any TV reception at the time; I heard the whole thing over the radio.  I never saw the towers collapse until last Tuesday.  As I watched last week, my heart pounding with anticipation of the terror I was about to see, I was transported back to the feeling of September 11 a year ago.

            And I realized how far we’d come, and how far we’d failed to come.

            I remembered the vigils in churches and street corners for a week afterwards.  I remembered people who would never eat in the same restaurant, if they could avoid it, singing together.  But I also remember the bombs that we dropped – for good or for ill – on Afghanistan.  And I listen today to the martial drums of war sounding louder and louder and it frightens me.  We have learned so much, but we have so much more to learn.

            If a person or a community is to be at one with the world, and thus with the divine, we must honestly face our fallibility and find our humility.  We may choose to act in decisive ways, but if they are the old ways, then we need to examine them closely.  Are we truly renewed, or are we mired in a past too quickly forgotten and too tightly grasped?

            To put it more simply – if you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

            But hopelessness is often an illusion.  Our barriers are often the limitations of our own habits.  We can find renewal and change, though it may not be easy when events push or pull us in directions that are hard to discern, let alone control.  In every point in our lives we have choices.

            One of the most hopeful images I’ve heard lately comes from a song, written by Len Chandler in the 1960s, in which he coined the phrase “Keep on keepin’ on.”  In the last verse, Chandler raises the image of two ships in a harbor sailing in opposite directions.

            One ship sails east and the other sails west
            While the very same breezes blow
            It’s the set of the sail and not the gale
            That bids them where to go
            And like the ships of the sea is the way of our fate
            The seas are getting stormy and the hour’s getting late
            If the ship starts seeping water you know how to bail
            You can’t change the weather
            but you sure can change the sail
            And the harbor looks much better
            when you’ve made it through a  gale.
            So I guess I gotta keep on keepin’ on.

To choose the sail to set as we face imperfection, whether our own or another’s, and try to come again to at-one-ment is not easy.  In Judaism, God grants forgiveness on Yom Kippur, but only if forgiveness has been sought and received from people first.  That means we have to be able to identify the source of our separation.  It means introspection, and it means taking responsibility.

            There were once two brothers who hadn’t spoken to each other for twenty years.  They had argued over the ownership of a wheelbarrow, and eventually stopped talking.  When a new minister came to their church, he decided this was a terrible shame.  He said to one of the brothers, “Listen, I’m not a gambling man, but I’d like to make a bet with you.  I’ll bet you five dollars that the next time you see your brother, if you speak to him, he’ll speak to you and the fight will be off.  The man said to the preacher, “You’re on.”  Just then his brother came down the street, and he spoke to him.  Hollered at him.  He said, “Give me back my wheelbarrow, you gol-durned thief!  Then he turned to the minister and said, “You lose.”

            We can choose to reconnect, renew, and atone, but they have to be real choices and real changes.  I’m not talking about simply doing the same things in a different way.

            I’m talking about the tree with in lights in it.

            Every moment, if we are awake to it, is another beginning.  Every instant is a recreation of possibility and of hope.  As existence unfolds, in every moment we have choices; we have the ability to set our sail.

            Though we are shaped by the past, we are in no way bound by it.  “The past,” as H. G. Wells once wrote, “is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”  His essay was entitled “The Discovery of the Future” and it was aptly named.  When we allow ourselves to look honestly at ourselves, our relationships, our community and our society, we become open to the discovery of the future, to a renewal, a recreation, another beginning, a dawn of hope and possibility and promise. 

            Yes, it means commitment on our part.  If the atonement of our heart is true, and if the renewal of our spirit is real, than our every relationship will be changed.  The more we grow in this way, the more we will look outside of ourselves and of our disparate communities, the closer we will come to wholeness.  As we come closer to wholeness, we begin to bind the wounds of humanity and of our planet.  We become healers.

            At the end of many Yom Kippur services, the cantor or the rabbi will read from the Book of Isaiah.  In the 58th chapter, God, speaking to Isaiah, condemns the practice of fasting on the sabbath.  Instead, God tells us (and this is the passage they read):

This is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
to break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

            Let this be our atonement – that we look deeply and honestly within and make the choice to be, as best we are able, the giving and growing people and community we wish to be.  Then, renewed in spirit, may we begin again to build a land of wholeness and possibility.

“What we call a beginning
is often the end,
and to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
May every moment begin in hope.