Let my love be heard whispering in your angel wings.
As grief once more mounts to heaven and sings…
Let my love be heard.
Knowing the truth of grief and loss…
Achingly aware of disappointment in ourselves
And in our world,
And yearning for a certainty that remains
Always beyond our reach,..
Let my love be heard…
Whispered in the wings of angels.
Let my love be heard.
Howard Thurman speaks of life being saved by the singing of angels.
“There must be always remaining in everyone’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful. … The commonplace is shot through with new glory; old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. … Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.”
Let my love be heard whispering in your wings.
But…how many of us believe in angels?
Honestly?
We are such rationalists, most of us. Our intellect, our ability to think things through is one of our great strengths.
Angels? We can be moved by this poetry… Perhaps we are able to imagine angels as metaphors…but our rational processors, our left brains, seem always to be whirring in the background, ready to step in and discount such ephemeral thoughts…
We can suspend disbelief for a while…
But we are the people who speak of reason in religion, and have since William Ellery Channing preached that famous sermon in Baltimore in 1828. He preached that reason was a defining value of this Unitarian faith.
Angels?…right.
It is a hard enough task proving, even to ourselves or perhaps especially to ourselves, that love is real. There is so much evidence to the contrary. So much proof that hatred and greed are winning out…especially in these days.
Confident promises of a brighter coming day, some future “coming of the Kingdom” just do not ring true.
Rick Warren is a megachurch pastor. Many of you have heard of him. I’ll bet some of you have read his book, The Purpose Driven Life. Almost 40 million copies in print.
A few years ago, I heard Rick and his wife, Kay, being interviewed about their son’s death. Mathew Warren committed suicide…in his late 20’s. The young man had mental health issues. He had received all the care he would accept, but he had managed to buy a gun…as anyone can if they work at it…and, eventually, he used it. It was a tragedy like so many we too easily forget in the public debate about guns.
Rick Warren was asked how he had dealt with that loss and how he could still proclaim Good News from his pulpit.
Warren’s response was that the loss had been devastating. He and his wife spoke of weeping every day. He did not deny the impact of the loss on his life.
But he said that his faith saw him through. He spoke of his faith and the role of his faith community, where he could be confident that “his past, his present and his future were assured.’ Those are his words: “My past, my present and my future are assured.”
A faith and a community where his sins, his past, could be forgiven. Where he could know a purpose for his life…in the present. And where he could trust that there was a place for him when he would die…just as there was a place for his son.
Confidently assured.
His words were rehearsed, of course. He had preached this sermon before…but not to himself and for himself.
As I listened, my brain wanted to critique his theology because his theology is not mine. I wanted to criticize and dispute his belief…but my heart…well, I found my heart envying his confidence.
I found myself yearning for his confidence.
And I realized that I was asking myself whether the best I could offer up, if I had to answer that question about the good News, would be to say: “Well, we make no promises about that. There is no guarantee. It depends?”
There is a story…some of you may know this one…
There once was a Chinese farmer, who had a horse, and a little land and a family to feed. He was not well off, but, like his neighbors, he managed…barely, as long as most things went fairly well.
One day, someone left the barn door open, and the horse… which was their only means of running the pump, plowing the field, or riding to town…ran away. When news of this event got out, the neighbors came over to commiserate. “Oh, how awful that your only horse ran away,” they said. “How will you manage?” But the farmer was a philosophical sort…a Buddhist perhaps…very non-attached. He answered his neighbors, “Maybe its good, maybe its bad…it depends…we’ll see.”
Well, lo and behold, the next day, the horse came back from the forest with several wild horses following behind. When news of this miracle spread, the neighbors all came around to congratulate the farmer. But the farmer was a philosophical sort: “Maybe its good. Maybe its bad. It depends. We’ll see.”
The next day, the farmer’s only son went out to the corral to break in the new horses, and one of the horses kicked him and broke his leg. The neighbors all came round with casseroles and commiseration, but all the farmer would say was…Maybe its good. Maybe its bad. We’ll see. And the neighbors went away, shaking their heads.
But a week later, war broke out in the empire, and the emperor’s soldiers came looking for conscripts, and of course, they passed up the farmer’s son with the broken leg.
After the soldiers had left town, the neighbors crept over to the farmer’s house to congratulate him on his luck, but…well…you know what he said…
Maybe its good. Maybe its bad. We’ll see.”
It depends.
It is a challenge, I think, to embrace a theology, a way of understanding the world and our place in it…it is a challenge to embrace a theology that does not offer certainty.
Our liberal religious theology is more than anything else, a theology of process, not of certainty.
Rebecca Parker, in our responsive reading, writes of a love that hasn’t broken faith with us and never will. That is a statement of faith if I have ever heard one.
