PeaceBang

My Easter Sermon Excerpt, With Love

Happy ending, Peacebangers! Just know that what originally appeared on this blog wound up serving as fodder for one of the most joyous and memorable Easter services I am ever likely to celebrate with my congregation:

From the Easter Sermon, “It Matters To This One”

…The church is a kind of training ground, or gym, if you will, for the soul. We spend regular pew time in here with the aim that on the other days of the week, we might find it easier to remember that the Earth is a living organism that needs our care, and that each person upon it is actually a brother or sister of ours.

Here we train ourselves to look at the insides, rather than the outsides, of people and situations. We remind ourselves of the need to speak peace, bring peace, act peace, be peace. Our children desperately need to see this in us and we desperately need to extend it to each other. I dare say that the dominant culture of our day does not much encourage the peacefulness and sense of kin relation between us.

So we come together on Easter morning affirming the things that need to be affirmed if we are to endure as a species, and we do it knowing that it’s tough work indeed. We are such complex and secret creatures, as you know. You know as well as I do that we can spend an hour in here with the very best intentions and with full hearts, but that the minute we walk through the door we are going to see a whole lot of evidence that everything is crazy and broken, and we might as well chuck the church nonsense, go shopping and stay drunk on chocolate and denial for the rest of our lives.

If you think the Easter story is crazy, it is. It is absolutely crazy and ridiculous, as we are. Deciding together to experience life and joy where there is every reason to proclaim death and failure is absolutely ridiculous. As the composer Stephen Sondheim wrote, “Send in the clowns. Don’t bother; they’re here.”

We celebrate a ridiculous story here today, a fantastic story. Jesus’ original community of disciples went home on Friday afternoon thinking the whole enterprise was over, failure. Enough with this kingdom of equals, enough with the promises of God’s healing and love for all. It was done. Finished.

And then the women went back to tend to the body of their rabbi the next day and they found the tomb empty. They saw an angel. Or a figure in white, it depends who you ask. The details of their vision aren’t consistent among all the gospel accounts, but it startled them just about out of their skins and they went running off to tell the men. The men said, of course, you’re being ridiculous.

This is what we usually say when something seems an enormously obvious failure and ending by our conventional wisdom. “Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no life to be seen there, and there certainly aren’t any angels.”
So a couple of those downhearted men walked to a town called Emmaus, seven miles out of Jerusalem, as S. just read to us. They were doing some Monday morning quarterbacking, no doubt, and assessing what went wrong, who screwed up, getting ready to label everything with a big black marker called “We Lost” and going to get back to their oppressed, frustrating lives.

But you know, there is that human spark of hope and God that beats in every one of our breasts and has since the beginning of time, and lo! these men too had a vision. It began ordinarily enough, with a stranger walking beside them. The two men had already decided the women disciples were fools for believing that Jesus was still alive, and yet they got pulled into the very same experience of life and faith as the women did. They got pulled into just as much ridiculousness.
Wait a minute!
Wasn’t that Jesus?
Where’d he go?
Was that really him?
Wait, that was him, wasn’t it?
Oh my God, you’re kidding me!

All that time they walked along the road together, but they didn’t see who it was keeping them company, Luke tells us, until the breaking of the bread at the table. When they finally got it, they just about fell over themselves. And in this wonderful line, one of them says to the other, “Wait a minute. Let’s go over this. Didn’t our hearts just burn within us as he was teaching us on the road?”
Yeah, mine did. Now that you mention it. Yeah. My heart was burning. But I didn’t think I’d mention it or anything. I thought I was being ridiculous.

I love that Jesus himself in this resurrection appearance even says to the disciples, “You’re such fools.” He knows better than anyone that when your heart is full, when it is burning within you for love and inspiration and recognition of the holiness at the heart of being, you don’t worry about making sense.

I’m so glad that our Unitarian Universalist faith says in its first Source that our living tradition receives wisdom from many sources, including the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” It’s right there on the first or second page of your hymnal. Now that’s the Easter experience in a nutshell, isn’t it? Direct experience of a transcending mystery and wonder. I’m so glad, because it gives me permission to be ridiculous. … I’m grateful for it. It says that spiritual truth is just as valuable as scientific truth in how we make meaning. It affirms the mystical. I respect that. I especially respect it when a group of people’s direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder leads them to see the possibility of life, ministry, healing and hope where there was death.
How blessed to be that ridiculous. It’s what I live for.

