by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given November 19, 2006

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come in this season of Thanksgiving

with open hearts,

with a longing to be made whole.

Bless us, we ask, in this hour together—

Come now, and let us worship together.

Sometimes there comes a moment in our lives when we decide “no more”—we can no longer go this way, whether it’s a career path we’ve chosen, or a relationship, or a way of living.  We just say, “Enough already!”

Such was a time on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks decided that she would break the law—she would sit her tired body down at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  Now in the South at this time, this was a provocative act, a dangerous act.  What could have brought her to behave this way at this time?  Legend has it that, when she was asked why she sat down, she said, “I was tired.”  But she didn’t mean just weary of body, aching of feet—no, she meant, “I was sick and tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.  I was soul-tired.” 

Now it should be noted that Rosa Parks was part of a community that had prepared her for this moment.  She had been trained in non-violent protest at the Hilander Folk School in Tennessee, where Martin Luther King, Jr., had also gone to learn.  And she had long been a member and had served as the secretary of her local chapter of the NAACP.  She did not, however, say to herself when she sat down, “I’m going to start the Civil Rights movement today.”  No, she simply said, “No more.  Enough.”  It was an existential moment of truth, and she did what she had to do.  This is what we mean by “integrity”—when something has integrity it is undivided, complete, unbroken.  She would be a divided person no more—she would claim her self, she would claim her wholeness.

This journey toward wholeness is a journey which invites every one of us, lest we squander our gifts and regret our days upon this earth.  What is the nature of this journey? 

Well, sometimes it starts when a door closes.  Sometimes it’s at our lowest moment, when we have lost what seems most precious, when we feel as if we’re in free fall, that we begin the movement toward our truest selves.  After all, we have to make space for the Holy, we have to make room for the new.  Certainly, it was that way with me. 

I was out of a marriage that could have kept me financially secure, I was out of my job as a social worker, thanks to the election of Ronald Reagan, and I had two young boys, two toddlers, to raise.  After considering going back to graduate school, I decided instead to go to seminary.  I had to have some means of supporting my family, and perhaps the ministry would enable me to give my children at least the basics.  But truthfully, when I went to interview at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, CA, I had no idea whether or not I would really become a minister.  When one of the professors asked me in the interview what my goal for my life was, I just said, “I want to be all used up.”  He said, “Well, parish ministry should do that for you.”

At any rate, now when I’m on an airplane, and somebody asks me what I do, and I say I’m a minister, sometimes that revelation is followed by a long and as they say, a “pregnant” silence.  And then the person sometimes asks, in hushed and reverent tones, “And how did you know that you were—you know, called, to the ministry.”  They are expecting a pious answer.  And I just say, “It was the money.”

Parker Palmer, in his book Let Your Life Speak,[1] which was the inspiration for this sermon, refers to what he calls the “true self”[2]; he says that the true self is not the ego self that wants to inflate itself, nor is it the intellectual self that wants to see itself as over and above the messy realities of living, nor even the ethical self that prides itself in living by some abstract moral code.  No, the true self is the self planted in us from the beginning, the self that wants “nothing more than to be what we were created to be.”[3]

As many of you know, I grew up with my grandparents in northern Louisiana.  They lived to be in their late 80s, lived to see their 67^th wedding anniversary.  They had seven children; many, many grandchildren; some great grandchildren; and even some great-great grandchildren.  When they died, I was a young adult, teaching in New Orleans at the time, and when I came back home for the funeral of my grandmother, who had died six months after my grandfather, the various children and grandchildren were given certain possessions from the home.  Somehow—and I still don’t know how—I was given my grandmother’s Bible, out of which she read out loud every single day, and I was given my grandfather’s pencil sharpener, which we kids had used all the years we were growing up.  I still remember us three kids being lined up, and my grandfather saying, “All right, confess—who sharpened the crayons in my pencil sharpener?”  So I got the Bible and the pencil sharpener, and I became—well, a minister and a writer.  Was that in me from the beginning?  Was that meant to be?  I don’t know, but it seems that way. 

Just let your life unfold—it sounds so simple, but not so.  You see, there are multiple voices, strong voices, telling you otherwise, shouting down that still, small voice within.  There may be your father’s voice telling you to “succeed,” on his terms, not your own.  There may be your mother’s voice, telling you to live her own unlived life.  There will be tradition, saying that certain roles are appropriate for you, while others are not, or certain ways of loving, or ways of speaking—that’s the way it must be, the voices say.  There may be religious teaching from the past that brings echoes of guilt.  There will be a consumer society at you constantly, a barrage of messages telling you that if you don’t have this, or look like that, you will most surely not be loved.

And so we end up so often hiding our truest selves, and moving away from the wholeness we were meant to be.  Because the voices that I spoke of are so strong, so adamant, we often choose to medicate ourselves, to numb out, for relief—your drug of choice could be, well, drugs or alcohol, or overwork, or shopping, or frantic movement from one activity to the next.  The good news, though, is that our God is a suasive God, calling us back to that wholeness.  You see, a divided self is always a wounded self, and we feel that woundedness in our very soul, and we feel that tugging back to wholeness and peace.  And every time we get in touch with what is real and what is true, it’s a little easier the next time to return to the wisdom of that inner voice.

