Rev. Bill Sinkford
This is love searching love.
The beautiful choral phrases of our anthem invite us to turn inward. The season is an invitation make a space in the busyness of life…
An invitation to rest…yes. But also an invitation to allow our hearts to reclaim their yearning. A time to remember the difference between the merely urgent and the ultimate.
This is heart searching heart.
If we lose track of what we truly yearn for, we will never be prepared to live that yearning into life.
The season is an invitation to a time of waiting, a time to prepare ourselves for the birth…or the rebirth…for the return of hope and love.
Waiting. But what, as religious people, and especially as liberal religious folks…what are we waiting for?
This is Advent…in the Christian liturgical calendar.
“Adventus” in Latin, from the verb venir…to come, to arrive.
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.
Emmanuel. God with Us. God within us. The Incarnation.
O Come. O Come. It is a beseeching for hope and the holy to arrive, to be present with us. There is a plaintive quality to Advent that acknowledges absence, that acknowledges need, that yearns for hope.
This season speaks to that human yearning…that yearning we humans have felt since time out of mind, since long before the birth of that particular child…
The miracle stories about that child…the stories about his birth and his death… about the miracle of new life he promised…
Those miracle stories were some of the first things our religious ancestors rejected.
And yet, more people will crowd into this sanctuary on Christmas Eve than at any other time in the year.
It’s a little strange…isn’t it? Why are we so devoted to that particular story of birth and rebirth.
What are we waiting for, and why do we come, if most of us do not find ourselves in the story we will celebrate?
What are we waiting for?
There was a challenging (?) article in the New York Times this week. “The Return of Paganism,” was the title. Some of you saw it I know. The subtitle was “Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America.”
The short version of the argument is that those who see the decline of institutional Christianity as part of an inevitable movement toward a purely secular society…are just plain wrong.
The rise of the “none’s,” those who claim no allegiance to traditional denominations…the dramatic increase in those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious…like a lot of us here…the article claims that the pundits have just misunderstood those trends…because the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. Witness the self-help gurus, witness the 12 step programs, witness Oprah Winfrey…
Americans feel no less need for spirituality. It is simply that the institutional forms of religion, churches, many of them, no longer provide what we need.
Among the proponents of this argument is Steven Smith, a professor at the University of San Diego. He argues that “much of what we understand as the march of secularism is … an illusion [that masks] … the return of a pagan religious conception, what was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.”
What is that conception? That divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside of it, that God or the gods … (or the Spirit of Life, to insert some of our language here)…that God or gods are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning … is to be sought in fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent. (some world beyond or after this one).
This new spirituality is deliberately agnostic about what happens after death.…It sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as … a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the everyday…it insists that our everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home.
This world…Divinely endowed. A place where we can truly be at home.
Is this sounding at all familiar? The focus on this world and the holiness that can be made real in our living. The Spirit of Life that moves within us and among us? The shaping of the world into place where we can truly be at home?
Is this a return to paganism, or a description of the liberal religious faith that we strive to embody each week?
Remember that paganism was a term invented by the Christian community to describe everybody else…and using that term somehow preserves the right of the Christian tradition to define who is in and who is out.
Paganism?
Aren’t there important parts of the Christian story that we affirm. The Beloved Community is our language…but it is so close to the coming of the Kingdom? Doesn’t the concern for the “least of these” ground many of us in our work for justice? Don’t we see the hope in that one child as a metaphor for the hope in every birth…that each child is another redeemer?
We draw much from earth-centered traditions in this church, but we are not waiting for some new post-Christian Pagan cult, which is what that author suggests.
We already have a faith that feels the Spirit of Life moving within us and among us. We already have a faith with an ethic that calls us to build the Beloved Community and deconstruct the systems of oppression that hold us all down. We already have a faith that points us to the rebirth of hope in our hearts…again and again and again…that renewal that takes place within us and among us as we hold each other in community.
So what are we waiting for?
Perhaps what we need in this season of long dark, is something to remind us, something to help us remember who we are and who we want to be, and what we need…what, as human beings, we need.
Regardless of your theology, whether you call yourself Christian or Pagan or humanist or Buddhist…wouldn’t it be good, regardless of what we call ourselves to get in touch with just how much we are all in need…
A story told by Nancy McDonald Ladd, called: “Holy Family.”
