Text: Gen 32:22-32

First I want to say that it’s lovely to be here with you this morning, to share worship and to be in this sacred space together. As you may have heard, our Unitarian Universalist congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee was attacked last Sunday morning by an angry man with a gun, who killed two people and wounded seven others. It has been a hard week for our little denomination, especially as we learned that this was not at all a random act of violence but a pre-meditated attack on our liberal religious tradition, and particularly our commitment to the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered people in the life of our congregations.

I am bitterly angry and grieving and it has been hard to say the expected words of hope, healing and peace.

So I have been wrestling with God a lot myself these past days. And this is what I want to talk about with you this morning.

You’ve been spending time with the book of Genesis – this epic family story —(and my Lord, whenever I think that my own family is dysfunctional, all I have to do is flip through Genesis and by comparison we look like The Brady Bunch!) God creates human beings at the beginning of the book and immediately they’re off and running: murder, deceit, betrayal, rape, theft – you name the crime, someone in Genesis has committed it.

You’re going to think I’m crazy for saying this, but I consider this a relief, in some ways. It certainly shows us that the God who works through history chooses to work through ordinary men and women like you and me. We don’t have to be saints to be the instruments of the holy. That’s good news.

When I became a Christian, I was naive enough to believe that if I worked hard enough on spiritual practices and worshiped God with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul and all my strength, I would miraculously get a personality transplant and become a sweeter, nicer, and better person than ever before. That didn’t happen.

What did happen is that through practice and prayer, I came to love God more, love and cherish the Christian tradition more—even with all the sick branches of our family tree—and to become more aware than ever of how much I need the Church.

I’m still ornery, angry, impatient and judgmental. God hasn’t taken that from me. It seems that God takes me as I am, and invites me to accept that I am loved as I am. This is called my particular struggle; to accept grace. Well, I don’t like grace, because I can’t control grace; it is freely given. So I wrestle with God over this. “Give me a personality transplant! I say, as I wrestle. “Change me!” And God flips me over and pins me there and says, “Change yourself if you want. But whether you will or not, I will love you and I will call you my child.”

I am beginning to understand the mystery that while we practice our faith in community, the process of spiritual growth and the getting of wisdom are things we do very much alone with our God. And I think that’s what our Scripture reading for today is all about; it’s about Jacob coming face to face with his demons with his God, dealing with that , as we all do, as a solitary human being.

Last week you heard about how Jacob cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright. Nice guy. I mean, his mother helped him do it, so he’s not entirely to blame. And there is also that moment where Esau himself says, “Go ahead, have my inheritance. I’ll give it to you for a bowl of lentil soup, I’m that hungry.” Isn’t thinking at all about the consequences of what he’s doing, but he’s giving away property, livestock, cash value. Maybe he thinks Jacob will forget about it. No such luck. Jacob covers his hands with goat fur to impersonate his hairy brother gets the inheritance blessing out of his dear old dad, the blessing whose words begin,
“May God always give you plenty of dew for healthy crops and good harvests of grain and wine.”

Whoa. Sibling conflict! After the expected bitter exchange of words and promises of vengeance from cheated brother Esau, Jacob goes off with his ill-gotten gains and has his own adventures. You heard last week how he had a vision one night during which God made him amazing promises – primarily that his descendants would be as numerous as the dust of the earth, and that they would be blessed. This is the God of Moses and Abraham – the Great I AM. Jacob is awed by this revelation and promises to be faithful to this God, if he will protect and be with him on his journey.

So off he goes to live his life. He serves his deceitful Uncle Laban, who promises Jacob one daughter in marriage if he’ll work for him for seven years, but on the wedding day slips another sister, Leah, under the veil. Another nice guy. Jacob – who has now had a sweet taste of being cheated himself — gives Laban another seven years of service, after which he gets to marry the sister he wanted all along, Rachel. With the help of their servant-women, Bilhah and Zilpah doing conjugal duties on their behalf, the two sisters give Jacob twelve sons. By the time we see him in today’s reading, he’s a prosperous guy. Definitely holding some guilt about how he got there, and certainly suffered his bumps along the way, but prosperous.

