Show us how to love.
We must learn how to love.
Amen to that.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
This holiday calls us to express the love that we feel…and I am a “love preacher”…what better topic could there be?
This holiday has theological resonance too.
I remember when I was in elementary school…and this is still done in some schools today…
I remember getting these sheets of small Valentine’s Day “wishes”…small cards with “Be My Valentine” and “I Like You” and “From Your Valentine” printed on them… There must have been a dozen of them to a sheet…
You cut them apart…
And wrote the name of each child in your class on one of them.
The teacher would collect all these small cards and sort them…
And then each child would go home with a Valentine’s Day wish from every other child.
You’d have a bag full of them.
I didn’t think about it this way then but it was very Universalist. Each child worthy. Each child recognized and named. Each child loved.
Each child had the proof in that bag of Valentine’s Day wishes.
Valentine’s Day has long been taken over…its been colonized…by the card companies and the candy makers. You could easily think Valentine’s Day is all about romantic love.
But the original Saint Valentine was not just a lover struck by one of Cupid’s arrows.
The original Valentine was a priest in Roman Italy…actually one of three priests named Valentine…it was a popular name back then…all of them became martyrs for proclaiming their Christian faith.
Here is an image of one of the Valentines. Looks…unlikely … as a target for Cupid, don’t you think? But who are we to say. We do believe in the power of love.
And the stories about the Valentines redeem them for us…at least they help.
Remember, all stories are true and some actually happened.
One story is that Saint Valentine performed secret marriages for soldiers…because the emperor thought that unmarried men made more aggressive soldiers…so he made it illegal for soldiers to get married.
In our church we know how important being able to marry the person you love is. I like that story about old Valentine.
Another story is that Valentine helped inmates escape from harsh Roman prisons where they were unjustly held and badly mistreated.
We know something in our time about how people can be put in prison unjustly, especially People of Color. I like that story too.
There is even a story about Saint Valentine, when he was in prison himself, falling in love with his jailor’s daughter and sending her a message that he signed, “From your Valentine.” Like the message on some of those cards I exchanged in elementary school.
Valentine was named a Saint because he defended his religion, when his faith, Christianity, was under attack by the Roman Empire.
He was named a saint because the church wanted people to remember the way he defended the church. They wanted people to remember his life as a good way to live. They wanted him to be an exemplar. So they made him a saint.
(This was before Popes took on the job of elevating individuals to sainthood. Saints, originally, were named by the vox populi…the voice of the people.)
In many religions, saints are people who are known to be exceptionally spiritual or holy. People who seem “close to God.”
We might say that the Spirit of Life and of Love is strong in them.
Other religions believe that all people become saints when they die.
Almost all religions have some way to honor lives that are truly exemplary…lives that that religion holds up as examples to be followed…examples of what it means to live a good life.
Jews call these individuals Tzadik, Muslims call them Wali. In the Sikh and Hindu faiths they are Gurus. Buddhists called them Bodhisattvas. In Santeria, from West Africa, they are called the Eggun.
Different names for individuals who are to be honored for the way they lived. Ancestors that are to be held up as examples and remembered.
And whether those religions believe these people have some special power, they almost all are considered teachers…teachers whose lesson is about how to live.
Of this Valentine’s Day, it is good to tell those you love that you love them. For me, that is a good enough reason to hold up old Saint Valentine…whoever he actually was.
Saints. Ancestors who can help us find our way in a complicated world.
What I know is that who you hold up as exemplars, and the stories you tell about them, says a great deal about what you value.
These days, the accelerating pace of vaccinations to protect against the Covid virus is a source of hope…hope that the worst of the pandemic just may be behind us…hope that our lives might soon begin to move toward some sense of whatever normal will come to mean.
Vaccination, we hope, will change our lives.
If you google the question of who invented vaccination, who developed that technique to prevent viral infections, Edward Jenner’s name comes up. Jenner was a country doctor…we would call him a “provider” or a clinician today…in 18th century England. And, according to Wikipedia, he created the world’s first vaccine and performed the world’s first inoculation in 1796.
What he demonstrated was that introducing live Cowpox virus, a similar but mild version of smallpox that infected cattle, prevented humans from contracting the more severe disease. In fact, it was Jenner who christened the procedure ”vaccination”…from vacca, the Latin word for cow.
But the principle of inoculation by introducing small amounts of virus into the human body so that anti-bodies would develop…
That approach was first recorded in China…in about the year 1000 (CE), 800 years before Jenner. It was popular in Turkey and Central Asia in the 16th century, 200 years before. And it became known in the American colonies long before Dr. Jenner.
And the knowledge came from an African slave.
Slavery, of course, was common throughout what would become the United States, not just in the American south. William Ellery Channing, whom we call the father of American Unitarianism, came from a slave owning family in Rhode Island.
In 1706, the famous Congregational minister, Cotton Mather, was given a gift by his congregation… an African slave whom he christened Onesimus, after a slave that the Bible recounts as belonging to Saint Paul.
That minister had a tendency to the grandiose.
Mather had studied medicine before entering the ministry and at one point asked his slave if he had every had smallpox.
Onesimus answered “Yes and No.”
He explained that in Africa it was common to be inoculated with a small amount of smallpox (literally a tiny amount of the pus from someone with the disease…sorry for the graphic description), which gave them a mild case of the disease…most of the time…but left them immune.