If you want to set out to be that ridiculous, and I hope you do, here’s how: set out to find bits of light, love and understanding wherever you can. Have a direct experience of ridiculousness that turns the way you perceive reality from death to life; from destruction to creation. Pick one small ridiculous act of life and commit it. (Commit random acts of ridiculousness!)

There is a corny story that I like about that kind of small, ridiculous act of finding life amid death. A boy is walking along the beach where thousands of starfish have been tossed up and stranded by the tide. He is tossing them back to the sea, one by one. An older man stops and watches him for awhile, and he chuckles. “What does it matter, son? There are still thousands of starfish on the beach.” And the boy throws one more starfish back into the tide and he says, “It matters to this one.”

It’s a corny story but it came back into my mind a few weeks ago and I couldn’t get it out. Here’s how it happened.

I went to see a production of the musical “Gypsy” at a local theatre. One of the characters, a pushy stage mother, is a real animal lover and she gets her daughter a lamb for her birthday present. The girl, Louise, sings a lovely song to the lamb, called (appropriately enough), “Little Lamb.” I know the show pretty well and I wondered how this theatre would handle the live animal situation. Would they do it with a stuffed animal or what? So I was just as charmed as everyone else in the audience when a real, snowy white lamb got pushed onto the stage in a diaper at the beginning of the scene. It was just as cute as can be, going “baaa baaa” and pulling at its harness while the actress sang to it.

Later, backstage, I asked the producer about it: “Getting that lamb must have been a real challenge for you!” Yes, it was, he agreed. And I congratulated some friends who were in the show. “LOVED your performance, LOVED the lamb!”
“Oh, we love the lamb, too!” they said. But one of them pulled me aside and whispered to me that they had gotten the lamb from a slaughterhouse and that the lamb was going to go back there after the show. To put it delicately, she was scheduled to become lamb chops.

In the interest of full disclosure I will say that I am a carnivore and I thank my brother and sister chickens, cows, sheep and pigs for much of the food that I eat. But I am also a lady of the stage and it seemed to me that this little lamb was also a lady of the stage, and ladies of the stage are should not be served up with a side of mint jelly on anyone’s dinner plate. Even if they do pull at their harness and bleat while fellow actors are trying to sing.
It bothered me.

So I prayed about it. “I know I’m being really ridiculous, but I just feel I am supposed to protect that lamb.”
The still, small voice inside answered me. It said, “Well, you have ten fingers and a mouth: get on the phone!”

So I called around, and I visited around, and through a lovely lady of this congregation, P., I was put in touch her daughter-in-law A. We had a great rollicking talk one afternoon at the Science Center down the street, along with An., and A. was more than happy to provide a home for the lamb. She had had sheep before and she was happy to get another one. And the farmer was just as happy to sell the lamb to me.
The lamb is now named Little Compton. She is living happily in Pembroke. There is no mint jelly in her future.

And we welcome her and her mistress A.to our church this morning.

(At this moment, A.and Little Compton entered the back of the meeting house and walked up the center aisle. The rest of the sermon was delivered with Little Compton standing beautifully and calmly by my side).

Go ahead and be ridiculous. And when you are practicing the ridiculous Easter faith of loving the world, of finding life amidst lost causes, of practicing hope amidst despair, and of letting your hearts burn within you for joy — remember the disciples, and remember the starfish, and remember this lamb. And remember that it matters.

It matters to this one.

I’m Coming to Church!!

I’m Coming to Church!!
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Happy Easter to everyone from Peacebang and Little Compton, who will be making her church debut at approximately 10:30 a.m.

Please pray for us. We like our rug very much.

Happy Chocolate Risen Bunny Christ Day!

Passion Bear
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

This is just so many different kinds of wrong. Go ahead, click on it. Get a good look.

Thanks to H. for sending me over to http://www.goingjesus.com for some truly horrified, irreverent laughs.

:::shakes head, slinks away to finish Easter sermon:::

"Not Dead Yet"

A colleague sent off an e-mail to a group of us this morning, asking us to think again about the Terry Schiavo case, and this time from the perspective of the disabled community.

She directed us to several links; this one among them:

http://www.notdeadyet.org/docs/ndydisqueers032105.html

The argument put forth by this group, “Disabled Queers,” is that we should think of Terry as disabled and that those who advocate for the removal of her feeding tube are thereby participating in discrimination against a disabled person.

While I appreciate the bold witness on behalf of Terry’s life, I simply cannot regard someone without a cerebral cortex as “disabled.” She is far beyond that Pale at this point.