Because this is a love, a higher power, God if you are comfortable with that language… this is a love that we know does not always win…
We believe…I believe…that that love is always available to us…in some sense is waiting for us to approach, to invoke it , to call it by name and try to embody it…
It is available to us.
But it does not promise victory.
Will we be successful? Can we promise that things will turn out right in the end? Well, it depends.
What confidence can we offer in this community?
Every week, in this sanctuary, we share the joys and sorrows of members of this community. We name deaths and illnesses, losses and grief’s…every week. We are a community that is always grieving.
We are always saying goodbye.
And every week we also name births and weddings. We celebrate graduations and welcome visitors and new members. We bless those who serve and those who are served. We are also a community that is always celebrating.
Always grieving. Always celebrating.
What do we offer?
Not certainty, but presence. Central to what we offer and what we do is to offer presence.
We call it religious witness when we are present to the brokenness of the world in the public square…we think of religious witness as our looking outward and helping to bend that arc of the universe toward justice…as we were yesterday at the Wear Orange event against gun violence where I spoke. First Unitarian was well represented…by our soul boxes, our banner and by many of you.
But the presence we offer every Sunday and every day to one another is also a practice of religious witness. We promise to be present to one another as we are…not just as we might hope to be … or as we might present ourselves as being…
We promise to be present to the real experience of life…because that is the life we are living…in all of its ups and downs…in all of its joy and its sorrow…in triumph and sometimes in despair.
We promise to offer presence.
We also promise our attention…we promise to notice…to notice the brokenness around us…the oppression and the inequality…the ways we are pressed down and the way those around us are pressed down.
We promise to not close our eyes and ears and hearts to real, lived experience. We promise not to pretend.
We promise to be present and to pay attention to what we know to be true and real and human.
If we can be said to have faith…and I think we can…that faith is that we will find enough goodness and rightness in what is real and what can become real…to see us through.
If we can be said to have faith…and I think we can…that faith is not only that our presence and our attention can be support enough and comfort enough and nurture enough for our spirits…and those are not small things…
But our faith is also that…if we can support one another in living as if love were real…we will, somehow, miraculously make that true.
This business of living without certainty…of living by faith… is not for the faint of heart.
Author Kim Stafford tells the story of teaching writing at Jefferson High School, of having an elaborate plan to help his students learn how to write essays. He received a letter just before leaving for school from a teacher friend in Idaho, named Reva. The letter was rushed and teared stained.
Quoting Stafford: “Reva’s student Mark, she wrote, had been driving north from Boise to his home on the … reservation when he stopped to help two men beside a gold Cadillac in the ditch. When he stopped, they killed him, and took his truck. They were escaped convicts, Reva said, and had pushed their stolen car into the ditch when it ran out of gas, and waited beside it for the first Good Samaritan.
When Mark first came to my class, Reva wrote, “he was not the kind of person who would stop to help anyone. My teaching made him more kind—and that got him killed. How can I keep on teaching? Why would I?”
“When I got to [school],” Stafford writes, “I set my teaching plan aside. With shaking hands, I read Reva’s letter to my students. …
“Can we help my friend? Can you write Reva a letter? What can she do? How can we help her think this through?” We bent to our work for a little infinity of time. Then shared what we had written:
‘If God got discouraged every time He made a mistake, we wouldn’t be here…’
‘Mark’s life was a better life, even if it was short. He was lucky to have you for a teacher…’
‘My Mom’s got cancer—I get dark too—here’s my phone number…’
Stafford concludes: “That day in class changed my life as a teacher. I wasn’t teaching writing any more. Instead, we were using writing together to work through what we had to do to understand our place in the world, and to make it better for some[one], somewhere, who needed what we had to say.”
To understand our place in the world…that’s theology. And to make it better for someone…that’s justice…
And isn’t that what we try to do here…every week. We say that we nurture the individual spirit and, together, build the Beloved Community. And that is true. And that is good language.
But we could also say that we come together in this community to understand our place in a world of so much beauty and so much violence…and to make that world better for ourselves and for our neighbors.
This whole block in downtown Portland, all of these talented staff members and ministers and dedicated lay leaders, the worship and the classes and the meetings…all of us working to understand our place in the world and to make it better for ourselves and our neighbors.
Rebecca Parker writes:
In the midst of a world
marked by tragedy and beauty
there must be those
who bear witness…
There must be those who
speak honestly
and do not avoid seeing
what must be seen…
There must be communities of ¬people
who seek to do justice
love kindness and walk humbly with God,
who call on the strength of
soul-force
to heal,
transform
and bless life.
[There must be
religious witness.]
You see, it does depend. It depends on us. The choice is ours to bless or to curse the world. To live out of love and into love… or to reject love.
It depends on us. Ours are the only hands on earth.
The Good News is that here, in this community, we need not travel alone.
That may not give us certainty that love will win. But it can give us the confidence that we need to bless ourselves and to bless the world.
Amen
Topics: Community