The path I speak of this morning requires courage.  There will be practical hindrances, always, and there will be fears—fear of conflict, fear of rejection, fear of failure.

Parker Palmer tells a personal story that is instructive when we come to those tough places that we can’t seem to get through.

He says that in his early 40s he decided to go on an Outward Bound program.  He was kind of depressed, and he thought that the challenge of the program might shake him up, teach him a few things.  He chose a week-long course at Hurricane Island—the name itself, he says, should have warned him.  It was not called Pleasant Valley. 

Anyway, in the middle of the week, which included deep community, genuine growth, as well as a lot of fear, he found himself facing the challenge he feared the most.  One of the instructors backed him up to the edge of a cliff 110 feet above the ground, tied a very thin rope to his waist, and told him to start “rappelling” down the cliff.  “Just go!” the instructor said, in typical Outward Bound fashion.

So Parker went—and immediately slammed into a ledge, with bone-jarring force.  The instructor looked down at him.  “I don’t think you’ve quite got it,” he said.

“Right,” said Parker, being in no position to argue.  “So what am I supposed to do?”

“The only way to do this,” the instructor said, “is to lean back as far as you can—you have to get your body at right angles to the cliff.  It’s counterintuitive, but it’s the only way that works.”

Parker knew he was wrong, of course.  He knew that the trick was to hug the mountain, to stay as close to the rock face as he could.  So he tried it again—and slammed into the next ledge.  So then Parker decided to take that very big next step—he leaned back into empty space, his eyes fixed on the heavens in prayer, and started descending the rock face.  It worked!  He was gaining confidence with every step.

When he was about half-way down, another instructor called up from below:  “Parker, I think you’d better stop and see what’s just below your feet.”  Parker lowered his eyes very slowly and saw that he was approaching a great, deep hole in the side of the rock.  He knew he would need to change course to get around the hole, and he knew for a certainty that attempting to do that would lead directly to his death.  He froze, paralyzed with fear.

The second instructor let him hang there, trembling, in silence, for what seemed a very long time.  Finally she shouted up these helpful words: “Parker, is anything wrong?”

Parker writes that to this day, he does not know where his words came from, but twelve witnesses say that he spoke them.  In a high, squeaky voice, he said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then,” said the second instructor, “It’s time you learned the Outward Bound motto.”

“Great,” he thought.  “I’m about to die, and she’s giving me a motto!”

But then the instructor shouted ten words he says he hopes to never forget, words whose impact and meaning he can still feel.  She shouted, “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”  He says that the words completely bypassed his mind, went into his flesh, and animated his legs and feet.  His feet started to move, and in a few minutes he made it safely down.[4]

Why is it so important that we “get into it,” that we “stay with it”?  Two reasons.  The first is that we have to live with ourselves.  The only way to do that with any sense of peace and real joy is to have some modicum of self-respect.  I love the way Joan Didion says it in her classical essay “On Self-Respect.”  She writes: “However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.  Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”[5]

The other reason is that we live in relationship, to specific others and to the larger world.  And this world needs us, and needs our values. There is no “self” outside of relationship.  We are called to live responsibly within a network, both the human community of which we are a part and the eco-system that supports all of life.  We cannot be true to the larger context of our lives when we are not true to ourselves.  I think of the poet Rumi’s observation: “If you are here unfaithfully with us, you’re causing terrible damage.”  What does it mean to live faithfully, with yourself, and with others?  What does it mean to be faithful to an institution, and to keep that institution faithful?

In this Thanksgiving season, I feel so very thankful.  As I look out over this congregation today, I see so many who are living lives of faithfulness, of service.  I see so many who have gone their own way, and it hasn’t always been easy.  There’s the young mother who takes her two young children on the bus everywhere she goes because she wants to do her part to cut down on pollution.  There’s the man who has given up a more lucrative job in order to work to make our milk safe, safe for our children, and for all of us.  There’s the business woman who resigned from her six-figure corporation job to do free-lance work around business and ethics.  And I could go on and on. 

This is an amazing group of people.  I see you growing spiritually, becoming the persons you were meant to be.  This, after all, is what church is about, isn’t it?  Showing up, being real, struggling through the hard places, in community, that we might be faithful to our gifts, blessing those we encounter and blessing the larger world.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we come today thankful for this church and all those who come here to grow and to serve.  Staying true to ourselves is not easy, and so today we ask for courage.  When we feel lost, give us the faith that a door will open, and we will find a way through. Let us ever be true to the voice within, for we know that is how the Holy One speaks.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

In this season of Thanksgiving, ask yourself the one question that matters:  what is your whole being leaning toward?  How will you let your one precious life speak?

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Copyright 2006, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.