PeaceBang

Singing ‘Bout Jesus in the UU Context

Suzanne wants to resurrect the thread of comments from this old post, and I say why not? I’m working on a paper and will start a ten-day intensive course tomorrow, so original material is unlike to issue forth from my fingertips until much later in May.

She writes,

Peacebang, I’m going to resurrect this thread, because it’s something I grapple with on a daily basis. I am a spiritually open and ritually eclectic person; I’ve ministered musically in Reformed synagogues, Episcopal churches (high and low), American Baptist, and (yes) Wiccan circles and pagan networks. I am now at my first UU position. How to choose hymns and anthems that support the sermon, provide liturgical flow, and have a spiritually meaningful component is shockingly difficult. Many of the best and most suitable music uses the word “God,” and (Oh NO!) often refers to Jesus. The word “God” is tolerated if I don’t overuse it. But if I use the J-word too often, I am severely and immediately criticized. Then if I don’t use the J-word often enough, I hear about that, too. The same group of people who wish for non-theistic language also want more classical or traditional music. WTH? Traditional church music without Jesus mentioned? I guess “Jesu Christe” is ok because if it’s in Latin it doesn’t count??? So I began to change a few words here and there to “UU-ify” the language of our anthems, which actually became ridiculous. (My husband said “why don’t we just say ‘Jello’ whenever the words say ‘Jesus?’ Everybody likes it, and there’s always room for it.”) Finally I had to write a newsletter column in which I told the congregation to trust me: I don’t have a religious agenda, but a spiritual one. I also told them I would trust them as well: I would trust them to use their own brains; I trust that all references to the Divine in the music I choose will be interpreted in any way they wish or need. I don’t care what images they have, or whether they believe in God. But they have chosen to call their institution a “church,” and that implies a spiritual component, which I believe can exist with or without a belief in God. I feel shackled by the bonds of the congregation’s contentiousness.

I marvel at how a denomination that is so proud of its inclusiveness should be so bitter and exclusive to the Christians (or even the theists) in its midst. Yet everybody wants that special Christmas Eve service, and to sing the old carols with the original words. I suppose Jesus, who advocated a radical form of inclusivity based on loving others, is not so radical or his teachings so alarming when he is kept eternally in the manger.

You can’t have it both ways, UUA-ers. You are either inclusive or not.

Suzanne, thanks for your testimonial on Unitarian Universalist Christophobia, which is still alive and well among us, even though from my own perspective we’ve come a long way in the past ten years. At least more UUs know that both Unitarianism and Universalism have exclusively Christian historical roots, and I experience much less Christian-bashing and ignorant comments than I used to. But that may be because people more know who I am; I’m not sure.

These days when people ask me “How can you be a UU a be a Christian?” I sense that they mean it with more openness and less hostile challenge than when the question came to me formerly. I receive anywhere from 20-50 e-mail inquiries and letters per year asking me how to be UU and Christian (or to remain Christian and join with the UUs), and I haven’t been angrily asked to leave Unitarian Universalism for at least a year (now that’s progress!).

In this blog and everywhere I go, I have been exhorting Unitarian Universalists to understand that “Christianity” is not a monolith, that we are too often willfully ignoring evidence of a huge liberal Christian world out there in favor of perpetuating myths of Unitarian Universalist uniqueness, and that this has got to stop if we want to live into our own claims of being accepting and intelligent people. I have been actively participating in ecumenical Christian life for many years and answering dozens of questions per year about why I am there (as in, “Why are you here, heathen?”). It gets tiring, this role of defending myself to hostile Christians who have been insulted for too long by Unitarian Universalists (or are just plain prejudiced), and defending my life in Christ to wounded or just plain hostile UUs who claim to be intellectuals but who know precious little of Christianity beyond what offended their spirits in 8th grade (the age they decided religion was all nonsense, and particularly the religion of Christianity).

To speak more directly to your point of being a UU Music Director, I do think it fair for the congregation to request minimal Jesus references if they’re not a Christian congregation. While I have every sympathy for your struggle, and while I cheer your ability to name hypocrisy when you see it, and while I totally dig your analysis that the baby Jesu in the manger is not nearly as threatening as the living Jesus who passionately challenges our spiritual inertia and social sins, I still think it makes some sense to ask, “If we’re not officially Christian, and if Christian Scripture isn’t part of the larger liturgy, why would we import Jesus only for the musical segments of the service?” That, for me, is about liturgical integrity as much as it is about theological distaste or mistrust.