And now it’s come time to face the music and head back home to the land of his kinfolk as God commands. I don’t know how old Jacob is at this point but I like to imagine we’re about the same age – peers in some way. That part of middle age where you can take pride in your accomplishments but you’ve learned enough about human nature – including your own — to take responsibility for all the good and bad in your nature that got you where you are. It’s a kind of bittersweet place to be– I kind of think of it as the emotional halfway house of maturity – you’re well past the rampant insecurities of youth but not yet at that place of acceptance of self and others that we all hope to reach by the time we’re elders.

Jacob knows he’s going to see Esau. He’s nervous. Who wouldn’t be? He hears that Esau is sending 400 men to meet him, which doesn’t sound good. Is this a parade coming, or an army? Figure it out; these brothers did not part on good terms! It would be a good time to run for it, but Jacob can’t. He’s being obedient to his God, who has told him that he needs to go back to the land of his people.
And Jacob’s honoring his own integrity, too: he knows he done wrong, so he humbles himself. “Tell Esau his servant Jacob has come,” he tells his brother’s messengers. He piles up loads of gifts for Esau out of his own vast holdings. He’s going to try to reconcile with his Esau, but he doesn’t know how things will go.

Have you ever been in this situation? You know your own intentions are good, you’ve done your inner work and know that you’re coming from a pure- hearted place, but the someone you’re trying to patch things up with may be harboring a lot of resentment. What can you do? Well, you can worry yourself sick about it, you can be met with hostility and get defensive about that, you can avoid the relationship altogether, or you can stand there with your pure heart and risk getting slapped in the face, stabbed in the back, or maybe… if you’re lucky… forgiven, accepted, gathered in.

Jacob isn’t sure what he’s going to get. He’s nervous, pacing. Can’t sleep. So in the night he gets up and sends his two wives, concubines and sons across the Jabbok River. “You go ahead. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here.” And then, because maybe there will be torches, he sends all his possessions across the river as well. And then he is left alone. You know that kind of alone. Alone alone. Two, three o’clock in the morning deal-with-your-own-demons alone. At least we think we’re alone at those times. But we’re not. This story tells us that God is right there with us on those sleepless nights. For Jacob, God takes the shape of a mysterious man who jumps him at his campsite and throws him to the ground.
. . . What the hell was that??! Who is this, what does he want, why won’t he just take my wallet and leave?!
The two wrestle all night,
sweaty,
panting, dirt and some blood mixing together,
flesh on flesh.

I envision Jacob crying tears of frustration, anger, fear, all the stuff about his brother and his past coming out of him as this mysterious man throws him all around. It hurts! And yet there is also a strange satisfaction in it,
a catharsis,
that sobbing,
that digging your fingers into something real that was only emotional a few hours before,
pushing back against it,
grabbing it by the scruff of its neck,
throwing it down.

Whatever this creature is – and we know its something not of this world – it figures out that Jacob ain’t giving in – so it knocks Jacob’s hip out of its socket (OW!) and says Let me go, the sun is coming up.

Supernatural beings can’t stick around for daytime.
Ancient peoples knew this, and so does Jacob.

You can imagine him standing there with his arms around the being’s torso from behind, panting, gasping, sore, with that hip throbbing in pain –oh my god almighty – he realizes he’s been wrestling with God, or certainly with one of God’s messengers. And so he doesn’t let go. Oh hell no. In that darkness that comes right right before dawn, he holds onto his supernatural wrestling partner and says You have to bless me. You put me through this, God, you brought me to this night of confrontation, of grief and exhausting struggle, it was you all along. I cannot and will not let this struggle end until I receive your blessing.
Otherwise why did I bother? What else is all of this for,
the guilt, the worry,
sending my beloveds across the river not knowing what would happen to them or to me,
the painful confrontation with all my own past sins? The transformation from the guy who would cheat his brother into the guy I am today? You must bless me!!

“What’s your name,” asks the supernatural wrestler. And Jacob tells him.
I’m Jacob.

Well, you’ve got a new name now, says the angel. You’re now Israel, because you have struggled with God and men and won.
(Israel means “God struggles,” or “one who struggles with God.”)

He won? He did? How did Jacob—now known as Israel – win? Didn’t he get his hip knocked out of its socket? He’s lost a whole night of sleep. He’s bloody, he’s beat up.