Onesimus showed Mather his scar. Many of us have one on our arms.
Mather asked other Africans in Boston and realized that the practice was widespread in Africa. So, when a smallpox epidemic struck Boston in 1721, Mather promoted this process of inoculation.
Mather was attacked with racial slurs for his “Negroish” thinking. One Bostonian threw a bomb through Mather’s window with a note that read: “Cotton Mather, you dog, (expletive deleted), I inoculate you with this, with a Pox on you.”
That sentiment, “A pox upon you,” comes down to us from that Boston smallpox epidemic and that incident.
Despite the pushback some Bostonians agreed to be inoculated. And when the epidemic finally subsided, almost 6000 Bostonians had contracted the disease, about half the population of the town. One in seven of them had died. But of the 242 persons who had been inoculated, only six died…one in forty.
Well, I was intrigued when I came across this story in an article at the history.com website, and I began doing a little more research. We are all becoming mini-experts on vaccines and viruses these days.
But I was already thinking about this sermon. I asked myself, who should we hold up as an ancestor? Edward Jenner, who did demonstrate and document and publicize the life-saving technique of inoculation. And, to his credit, pursued the then “crazy” idea that Cowpox and smallpox were related diseases.
Should we hold up Jenner who, of course, is European American… white… and in the tradition of western medical science.
Or should we be holding up Onesimus and African medical wisdom…in a different scientific tradition…that saved all those lives in Boston? And should we be exploring how much Jenner knew about and learned from the African and Asian traditions of inoculation.
What we hold up says a lot about what we value.
The saints we name and the ancestors we recognize say as much about us as it does about them.
It is, after all, not only Valentine’s Day but also Black History Month.
This is a time to lift up the stories and the contributions of people of African descent, and I would argue also the stories and the contributions of all those not included in the “official” narrative of this nation.
We need to claim and reclaim the stories of those who have been excluded…like Onesimus and the African and Asian wisdom that his story highlights.
And, you know, I could just ask to get an amen now… just leave the sermon right there. Another Black contributor to our life today. Another black name for you to remember.
There will be many sermons preached this month to celebrate the contributions of those of African descent. To celebrate the stories and the lives of Indigenous and other People of Color perhaps too. Most of those communities do not have a nationally celebrated month of their own.
Many preachers would be content to mourn the loss of trans lives when we host the Trans Day of Remembrance. And to acknowledge the contributions of disabled persons when we celebrate the passage of the ADA. Content to highlight the value of immigrant lives when the effort is announced to unify families torn apart at our border. Or applaud the first female identified Vice-President. Female Vice-President of Color.
But, I have to tell you, that that still feels like living with our spirits segregated and our attention siloed. Like those “special” stories are nice, perhaps that they are even important…but they still feel like extras, add-ons to the real story, the central narrative.
Perhaps this is a stage on our journey. Perhaps we are not ready to move beyond this kind of “add-on” approach that leaves the official narrative laregly unchanged.
Valentine’s Day and Black History Month. There is a lot to preach.
In addition to all of that, our spiritual theme is Wholeness this month.
Wholeness.
How does the notion of wholeness, the hope for wholeness play in here? How does this all connect?
Would wholeness require…somehow…that the master story, the master narrative itself begin to change? That all of those add-ons, those extras…need to become part of the story we tell not just on their special days or in their special month…if they are lucky enough to have one.
That we need to know a story in which we all have a place…in which we all recognize ourselves…and not just as the heroes of the piece…and certainly not just as the villains…
I believe that imagining such an embracing story raises anxiety for some…that it seems to threaten loss for some of us who have never had a problem seeing themselves in that confident master narrative…
But wholeness, I believe, is not about removing treasured stories that we love. Wholeness is not about discarding, it is about embracing.
Wholeness would ask us to honor Dr. Jenner for his contributions…which were real…but his story is not all that needs telling.
Wholeness would honor Dr. Jenner AND honor the medical wisdom from non-European parts of the planet.
Think of it…think of it in terms of medical care. I take full advantage of western medicine. I get the lab work done and take the prescriptions when my doctors prescribes them …I’m faithful about that.
But I also can’t wait until I can return to my Chinese deep massage therapy. And acupuncture.
Wholeness asks us to hold the value of both…
In the medical realm a lot of us do this already. What kind of a story would we tell if we did that in every part of our lives?
I offered the message for the Family Worship earlier this morning…using some of the stories about Saint Valentine that I shared with you.
When I tried to describe wholeness for that service, I thought long and hard, looking for the right way to talk about it. Because I did not want to leave the impression that wholeness is about perfection. I was clear that I did not want to communicate that.
What I decided to say to them was this:
That wholeness was about all that we need to hold. Our past and the ancestors, the saints that we would name. Our past.
Our present hopes and challenges, and the future that is still unfolding for us.
I said that wholeness called us to hold all of that AND to share love, for ourselves, for those around us and even for those who came before us…sharing love and gratitude for all the saints.
We remember because “it is an easy thing to forget” that we are not the first to suffer or to celebrate.
We remember because we are descended from saints…and gurus and bodishatvas and eggun.
We are memoried and storied creatures. And so is our culture.
There is a world of wholeness that beckons us. May we move forward, together, toward that vision and with that love.
Topics: Wholeness