All that said, I think your ministry with the congregation sounds like an excellent one, and that your newsletter column was a brave and wise invitation to individual discernment and more conversation among you. If anything, the congregation needs to know that there’s not a huge repertoire of purely secular (ie, “God-free”) music arranged for choral performance that would work well for Sunday morning worship. Your respectful invitation that they stop censoring you (your phrase, “I feel shackled by the bonds of the congregation’s contentiousness” pierces me to the heart) and your logical conclusion that “church” implies spirituality and yes, God-language, feels RIGHT ON to me. Hang in there, Music-Maker. Chances are you are doing much good in fighting for the right to include sacred music in this congregation. I don’t doubt that there are many in the pews who appreciate your struggle without even knowing that it is going on, and that you will do much good to the God/Christ-phobic by inviting them to move beyond fear and hostility into a place of comfort and more integrity around our much-vaunted commitment to inclusivity.

Blessings on your ministry, and on your congregation.

HANDS

Since you were all such marvelous help pointing me toward resources about modern day slavery, I thought I’d ask you for your favorite readings, poems and stories about hands.

I’m preaching a sermon about hands this Sunday — my last service before I go on a five-week sabbatical. I think I’ll call it “All Hands On Deck” (thanks, Rali!). I have a pretty good treasure trove of tales from my own life and some stories from the Jewish tradition, but I’m always on the hunt for more good stuff.

If ya got something, I’d love to hear it. And thanks!

“Enslaved” - A Passover Sermon

Friends, I would like to thank you so much for your help in preparing this sermon. Our service this morning was all the more powerful for your help and aid in connecting me with resources on contemporary slavery.

We did an early reading by Marge Piercy explaining the significance of the Seder, leading to a reading of Exodus 6: 1-13.

After the Offertory, I gave a synopsis of the Plagues from Exodus 7-12, deciding at the last minute to harshly bang a gong after the naming of each plague so that as I read the next one, the resonance from the gong still rang through the words. It was upsetting and I think very effective. It certainly affected me!! The Student Minister then came forward and read Exodus 12:14-20, which was followed by a prayer.

After the Anthem, we included this reading:

READING FROM THE CONTEMPORARY
from the Forward by Gloria Steinhem: Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, Directors of the American Anti-Slavery Group

“In wealthy nations like the United States, we may see occasional television exposes of undocumented immigrants forced to work for no play at guarded sweatshops in our cities, yet our responses still have the blame-the-victim quality of “Why don’t they escape?” After all, slavery ended in the nineteenth century.

We may read about Midwestern farm girls found chained to beds in Times Square or Tokyo, but our understanding of the Stockholm Syndrome is more likely to focus on intellectual political prisoners than young females whose will to survive is sapped by human traffickers adept at luring them with false promises, then “seasoning” them until are convinced that no one will ever accept them again. After all, slavery ended in the nineteenth century.

In developing countries, we see the abduction and auction of child slave laborers, families trapped in debt-bondage toiling in the fields, phony “adoptions” or poor children, false promises of good jobs used to lure and enslave domestic labor across borders, and even the use of the enslaved as sources of organs to be sold in a burgeoning black market. Yet many people vulnerable to these dangers continue to avert their eyes, if only because the need to survive leads to denial. After all, how could slavery exist in the same world with modern police and the United Nations?

Even by the strictest definition, slavery’s soul-murder and slow death are facts of daily life for millions of people.

Yes, most forms of slavery are now illegal, at least on paper. But some cultures normalize them by caste or debt servitude or sexual practice; others create laws but do not enforce them; may pay or supervise officials so poorly that bribery becomes a way of life; and most of the enslaved themselves are too dependent, invisible, or fearful of reprisal to speak – even supposing they would be listened to.”

— Gloria Steinhem

THE SERMON “Enslaved” Rev. Victoria Weinstein
First Parish Unitarian Church in Norwell
April 20, 2008

Moses died on April 5, did you hear? Of course I’m not speaking of the actual Moses, but of actor Charlton Heston who will always be Moses for some of us. Right in time for Pesach, or Passover, the holiday observed by Jewish families this week as it has been for thousands of years.

I went to my first Passover Seder as a kid, and I haven’t been to many since. It’s a very long meal with prayers and songs and recounts the story of the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt in (at anyone’s best guess) about fifteen hundred years before the Common Era. There’s a recitation of all the plagues (Exodus 7-12) and you get to do fun things like throwing drops of wine from your goblet onto your plate and some not-so-fun things like eating symbolic items like bitter herbs, horseradish and gefilte fish. And speaking of wine, there’s a lot of it. I went away from my first Seder thinking that it was sort of a religious drinking game, sprinkling wine on our plates as the plagues were read off (“Frogs!” “Locusts!”) and drinking four full glasses at prescribed times during the meal.