I’ll tell you how he won. First, he held on. He did not abandon the struggle throughout the long night even though he had no idea what he was actually struggling with!! – and most of us don’t, do we? Do we? I know I don’t!
For most of us, the spiritual struggle can seem a very long night indeed — we grope our way by faith, not by sight. Jacob/Israel also won because he recognized that his fight was a holy one, that he was thrashing it out with some manifestation of God’s own self.

We would also do well to recognize how often our own fights with ourselves and with others are actually divine arguments between ourselves and our God. We think we’re fighting with him or her or them, but the wrestling match is truly with our God and the divine within us. Jacob has struggled with God, with men and with himself and won.

Finally, Jacob is triumphant because in the end, he gets the blessing he seeks. I am sure that when the mysterious stranger threw him to the ground, he did not think the encounter would end in blessing. We never do. But maybe we will now.
Keeping our friend Jacob in mind, we might more often consider that whatever we’re wrestling with all alone in our days and nights might be sacred struggles, and hang in there until we get a blessing out of it.

P.S.? Esau greets his long-estranged brother with open arms. Happy ending.

So my friends, let us hold each other as brothers and sisters in our struggles, our midnight wrestlings. A lot of us are walking around with dislocated hips out here. Be kind. Put out your hand and help a fellow wrestler up off the ground.

Thank you for listening. Amen.

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.

UN-SAINTING MARTIN
Rev. Victoria Weinstein

Let me share with you a reading from our hymnal by Clinton Lee Scott:

Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.
It is easier to blindly venerate the saints than to learn the human quality of their sainthood.
It is easier to glorify the heroes of the race than to give weight to their examples.
To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their wisdom.
Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values.
Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes gather up the stones to build the prophet’ s monument.
Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.

Quite a little kick in the pants, isn’ t it?

But worth hearing, worth sober and sincere reflection especially today, as we honor a prophet from our recent past, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His friends called him “Martin” and they called him “Doc.”

The more I learn about Martin, the more I am staggered by his strength, by his clarity of vision, by his courage, and by his rockbound religious faith. This is a man who said at the eulogy of Unitarian minister James Reeb, who had been murdered by racist sociopaths while on a freedom march in Alabama,

“in spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period, something profoundly meaningful is taking place.” He was that committed to non-violence. His faith that humans would turn away from hatred and ignorance and toward ways of justice was that strong. He spoke from this place of strength and this conviction again and again in public, even knowing that he himself was likely to be murdered.

Martin lived in the eye of the storm of the violent time that was the civil rights era, and it cannot be said that he never wavered in his faith; in fact, in his final days he became deeply depressed by the possibility that perhaps all movements for social change would inevitably involve violence. As he was helping organize the sanitation worker’ s strike in Memphis, he questioned his own commitment to peaceful forms of resistance. Many within his own camp challenged his ideas, which hurt and distracted him. He had some sleepless nights. And then he was shot dead while standing on a balcony of a Memphis hotel talking to friends below about whether or not to wear a jacket because of the chilly weather.

And that commanding, inimitable voice was silenced.

I think he was the best preacher America has ever had. I cannot recommend highly enough that you obtain a collection of his sermons called Strength To Love and read them and re-read them. But don’ t read them if you want something to keep you comfortable on a cold January day. These sermons are brilliant things referencing everything from the Bible to philosophers, to works of literature and stories from King’ s own life to weave testaments to hope and deliverance — testaments whose power are staggering. As a preacher, Martin was no showy pulpit pounder; his rage has so much integrity and challenge to it, it silences and sobers one to read his words. Just reading them, I feel implicated in the crime of not working hard enough toward the vision of an earth made fair, with all her people one. Just reading them, I am convicted of being a complacent, middle class white woman who could be applying herself much more passionately to the cause of equality and justice. But I always come away energized from King’ s sermons, for Martin’ s special genius was to both convict and invite, as if to say, “Yes, we’ re sinners living in a broken world. But God made us for something so much better, so let’ s get to work.” Hearing him speak in person must have been even more powerful.

