by Rev. Leela Sinha

A sermon given February 11, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

What a joy it is when the sun rises!

What a lovely un-surprise that this day

like every day

is lit with fire and the gladness of community;

What a sheer pleasure to be here once again

connected, interconnected, pleasantly tangled lives into lives.

Come, let us worship together.

We didn’t mean to get a chihuahua. 

I mean, we already had two fifteen-pound cats, plans to move cross-continent, change countries again … no time for a chihuahua.

Besides, a chihuahua?  We had dreams of a big dog one day, one day when we owned our house we thought, a rescue-league Samoyed or an eager SPCA mutt, one that might play catch and run laps in the dog park and ignore the cats, a big loveable mop of fur and sweet eyes.

It never crossed our minds to get a chihuahua.  Sure, we joked with our friends about stealing their chihuahua, delicate, energetic, all five and a half pounds of her.  But we didn’t mean it.  Our cats would eat her alive.  Our lives were too chaotic.  We wanted a big dog. 

But then we met Melody.  The conversion took about five minutes.

So right before we moved here, in the middle of changing jobs and changing houses and changing cultures, we adopted the sweetest seven pounds of sleek, chocolate-brown dog we had ever met.  (Don’t tell her sister.)  Like the kittens before her, she changed our lives.  Some changes are good, some are challenges.  But what she does, consistently and with grace is remind us to open our hearts.  After all, how angry can you get at a dog that fits in your pocket?  We had no idea we were adopting a lesson in love.  You just never know where the joy and beauty will find you...and it turns out she’s stronger than she looks.

I’ve been using much the same perspective this winter—looking for unexpected beauty and love and strength.  Portland is always beautiful, but in February when the skies are still gray and we’ve got a couple of months to go, we can use all the sweetness and hope we can get.

That’s what Imbolc is about, the neo-Pagan festival based on the ancient Celtic tradition for the beginning of February.  Eventually Imbolc became Candlemas and Groundhog Day, but the idea of returning light is an old theme: Imbolc celebrates the lengthening days—that first sign that spring is returning.  The ewes are pregnant, and the candles that were used for early morning and evening chores are stored away for another year.  It is the time when seeds start stirring in the earth, and the first of the flowers begin to make their way to the surface.  It is a time of knowing what is possible, even when you can’t see it.

Of course things will take their time.  But there is hope.

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a young Cockney gardener explains life on the English moors to a girl who grew up in India:

“Will there be roses?” she whispered. “Can you tell? I thought perhaps they were all dead.”

“Eh! No! Not them—not all of ‘em!” he answered. “Look here!”

He stepped over to the nearest tree—an old, old one with gray lichen all over its bark, but upholding a curtain of tangled sprays and branches. He took a thick knife out of his pocket and opened one of its blades.

“There’s lots o’ dead wood as ought to be cut out,” he said. “An’ there’s a lot o’ old wood, but it made some new last year. This here’s a new bit,” and he touched a shoot which looked brownish green instead of hard, dry gray. Mary touched it herself in an eager, reverent way.

“That one?” she said. “Is that one quite alive—quite?”
Dickon curved his wide smiling mouth.

“It’s as wick as you or me,” he said.

--Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, ch. 11.

This is a good time to start looking for growth.  The buds on the hawthorn bushes outside my window are swelling, ripening, promising leaves and another year of lush greenery.  The birdbath water is no longer frozen most mornings, and the birds are singing.  I may still need my coat, but I know spring is around here somewhere.  Soon.  It’s coming soon.

And I need that kind of shot in the arm.  I know that winter has its place; I know that longer nights and shorter days teach us to sleep more, to go inside more, to bond with family and to listen to ourselves.  Winter days are good for creating things, for drawing and painting and quilting and writing; winter days are good for fires, and late Saturday mornings with cocoa and hot tea.  But like Mary, I’m getting restless.  In fact, most people I know are getting restless.  We want to cheat the year, to shorten the cycle, to bring it on faster than it’s coming.  We want satisfaction, and we want it now.

Fortunately, we have crocuses.  Crocuses are those audacious plant-creatures that threaten to poke their heads out at the first hint of longer days and warmer soil.  They make bright streaks on otherwise stark and brilliant landscapes, smudging purple and green and gold anywhere the sun slips between winter’s shadows.

They are the prophets of the season’s change, trumpeting hope and telegraphing warm soil.  They see possibilities, and they grow into them. 

…and we Unitarian Universalists are much more crocus than rose.  We are takers of risks, writers of histories, envisioners of futures.  We are often able to become more than we could even imagine by poking our heads out of the frozen ground.  Audacity serves us well—we have become the people that we are thanks to a long tradition of challenge and thinking outside of the box.  Starting with Origen’s second-century speculations about universal salvation we have consistently pushed the edges of possibility in the contexts within which we operate.  Those edges have given us access to congregational polity, to universal salvation, to Unitarian theology, to transcendentalism, to women in ministry, to humanism, to earth-centered spirituality, to free pulpits and free pews—in short, to much of what makes us who we are.  This free-thinking, radical religion doesn’t spring up out of nowhere—we stand firmly on the shoulders of those before us in a long line of liberal religious thinkers, and we can be proud of that heritage, as long as we continue to claim it. 

We make it a habit to see possibilities.