Why not celebrate your survival when you’re one of the most ancient ethnic groups in the world who have been the objects of systematic and organized efforts to annihilate you since the beginning of your history?

Jewish history is a wild history, and the Passover Seder is rowdy. It is not a synagogue observance but a family observance that happens around the dinner table. It commemorates terribly violent events and turns them into a feast of rejoicing. The songs are loud and triumphant. It reminds me of a saying I learned from a Voudon priestess, also the ancestress of slaves: “I will build my house upon the heads of my enemies.” It is no accident that the African-American people embrace the story of Exodus as their own, as have enslaved people everywhere.

What a story Exodus is. There is that portion we just heard where God is instituting the observance of Pesach and where, within 6 verses, he repeats the words “unleavened bread” or “no leaven” nine times. God doesn’t just tell the Hebrews to avoid leavened bread during this seven day festival, he demands it nine times. He’s like your mother before a long car ride when you were a kid. “Did you go to the bathroom?” “Yes, Mom, I went to the bathroom.” “Are you sure you went?” “Yes, Mom, I went.” A minute later she says, “This is a long ride and I don’t want to have to stop. You get in there and use the bathroom.” (“MA! I told you, I WENT!”)

I wonder if there’s a drinking game at a liberal yeshiva somewhere where they read Chapter 12 of Exodus and take a shot every time God says “leaven” or “unleavened?” And it’s not just God who emphasizes unleavened bread. Moses gets into it, too. In chapter 13 of Exodus, as he is reminding the Israelites of their duty to remember what God has done liberating them, he tells them that for during this observance for seven days they shall eat no leavened bread. He says it five times in four verses.

Now, you could say that this is just the style of the unknown author who recorded Exodus for posterity. But I don’t think so. I am sure that rabbis don’t think so, either, those experts at finding every nuance in every book of their Bible and debating and illuminating every possible meaning over centuries upon centuries. So in the rabbinical tradition, if I may, I would like to share my own sense of why the word “unleavened” is repeated so many times in the telling of the exodus story, and my thanks go to our student minister Misty-Dawn Shelley for suggesting the idea in the first place:

When freedom comes, there is no time to waste. When we are set free from enslavement in a literal or a spiritual or psychological sense, we must be ready to move, and to move fast, and to leave behind things that weigh us down, ready to leave behind even things that we think we need, things that will not serve us on our flight out of captivity. You heard how the Israelities first responded to Moses when he told them they were to be set free: they didn’t believe him. Slavery had broken their spirits and they weren’t ready for this news. They weren’t able to believe in the possibility of freedom.
We are all captive in some way or another. Captive to damaging ideas, limiting attitudes, family or societal expectations that stifle, responsibilities that keep us careful where we might want to be more risky, grounded where we would like to try to fly. That is the human condition. When we have an opportunity to experience liberation from limitations that bind us, it is also very human to say, “But I can’t change. I can’t leave what I’m familiar with. I’ve always baked bread this way. Just wait until this dough rises and I’ll be right with you.”

God in this story is saying, and saying, and saying again, “You don’t have time for the dough to rise. Grab what you have and go. I am making this happen NOW.”

Go. Go. The freedom train is here, get on now. God is going to send horrific plagues to kill the oppressors. God is going to open the Reed Sea and send it crashing closed after the Hebrews have crossed it and just as Pharoah’s charioteers are starting across in pursuit of them. This story is littered with corpses, is full of blood and vengeance. It is a very tough read, more action adventure film than anything we think of as “spiritual.” We don’t like the old blood-and-guts mafia don God. I understand that. I share with you the hope that if there is a divine unity underlying creation, it is characterized by Love and experienced as peace, healing and harmony – not traveling through the night as an angel of death killing the first born of the people of anywhere.

It is a tough read. Even the animals suffer. Even the land is destroyed. “The hail shattered every tree of the field.” Awful.

But yet, as I spent time these past weeks in this ancient stories, there was part of me that appreciated this enraged God. Because if there is anything holy in this world, shouldn’t it be each human being’s absolute right not to be owned by another human being? If anything enrages the great “I AM,” would it not be slavery? The Ten Commandments expressly forbid humans owning other humans, we all agree that it is an outrage. I think, therefore, that it is a good thing for the human community to keep alive a story that says when a spokesman for an oppressed people cry, “Let my people go,” you had better do it or there will be hell to pay.