“I stood awkwardly grasping the overhead railing of a subway car pondering the meaning of life. Apparently a soccer game had just let out and my interior monologue was interrupted when the subway [doors opened]. A tidal wave of soccer-fan legs and arms and backpacks and voices pressed themselves through the tiny door, elbowing and complaining as they angled for precious space. Once the last stray limbs smashed in …, the doors closed with a groan and we all settled in. There was no place left for me to put my arms, so I folded them over my chest mummy-style and waited for the car to move…and waited…and waited…and waited.
After what seemed like forever, a crackling loudspeaker announced that due to technical difficulties, the car would not begin moving for some time. The herd of humanity surrounding me heaved a common sigh of grievance. A stranger’s clammy arm pressed against the back of my head, a stranger’s sharp umbrella poked me in the side, and a stranger’s broad back bore the weight of my protruding shoulder. When I inhaled, the expansion of my body pushed into everyone around me. When they exhaled, a part of me deflated. …every movement,… every futile attempt to scratch an unreachable itch directly affected everyone else in the car.
Finally, we did begin to move—ten feet at a time, lurching and then grinding to an abrupt halt again and again while we strangers of unusual intimacy stood together, unable to grasp protectively at our purses,… unable to support ourselves with anything but the bodies of the people around us. As the car moved in its jerky dance, first we all fell to the right, then the left… always into one another. And right there, through some bizarre grace, in a hot and none-too-fragrant subway car, I felt my lonely self held up, buoyed by an unbidden and unplanned force of humanity. I felt the presence of the holy. Right there—in the smelly, crowded, and inconvenient midst of life—I felt held.
…I heard the voice of the man next to me say simply, “Well, we’s all family now.” Yeah, we’s all family now, and that mass of humanity laughed in response. It takes this, but we’re all family now. Not exactly Mary and Joseph and little baby Jesus, but a holy family nonetheless. A common one. A human one. An un-shiny and un-perfect one. The family of humanity, worn and broken and healing and hoping, is the only holy family I have ever encountered face-to-face, or arm-to-arm, or back-to-elbow. It is a family holy enough to merit the highest forms of reverence.”
Why do we come together in this season? Do we need to analyze? To explain it? To dissect our reasons?
Or can we simply let the truth of our need to be held be enough.
I want to invite you to hold one another in prayer. We do this about once a year. Many of you will remember. If this is new to you, it is simple.
When you came into the sanctuary, there was an index card clipped to your bulletin. In a moment, I am going to ask you to write down a request for prayer on that card.
If you need to translate that word prayer, if you need to think of meditation or of sending positive thoughts…the language you use doesn’t matter.
What you write down can be a request for prayer for you or for someone you know who could use some support. It could be for a member of your family or a friend who is struggling right now, or someone close to you who has just had a success. Try to keep this as personal as you can, but don’t put your name on the card. That is not necessary.
The ushers will collect those requests for prayer. Those requests to be held.
After the service, the ushers will be in the lobby and at the stairwells with baskets of those cards.
As you leave, take a card, with a request for prayer written by another congregant. And this afternoon, or this evening, I want you to “hold” that person’s request and offer what prayer you can as requested by the person who wrote the card.
You will be “holding” that prayer request just as the ministers and lay ministers hold the requests that you leave each week.
OK?
Take a minute in silence now to write your prayer request. Share pencils and pens as you need to. Be thoughtful in your writing. Remember that someone else will be reading and responding to what you write.
What prayer will you request today?
If you are with us on-line, you can send your prayer request to prayer@firstunitarianportland.org and it will be held by our ministers this week.
Will the usher collect the cards?
Pause
In these days of long dark, it is time for us to shine
To shine now. To allow our hearts to open, to welcome the spirit that we know by many names and to remember what we yearn for…
To become gentler and more compassionate
To become more empowered and fearless
Held by those around us. Holding those around us.
Ready for a new birth of wonder,
Ready to fulfill the promise of this season.
Will you pray with me now?
Prayer
Spirit of Life and of Love. Great mystery that we know but struggle to name.
These days of long dark call us to rest as the earth rests
These long nights call us to prepare ourselves for renewal
This is a time of rest and respite
A time when we can remember what we care most about
A time to focus and center, and claim our ground once more
This is a time of rest and respite
But we do not need to wait for the coming, for the arrival
The Spirit of Life is already present,
Moving within us and among us
We do not need to wait
We are already the holders of life
Help us hold one another with tenderness
Help us hold one another with love
Help us hold one another in prayer
Amen
Topics: Listening