Now sometimes that makes us too nice—too gentle—we become afraid to say clearly who we are, for fear that we will eliminate the possibility of including or becoming someone else.  But the fact is, we are not quite so identity-less as we seem.  The “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” does not lead just anywhere.  Within our congregations, in these communities, it seems to lead consistently to the principles that we affirm and promote: everything from individual dignity to democracy, to interdependence.  There is something about who we are and how we search that brings our searches together; there are things we can say about ourselves as a community, if only we will have courage to say them.

There’s an old story that

Travelers across a long and seldom-used trail in Nevada’s Amargosa Desert would pass an old pump that offered the only hope of fresh drinking water along their journey. Wired to the pump handle was a baking powder can, and inside the can was a handwritten note:

“This pump is all right as of June 1932. I put a new sucker washer into it, and it ought to last five years. But the washer dries out, and the pump has got to be primed. Under the white rock, I buried a bottle of water out of the sun, the cork end up. There’s enough water in it to prime the pump, but not if you drink some first. Pour about one-fourth and let her soak to wet the leather. Then pour in the rest medium fast and pump like crazy. You’ll git water. The well has never run dry. Have faith. When you git watered up, fill the bottle and put it back like you found it for the next feller. (Signed) Desert Pete. P.S. Don’t go drinking up the water first. Prime the pump with it and you’ll git all you can hold.” (from Dare to Live Now, a book by Bruce Larson)

--from the writing of John Biedler, minister of UUFD in Decatur, IL

As far as I can tell, that’s even a true story.  Referencing and cross-referencing give it about as much credibility as an old oral tradition can have.  So I believe it.  After all, that’s how we all survive, by interconnection; by cooperation; by right-living.  It is the story of our lives.

When we are tired, when we are discouraged, when we are alone and our greatest hopes look tattered and worn, we are here to lift each other up.  We are here to know better.  We are here to see straight through the dry dust into the limitless well of possibilities.  We are people with divining rods walking the desert in search of water, and we can take the muddy dregs from under the rock and say out loud, “I know there is more within you!  I know there is hope beneath this despair!  I know you are more than you believe you can be—take this water and bring yourself to life, because we need more than a single, stale bottle—this world needs all that you can give, needs all that you can become.  Soak it in and reach deep inside because you have not run dry and I know we need every life-giving drop to heal this weary world.  Let the water flow freely, for you have it to give.”

And that, my friends, is what we are about.  Now lifting each other up, calling out the amazing possibilities, is not always easy work.  It is not always gentle work.  It is not work for the weak, for the tired, for the suffering.  But some days, that’s all that we have here.  We are all hurting sometimes.  We are all exhausted sometimes.  We are none of us at our best every day—that’s not the way life works.  But I’ll tell you the truth: lifting up other people is often easier than lifting up ourselves.  I can see that cool, clear lake under your feet when I cannot see it under mine, and so I must reach out and lift you up, call you to be your most blessed and brilliant self and hope that if I pour that last cup into your well, if I take your talent and your gifts and wash them through your veins, that your new strength will flow into the community, and that some how, some way, I will be lifted up, too.  This is why we gather in our congregations, on Sunday mornings and Friday afternoons and Wednesday evenings.  This is why we get ourselves out of bed and up from the table to come here and share the people that we are, and the people we are becoming.  Even when we are tired.  Even when we are in pain.  And what we do when we are kind and graceful with each other, when we are gentle and comforting, what we do is we build up a kind of sweetness.  We build up a kind of trust.  We build up a way of being together that calls to us, that speaks to us, that allows us later to say those true and hard things that go with lifting our people up out of their despair and bringing them back into life.  Because this ungentle, challenging work is about speaking a kind of truth that we don’t always want to hear.

We don’t want to hear that we are brilliant, that we are talented, that we have untapped aquifers beneath our cracked and dusty surface.  We don’t want to know that, sometimes.  We don’t want to hear it sometimes.  We don’t want our companions on this life-journey to speak that truth to us.  Do you know why?  Because we don’t want the responsibility of living up to our potential, living into our hopes and dreams and possibilities.  We don’t want to hear that we can change the world, because then we might have to do something about it, and this world right now, it needs a lot of changing.  It needs a lot of fixing.  It needs a lot of someones with somethings-special to step up and take on the challenge.  

And we, we are tired.  We are weary.  We don’t always want to do the work that we know we need to do.

But—but we know we need to do it.  We know we need to step up, to stick our necks out, to become those overflowing wells of water in the desert that this world is trying to become.  We know we cannot let that happen, because there are seeds in this desert, people, there are seeds buried under every rock, in every nook and cranny, there are bottles buried next to wells all over this barren land and we hold a key that can unlock them.  Do we hold the only key?  No.  Do we hold the best key?  There is no best or worst, there is no hierarchy of keys, but do we hold a key?  A good key?  A key that would work?  Do we have a bottle and a well and some good instructions?  Do we have hope that there is water under our feet?  Do we see a need?  Do we see that need and can we do something?  YES, yes we can.

We will make change inside us that we might make change around us.

It is our history to take that chance, to pour that water down the well and pump like mad.  It is our living heritage, and our gift to the world that we know the possibilities and we live them into being. 

And so we will.

Blessed be.

And amen.

CLOSING PRAYER

Oh let the light return

for too long have we begun and ended our days

without sun.

Let the days lengthen and strengthen

may we turn outward once again

may we reach for each other

may we give to each other

for we are linked one to another

until the end of our days.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2007, Rev. Leela Sinha. All rights reserved.