There’s that old expression, “fear of the Lord” that free-thinkers don’t much use anymore. The Passover story, filled as it is with terrifying and vivid images of a divine wrath unleashed on a hard-hearted leader who insists on basing his economic might on slave labor, makes me think that a nation or a people that have lost a good, healthy “fear of the Lord” may have also lost the ability to be ashamed of themselves. Fear is the beginning of wisdom, so it says later in the Bible.

Where is our shame today, all nations who permit humans to be owned as chattel? Slaves still hold up much of the world’s economy on their broken backs.

Let me share with you some information about slavery today, provided by the United Nations, who sponsored the first International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade on March 25, 2008.

“The first annual International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade also serves as a reminder that contemporary forms of slavery – such as human trafficking, forced prostitution, child soldiers, forced and bonded labour and the use of children in the international drug trade – are still flourishing today, largely as a result of vulnerability exacerbated by poverty, discrimination and social exclusion.

• It is estimated that more than 250,000 children are currently being exploited as child soldiers in as many as 30 areas of conflict around the world. Many of the kidnapped girls who are made into child soldiers are also forced into sexual slavery.

• The International Organization for Migration estimates that annually 700,000 women, girls, men and boys are being trafficked across borders away from their homes and families and into slavery.

• An estimated 5.7 million children are victims of forced and bonded labour, also known as debt bondage, and 1.2 million children are victims of child trafficking.

• Linked to trafficking is the commercial sexual exploitation of children of whom 1 million, mainly girls, are forced into prostitution every year. These girls are sold for sex or used in child pornography in both the developed and the developing world.

“Despairingly credible comparisons of scale and suffering may be drawn with the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans in the Americas in which more than 12 million people were forcibly transported over the ocean in four hundred years. It is to our great shame that if today’s statistics are correct, and 700, 000 people are now being trafficked across borders into slavery annually, we will have equaled that total in a mere 20 years.”

And we thought the cause of abolition was settled in the nineteenth century.

That latter quote comes from Mrs. Ndioro Ndiye, the Deputy Director General International Organization of Migration (IOM). “It is to our great shame,” she says. A good word. A good word if it means that the conscience is activated, that we come out of our shells a bit and say, “If this is going on in such high numbers, where might it be going on around me? Am I willing not only to hear the stories of those trapped in systems of slavery, but am I willing to look for it, to investigate how my life, my assets, my comforts, might be tangled up in these systems? What am I consuming, wearing, eating, using and enjoying that was produced by slave labor?” Modern people should have morally progressed far enough to understand that we plague ourselves by refusing to see the Pharaohs in our midst, and to hold them accountable.

The congregation of Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts, contributed this reading to the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. It speaks of our human responsibility to do the work that the Bible story says Moses and God teamed up to do so long ago. It reads,

What sacrifices would we make for freedom today?
What would we leave?
How far would we go? How deeply would we look within ourselves?
Our ancestors had no time to await the rising of the bread.
Yet we, who have that time, what do we do to be worthy of our precious inheritance?
We were slaves in Egypt… but now we are free.
How easy it is for us to relive the days of our bondage as we sit in the warmth and comfort of our Seder.
How much harder to relieve the pain of those who live in the bitterness of slavery today.

To live enslaved must be absolutely brutal. We are lucky not to have to know the pain of it. But to be free is also to bear a burden. It is to bear a burden of responsibility, of constant moral decision-making, of self-cultivation, of obediences and obligations chosen out of respect, not out of coercion. To be free requires speaking and living the truth as best we understand it to and with other free people, sometimes trying to persuade, sometimes trying to listen more carefully in order to understand. And always, always at the end, to advocate for everyone’s liberation from every kind of enslavement.

The easiest thing is to be technically free but unconscious, entirely self-interested, pursuing only what is comfortable, only what is pleasant, mostly what is familiar, and concerned only with the well-being very small circle of family and friends. To be truly free is to recognize that we are easily lured into a smaller life and field of vision than is best for us to have. To be truly free means to rail against the self-imposed chains of ignorance and pettiness. To be truly free is not only to be free from something but free FOR something – something that magnifies our souls and beckons toward ever onward toward a shining goal. Freedom is not a gift granted us once and finally, but is a process, a calling, and is the work of our lives to embody in the certainty that, in the words attributed sometimes to Mahatma Ghandi and sometimes to that great author, Anonymous, “no one is free when others are oppressed.”
(sung:)
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land.
Tell old Pharoah, let my people go.