However, the group raises for me this question: if we are to respect the right of disabled persons to have as full a life as they can (and I do), and if we are to respect the value of every life — even one as limited as Terry Schiavo’s in her current condition — let me ask you this: what do you think is the value of Terry Schiavo’s life right now? Ontologically speaking? Outside of the sense of purpose she provides to her parents, her other caregivers, to politicians, and to right-to-lifers who are right now keeping vigil outside her hospital room?

A second point the group makes is that keeping Terry alive via means of a feeding tube is not particularly high tech at all, and does not really amount to “extreme measures.” I find this a compelling point. Do you?

Third, all of these groups point to Mr. Schiavo’s conflict of interest in standing to benefit both personally and financially from Terry’s death. This seems strange to me, or at least terribly naive. I have not kept vigil with a great number of family members and loved ones after a decision has been made to withdraw life support, but I have some. And in every case, yes, there would be some financial and/or personal freedom earned by allowing the loved one to die.
I believe that Mr. Schiavo has already spent close to a million dollars on medical and legal expenses for Terry. Can we really believe that after fifteen years, this is all about hard, cold greed? I think of Schiavo’s girlfriend with whom he has a child or two. I imagine she might like to marry the guy. Is that really so depraved?

I truly don’t mean to be hurtful in saying this, but I wonder if any of the most outraged folks out there advocating for Terry’s life have even thought to connect her eating disorder with her long sojourn in this unconscious twilight, and thus to regard her in a more complex role as one of absolute victim or martyr. The fact that some of them (including children) are actually trying to get into the hospital with bread and water for her — and they don’t mean the bread and water symbolically, either — speaks to me of a kind of a kind of intentional ignorance that insists on making a saint or martyr out of an ordinary human woman.
People, she can’t eat that bread. She can’t drink that water. No way, no how. What are you thinking?

Mr. W. Works Beyond "The Wince"

I like this blog I found by another Unitarian Universalist:

http://www.paulwilczynski.com/2005/03/saving-jesus_23.html

I am directing you to one of his recent posts referencing a sermon his minister gave on “Saving Jesus,” directed partly at so-called “Jesus-wincers” in his congregation (I call them “Jesus counters.”)

I commend Mr. Wilczynski for expressing a mature Unitarian Univeralism that says, “This particular religious thing makes me uncomfortable and so I am working to heal my knee-jerk reaction.” It’s everything I hope for Jesus-counters of my own acquaintance: not that they become Christians, but that they become better UUs for moving beyond a censorious, angry rejection of any of our sources of religious wisdom.

Too often we forget that although we may be, as my friend Tom Schade says, “a hospital for the religiously-wounded,” we should help lead our co-religionists to the goal of healing and integration.

"I Am Convicted" (Con.)

For those of you who are following the thread of the March 16th post, “And I Am Convicted,” I’d like to refer you to the comments section, and particularly to my exchange between myself and a religious educator, Steve Caldwell.

I hope our conversation will encourage you to consider these questions: are
Unitarian Universalists generally even aware of the theological differences between liberal and conservative (or orthodox) forms of Christianity? Are they in your congregation? Are the youth? If so, can they articulate those differences with any confidence, even if liberal Christianity is not their own chosen spiritual path?

Does it matter?

Sarah Jessica Dumped!

Sarah Jessica Dumped!
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I know it’s Holy Week and there are more important things to worry about, like Terry Schiavo and all, but I wanted to let you know that fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker has been dumped from her lucrative Gap endorsement deal in favor of some blonde singer named “Joss.”

Joss. I ask you…!

And so goes another chapter in the war between the “interesting” looking girl (who might have a big nose and man hands, but who is also an accomplished Broadway actress and creator of one of the most endearing characters in all television series history)and the Generic, Younger Pretty Blonde.

SJP, I so feel you. If I had the dough I’d buy you a pair of Manolo Blahniks as consolation.

Thanks to www.adrants.com for the photo and the scoop.

Thin Soup, Not Bread

(I found this posting in my “drafts” folder from back in February. I am in the process of deleting some posts that mention my church, even though they mention my church with great pride and appreciation. Peacebang is undergoing a very subtle make-over; so subtle that you’ll wonder if she had any work done at all. — P.B.)

Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie tells us that a group of folks over at the First Universalist Church in Minneapolis came up with this answer to the question of “What are our essential religious beliefs?” They decided, in part,

You are loved in this world (the simple message of Universalism) and
You are good (the simple message of Unitarianism).

Phil writes,
“These simple messages articulate the essence of both our traditions—historically and theologically.”