Judeans Rather Than “Jews” — Sensitizing Good Friday Passion Readings

My friend Scott Wells, blogging as Boy In the Bands, writes about a Lutheran Good Friday service he attended that worked very well liturgically. Here, he describes what I want to lift up as a very helpful way to take some of the sting out of the painful anti-Jewish sentiment of the gospel accounts, heard too often by Christian ears across history as justification for terrible anti-Semitism. As a daughter of Jewish ancestry who heard from her own father to “be careful” on Good Friday (because he had grown up being harassed on that day, and had heard many stories from the Old Country that made Good Friday a fearful days for Jews), I commend this to your attention,

But I really mention the Passion Gospel because the reader-pastor made an important and legitimate alteration to the text. It is hard to really get into the story when you get a dose of the-Jews-the-Jews-the-Jews. Sensitive Christians have been troubled about this for quite some time, but I confess I hadn’t come up with as elegant solution as I heard today. (And indeed, it was featured in the sermon.) For Jew (religious identity), he said Judean (political identity). It isn’t a euphemism: Jesus was convicted of sedition for claiming (not to play Pilate) the “Rex Judaeorum” and Judean is already used a toponomic adjective.

There’s enough of a verbal distance to help Christians hear the story without getting coopted into the long history of anti-Jewish violence by Christians, or God forbid, extending it. There’s something to be said by what Jewish friends and family would make of the Passion Gospel. (Indeed, this is the reason I name the congregation, so as to attribute this good practice.) - Scott Wells, BoyInTheBands

I attended Good Friday at the Episcopal Cathedral Church in Boston and was very touched to see these words by Bishop Krister Stendahl on the first page of the Order of Worship,

A Note Toward Repentance

As we gather beneath the Cross of Jesus, we should perhaps also be aware how among Jews and Muslims this our most holy sign has evoked and still evokes memories of the murderous Christian Crusades. And in not too distant times, it was actually during Holy Week that Jews suffered the worst pogroms. Somehow it was the story of Christ’s Passion that gave Christians the biblical sanction for acting out in heinous ways that contempt for the Jews that has marked and marred so much of Christian teaching and preaching. Even today images linger in our minds of the high priests — not to mention Judas — as looking much more Jewish than Jesus. [Mel Gibson, are you listening? - PB] How can that be? Were they not all Jews? Such simple questions should make us resolve to purge our Good Friday worship of all its potential contempt for Jews and Judaism. We do so in a mood of repentance, shamefully aware of how our story of reconciliation often was turned into its very opposite. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. — Bishop Krister Stendahl

The Offering Is a Great Teaching Moment

Students and student ministers of mine know that I like to emphasize the fact that the Offering is not a throwaway moment that should be dispensed with as quickly as possible in the service so that we can get to the “real” religious stuff. Stewardship is (or could be) as spiritual as prayer, and I believe that ministers should put as much care and thought into making the offering words meaningful as they do their prayers and sermons. If people hear the same phrase week after week, their giving can also become rote. What a shame that is, for the offering is part of the liturgy during which we actually mingle our life energy in a tangible way, through the sharing of our financial gifts. There’s no reason to mumble something brief and euphemistic (The wag in me always wants to look around in exaggerated consternation when visiting at churches where they do this and say in a stage whisper, “Excuse me, is this the part where we’re supposed to throw money in the basket?”) and “get it over with.”

The Bible says that God loves a cheerful giver, so I like to start my Offerings with jokes, when I can get a good one. SweetieBang gave me this one and I’m using it tomorrow. You have my permission to do the same, just please attribute:

“A time-share salesman and a priest die at the same time. The time-share salesman gets hit by a bus; the priest dies in his sleep of natural causes. When they end up at the pearly gates, St. Peter calls forward the time-share salesman and says, ‘What did you do with your life?’ The time-share salesman guy says, ‘I sold time-share.” St. Peter checks his notes, he looks in a big book, he says ‘I see here that you are correct’ and he says, ‘You see that mansion made of solid gold, with the crystal blue sea on one side and the purple ski mountains in the back? You go there.’

So the priest is thinking, ‘Wow, if the time-share salesman gets that, I’ve got it made.’When St. Peter calls him up and asks, ‘What did you do with your life?’ the priest says, ‘I gave food to the hungry, clothing and shelter to the poor’ — he goes on for half an hour about all his good works. St. Peter looks in his book and says, ‘I see that this is true. You see that stone cottage in the meadow with the sheep in front of it? You go there.’ The priest says, ‘Well, begging your pardon St. Peter, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but how come the time-share salesman guy gets the gold mansion and all that?’

And St. Peter says, ‘Oh, he only gets that for a week.’

Jesus said, ‘Where your heart is, there shall your treasure be also.’ Our hearts are with this community – not because it is perfect, not because it is easy to be in community, and not because we are always happy here, but because here we are called and recalled, again and again, to our highest aspirations and ideals. The Church at its best provides not only the comfort of fellowship and care, but the spiritual stretch we need to go beyond the littleness of our own lives and grow in moral maturity. Let us now share our a portion of our financial treasure where our hearts are. Pledges and free will offerings to [name of congregation] will now be gratefully received.” - (Rev. Victoria Weinstein, Norwell, MA)

The News Of the Year In Religion

Dear ones,

Every year at the turn of the new year I give a sermon called “The Good News Of the Year In Religion” or just “The News Of The Year In Religion.” And you help me write it!

This year I am thinking about the presidential race and how religion is shaping up (sadly) to be a major factor in the campaigns. Note the sad spectacle of Mitt Romney pandering to the Religious Right earlier this week, doing a little tap dance about how much he loves Jay-zus and pulling out that tired old misrepresentation of the Founding Father’s original intent to “make this a Chreestiyan nashun!”
Aw geez, Mitt. And I had so much respect for… your hair.
He got thrown a few bones by some of the big guys so I hope he’s proud of hisself. I myself hear the soft thumping sounds of Joseph Smith rolling over in his grave.

So gimme some good news! Tell me about something that happened in your community (Milton, I’m looking at you!). Remind me of a little story that didn’t make it to the front pages. Help me explain, in one paragraph, what the hay-ell is going on in the Anglican communion.

Come and Get Me, Jesus

I’m preaching tomorrow on Matthew 9:18-26 and I am surprised to find that I feel no need to exegete this as a feminist text any more.

I’m going to go ahead and post my homily because I just want to make you laugh today. And I know that the story of my babysitter (all true, friends, all true) will probably crack some of you up. If you don’t like it, please don’t tell me. This is what I’m giving and it’s done.

I would like to especially dedicate this to You Know Who, who sat with me one night at GA over cocktails and laughed ’til we both cried about the Cult of the Zombie Jesus, our interpretation of what some very discomfited Unitarian Universalists think of our religious beliefs (based on actual conversations). We even designed special liturgical headdresses and tee-shirts. Our worship attire would involve huge rings of deep black eyeshadow all around our eyes. I swear someday we’re really going to make a YouTube video to get it out of our systems.
Please understand that I’m not laughing AT people, I’m laughing with them. Because as you can see from this sermon, I used to literally believe Jesus was a zombie. I have no idea how religious beliefs and ideas can morph and change so much over one lifetime, but I attribute this phenomenon in my own life to my Unitarian Universalist upbringing, where we learned that revelation is something that can happen at any time, and that we’re always free to adapt to new ways of experiencing truth and meaning. Thanks be to God!

Come and Get Me, Jesus

My sister and brother and I had some really great babysitters in our childhood. I remember some of them very fondly, like Helma Mezzie, who used to sew great outfits for our little plastic troll dolls. She was the best. A few times, though, we had a born-again fundamentalist girl named Cecilia. Cecilia made a very serious impression on me, and not in a good way. One night when she was over we had a big storm. We lived out in the woods and the wind was blowing all the trees around. Cecilia called for me to look out the window with her at the thrashing trees and the leaves blowing everywhere. I was maybe 8, 9 years old. I was nervous about it. Cecilia took me by the shoulders and made me look out into the woods and she said in this dreamy voice, “Jesus is coming for all his children. Jesus is coming for all the little children.”

I know that she found that comforting, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been so frightened in my life. You have to understand that the only thing I knew about Jesus back then was that he was this guy with long blonde hippie hair who got killed and came back to life, and that my grandparents had pictures of him all over their house because they actually thought he was God’s relative or something. He was on their calendar with lambs and children, he was on the thermometer telling you the temperature with his arms wide open, he was on the bedroom wall nailed to a cross and bleeding. I knew that Easter was a holiday about him coming back to life, so I concluded that he was a zombie. And now this zombie was coming to get all the little children! What was he going to do with us when he got us? I figured he was going to make an army of zombie children! I didn’t sleep that night. The next day I told my parents about Jesus coming and we never had Cecilia back to baby sit.