I think the statements above are nice, and religiously true — but they feel theologically amuptated to me. Since the original statement was made in the context of a religious education forum, it may be enough to teach our children that they are loved and they are good. They are worthy of love and they are worthy, and therefore they should go forth and love and bless the world, themselves and each other, and live for this life rather than the next life, etc. and all that good stuff. I’m for it.

But I dearly wish that among us grown-ups, we would be willing to expand those statements to reveal a glimpse of where in Reality we locate those claims to love and goodness.
The “simple message of Universalism” in its classical expression was not quite that simple. The Universalists who bequeathed upon us this lovely spiritual heritage said, We are loved in this world because God loves us, and all love flows from that eternal source. I don’t care if people nowadays want to define a spirituality that has no transcendent referent, but if we’re invoking the past we should do so in a way that’s honest, and not revise it to accomodate today’s discomforts.

Likewise, early Unitarian faith in human goodness and improvability was tied to their conviction that humans are created in the likeness of a benevolent God (a proposition most disstasteful to the Calvinists). There is no ontological condition of goodness outside from that bestowed upon us by the Father (hey, I don’t like the gender-exclusive language any more than you do, but that’s what they said and wrote and lived, okay?).

Our children should know these things. Our adults should know them. You cannot reject the God of the fathers and mothers and painstakingly work your way to a sustaining personal theology unless you know the God of the mothers and fathers. Watering it down to “you are loved and you are good” is thin soup, indeed.

Suicide Smocks

Suicide Smocks
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I’m still thinking about the Future of Peacebang, but meanwhile I thought you should see this. An alert Peacebanger (who happens to be related by blood) alerted me to a website for a company that manufactures these smocks for suicidal prisoners.

Really, I don’t WANT to laugh. I don’t think it’s a bit funny in the true sense of the word.
Perhaps what I feel gurgling in my throat is that existential kind of laughter, where we think fondly of the day we will be released from this extended absurdist performance called Life. Or perhaps it’s due to the unintentionally hilarious smock models, who look for all the world like Noah and his wife upon disembarking from the Ark.

This text lifted directly from one of the pages on the website, at http://www.preventsuicide.com/:

Clothe Your Suicidal Inmates
and Save Money

Medical Expenses
Clothing prevents the need for treatment of hypothermia
Warmth reduces the likelihood of illness, particularly upper respiratory diseases
Risk of Personal Injury Suits
Removal of clothing from particularly vulnerable inmates such as females and youth puts a facility at risk
Providing clothing protects your facility against a suit for harm caused by hypothermia
Staff members, the “patient”, and other inmates are more likely to report suicidality or implement necessary precautions knowing that the interventions do not include stripping (particularly in borderline cases and difficult judgment calls).
Demands on Staff
Inmate’s comfort and reduced anxiety means less harassment of staff
Overseeing naked inmates is uncomfortable for staff
A clothed inmate can be more readily moved
Staff gets a break from noise and demands when inmate sleeps
Duration of Suicide Watches
Clothing decreases the inmate’s sense of being punished or “treated like an animal”
A clothed inmate is better able to sleep which allows:
The bloodstream to be cleared of drugs
The therapeutic effects of sleep
An opportunity for a new beginning upon awakening

By God, the parousia can’t come fast enough.

Peacebang On Self-Imposed Time-Out

I just googled myself and found SIX pages of links to Peacebang, this li’l ole blog that I started right at the turn of the new year without one single-dingle consideration for what I was doing, what purpose I had in posting, and what kind of persona I would be putting out over the Internet.

I found that Peacebang is linked lots of places, and that way more people than I thought are noticing it and commenting on it. People I don’t even personally know! Yikes! Who knew? I thought my site meter was mostly reflecting about nine readers who click in a few times a day. To be honest, I don’t have the site meter programmed in correctly and I have no idea how many people are visiting.

My google search revealed that I have posted with impunity on lots of other people’s blogs, making incredibly snarky remarks and sometimes even using cuss words. Bad ones too, Pa.

On this blog, I’ve thrown in some fun stuff, some serious stuff, and some puppies and lambs for good measure.

I’ve created a monster! A monster I actually really like, but a monster nonetheless.

I need to take a little time off and think about what this monster should be, if this monster wants to stop writing anonymously (in which case I would adopt another, very secret persona for the sole purpose of writing bitchy things on the celebrity gossip blogs), if this monster wants to be more thoughtful and responsible about what she posts and says, etc.

The ethics of blogging: what are they?
If Peacebang disappeared, would you be sad?

Hmmm….