Of course I learned much later that I had it all wrong. Jesus wasn’t a zombie – in fact, his whole life and ministry was spent trying to keep us from being half-dead ourselves, to be awake to God’s presence in the world, to have life more abundant. I also learned that, contrary to what Cecilia said, Jesus wasn’t “coming to get” me or anyone else. While he definitely had a knack for showing up and filling atheist intellectuals like me with the sudden irrational desire to follow him, he wasn’t the type to break through walls and burst out of the closet and grab you like a monster. By the time I figured out how badly I wanted and needed Jesus in my life, actually, I had to break through a few walls and closets to get to him!

Isn’t it interesting how Jesus gets this reputation for having a character like a streamroller, a force that will just rudely plow through our lives to prove his godly powers to us, to charge through the clouds with an AK-47 to bring about his triumphant reign, when in all the real life stories about him, he always seems a little bit tired at being asked to save yet another life?

Look at the gospel stories we just read: this happens all the time! It’s not Jesus marching around going “Oh hey, you there – you need some healing. I’m going to spit into my hands now, blind man, and give you sight.”
“Does anyone happen to have any dead children or parents they’d like me to resurrect this afternoon? Please, line them up!”
No, it’s never like that. It’s always someone like the woman with a 12-year hemorrhage –totally untouchable by her society’s purity laws– who grabs him on the hem when he’s on his way somewhere else. “Mister, you gotta help me.” In Luke’s version of this story, you know, it even says that as the woman pulled at him, Jesus felt his power go out of him. Healing costs Jesus something. This should be a hint to all of us who seek healing that it’s no easy thing – if healing one woman drains even Jesus, just imagine the energy it takes you and me.

There are always needy people clamoring for Jesus. And it’s not minor stuff. It’s big stuff, like “This guy in our neighborhood is being tormented by demons, could you do something about it?” And Jesus does, of course. He says it again and again, “If you believe you can be well, you will be well.” He says it to the woman with the flow of blood, “Your faith has made you well.” He didn’t have to go after her. He didn’t go around breaking down doors nabbing bleeding women and little dead girls for his zombie army.

Did you notice this? No one ever got resurrects by Jesus in the gospels unless someone who loves them begs him please, someone I love is dead. You must help us. We’re begging you, please do this. We know you can do this. Jesus, with a sigh, does it. Your daughter isn’t dead, she’s sleeping. Now she’s alive, please give her something to eat. He’s always underplaying his presence, recommending that folks not go around talking about what they just saw. It’s just not Jesus’ style to come for anyone who doesn’t want him. It is his style to be the living incarnation of God’s vision of how we should behave with one another.

That’s good news for the scared little kid I used to be, who couldn’t sleep that night long ago for fear that this creepy man would crash through my window with his arms out in front of him and drag me away from my parents and my home.

But it’s not such good news for those of us here today who maybe thought that it was Jesus’ responsibility to come and get us and drag us to the life of faith or pull us up from the floor and into the healing waters while we kick, frightened and making excuses and resisting. It’s kind of hard news for those of us who stand far distant from Jesus with our arms folded saying, “Well, if you were really as godly as all that, you would see me over here, you would know how badly I need to be resurrected, you would see my flow of blood and make me whole.”

Friends, Jesus just doesn’t play that. That is not how the Christian life works. We give ourselves to God in freedom, because we were created in freedom, and Jesus is obviously a respecter of that freedom. At our baptism, we are invited into a beloved community hosted by the Holy Spirit, and promised that we are not stranded alone on this planet. We are not washed and installed passively in a hospital bed, assuming that Jesus will give us the right medicine when he makes his nightly rounds.

Jesus is not a cosmic doctor or a magician working tricks on an unwitting crowd. He is offering himself as the way, the truth and the life– and if we happen to be blind or bleeding or possessed by a few demons – (and who among us is not ?) — we need to let him know and welcome him in to do the work of healing. Scripture tells us again and again that if we have faith, we can be made whole, but this almost never happens unless we first go the necessary distance to sincerely seek it out.

Here we are on a rainy day much like that one so many years ago when my babysitter told me that Jesus was coming for all his little children. I don’t know where she got that, bless her heart. Jesus isn’t coming to getchya, my friends. But he is there for the getting if we need him – and we do.

Rev. Victoria Weinstein
October 10, 2007

HONK Festival

I went to the HONK Festival today in Davis Square. In case you didn’t know that there’s a whole subculture of “activist street bands,” I’m here to tell you that there is indeed!

They had names like Brass Liberation Orchestra and Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble and Hungry March Band and they came from as close by as Providence, Rhode Island and from as far away as New Orleans,Lousiana and Rome, Italy. My favorite group was the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, which had the best choreography and oom-papa kick-butt music and message.

It was one of those “Hush, Little Baby — Mama’s Gone Hunting a Sermon” outings — I already wrote 90% of my sermon on “Can These Dry Bones Live: Singing, Dancing and Laughing-In The Revolution” on Thursday and knew I’d get my first page or so from attending the festival. We’re hearing “Stories From the Cha Cha Cha” by Vern Huffman (in Paul Rogat Loeb’s marvelous book of essays, The Impossible Will Take a Little While) as our contemporary reading and Ezekiel 37:1-9 as our ancient reading. I’m referencing “Hairspray” and Baby Suggs’ Sermon in the Clearing from Beloved in mysermon:

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. … This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. … hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.”

I’m singing “Our Father (The New, Revised Edition)” by Susan Werner as the Prelude and the choir is doing “The Fire Of Commitment” by Jason Shelton. The music will all be fun, irreverent and contemporary. My Music Director is going to play “You Can’t Stop The Beat” from “Hairspray” as the postlude!

I used Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy as research reading.

My message is basically this: one of the most tried-and-true ways to oppress a people is to control their laughter, dancing and singing. The work of social change must reclaim these things. There’s a lot my sermon about colonialism and Western attitudes about the place of the body in spiritual practice (ie, none! ’til very recently!). We will remember the African slaves who sat in the choir loft of our own church building with their hands properly folded, having been taught that their own embodied forms of worship were demonic. The sermon concludes with the (somewhat inaccurate but by now legendary) words of Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Take and use as you like. I believe in sharing liturgical materials.

I’m really excited about this service. It has the potential to be a failure, and I think it’s important to take those risks now and then.

Food and Liturgy

Someone just made a $100 contribution to St. Gregory’s food pantry, which is fantastic! Every little bit helps! All your gifts are wonderful and SO much appreciated. Sara tells me that $400 will buy two thousand pounds of food.

I’ll take contributions through the end of this week and then we’ll cut a check for St. Greg’s, which is celebrating the 7th anniversary of the food pantry in early November. Wish I could be there!

On another subject entirely, have any of you ever offered a special evening healing service for your congregations? I am feeling that I would like to plan one this winter and would like to see people’s liturgies — especially Unitarian Universalists’.

Another liturgical inquiry: I would like to do a Tenebrae or Good Friday service this year for the first time. I attended one at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC about ten years ago that was very powerful, as it interwove stories of martyrdoms from around the world with the story of Christ’s passion. I am under the impression that other congregations have offered this sort of service, and was again wondering if you’d like to share either liturgies or stories of similar services.

Thanks for your help. Time for bed.

Anointing Ritual

A dearly beloved congregant died this morning, and I am so grateful that I was able to see him and give him this anointing, which I composed on the way to the nursing home. I told a friend about it and she said I should write it down and share it. So here it is, with my blessings on you and your mortal beloveds:

Anointing Ritual
Rev. Victoria Weinstein

N.., I bring you water from the North River, the place of your earthly home, to bless and anoint you as you make the transition from the earthly life to life in the spirit.

(after filling hand with some water, touch the brow)

I anoint you in the spirit of gratitude.
We thank God for all the goodness of your life,
(here you may name some blessings and happy memories)
and your many gifts (you may name some of them).

(with more water, touch brow again)

I anoint you in the spirit of forgiveness.
Whatever burdens of anger or regret you bear,
let them go.
Now is the time to release those cares,
and to receive God’s grace.
Whatever you have left undone,
do not be troubled by it.
Trust that we will attend to those things that concern you,
and be at peace.
Be at peace.

(with the final handful of water, touch the brow a third time)

N., we anoint you in the spirit of blessing.
We pray for your comfort.
You are not alone. God is with you, and we are holding you.
We witness to the beauty of your life,
and we are honored to be with you at its end.

Be at rest. God grant you peace. Amen.

(Here you may take your wet hands and touch the beloved’s hands, then move in a circle around the bed, taking the hands of the witnesses in yours by way of sharing the blessing.)

note: I felt it was important to perform this anointing at the setting of the sun.
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going to cry now.