Martin knew America. He loved America deeply enough to be honest about her shadow side, and he loved America enough to believe that Americans could, if we wanted to, finally achieve the ideals set out in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. True to the expression that a prophet is never honored in his own hometown, Martin’ s honesty irritated many Americans, whose consciences were scalded and whose unearned privilege was offended by the dignity of his movement. He spoke truth to power, as they say, and for his trouble his life was threatened, his house firebombed, and the FBI tailed him everywhere he went, desperately trying to discredit him and expose him as a fraud. The trouble is, he was no fraud. He was the real deal.

He was the real deal, and had he lived, he might have become a kind of Prophet Emeritus for America, remaining an eloquent, passionate thorn in the side of racist America, militaristic America, consumeristic America, soul-sick America, violence-addicted America, economically and racially segregated America. I don’ t know if he would have had the energy much longer, to be honest with you. When he was murdered at the age of 39, he was exhausted and not taking care of himself. But before he could pull back and assume a lesser role in the movement, he was assassinated.

And after that, the worst possible thing eventually happened: history made him a saint, sanitized him, beatified him, put a halo on his head and sat him on a shelf to be a decoration of our past. As if his rage would be any less today. As though the era of Civil Rights is over, and we solved it, and we now judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of our character, as he famously hoped we would in his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Can you imagine what Martin would have to say today about the racial profiling following 9/11? Can you imagine what kind of Biblical texts he would have chosen to preach in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, watching his southern brothers and sisters waiting on their rooftops for help that never came, while Condoleeza Rice went shoe-shopping in Manhattan? While so many other leaders went along la la la, fiddling while Rome burned? He angered many people in the 60′ s by speaking out against Vietnam War and he would undoubtedly have angered just as many today, speaking out against the war in Iraq. He would have been out there on behalf of a living wage, and against the increasing stratification between rich and poor in America.

But what happens to prophets in our culture once they’ ve been martyred and subsequently sanitized and “saint-ified?” We give them a national holiday, ignore the bulk of whatever message they may have tried to communicate, and eventually become much more fascinated by the details of their personal lives than by the transcendent, eternal truths they spent their life blood in serving.

What happens to saints over time is that they eventually stop being revered exemplars and become not much more than celebrities, whose lives are available for our voracious scrutiny and consumption. No life, no matter how revered, is immune from this treatment. Just to use one example, in the 15th century, Theresa of Avila’ s works of mystical contemplation were regarded as holy spiritual treasures. It was her work, her brilliant spiritual insights, that earned people’ s reverent devotion to her. But by the 21st century, I’ m learning all about how she wore her hair and what kind of relationship she had with her father. It’ s so much easier to read about her childhood in Spain than to delve into the genius of her religious understanding, which would require real effort! (Who needs it!?) Everything is so democratic nowadays that we like to demystify even the mystics.

Every year, some or other fairly juicy biography appears on the market, revealing salacious tidbits about men and women generally revered by society.

We find out that Thomas Jefferson had children with his slave Sally Hemings – punching home the painful fact that the author of the Declaration of Independence actually owned other human beings as property. We learn that Abe Lincoln might have had homosexual longings for a colleague or friend, and that his wife was insane (and we come away wondering if these are the most important things to know about him). Another book suggests a hot romance between Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson’ s wife, and did you know that Ben Franklin liked to sleep nude with the windows open? These books sell tons of copies and satisfy our iconoclastic desires (iconoclasm literally means “to smash icons”).

And then what? When we’ ve discovered that some of our saints and idols are actually fallible humans, are we then excused from heeding their call? Is that the ultimate end of the iconoclastic project? To make a prophetic human being into a saint, then demote that saint back to mortal status so that we can be so disappointed in their humanity that we don’ t have to listen to them?

I almost got into this exact kind of trouble with Martin recently. He was a saint for me. The bravest, the strongest, the most eloquent. I kept Strength to Love close by, turning again and again to its pages. What a preacher. What a minister. What a scholar. He was the consummate organizer, the one who could set hearts on fire. One who could not just talk about saving the world, but could actually do it.

And then I picked up a huge biography about him – the epic new Pulitzer Prize-winning one, Bearing the Cross, by David Garrow — and before you know it, I was caught up in the iconoclastic project of combing for the salacious tidbits that would prove my hero to be a hypocrite and a traitor to his own ideals. When I found out that it was true that Martin was a womanizer, oh boy, did that turn me off. I got cold and angry and judgmental reading about how much Coretta Scott, his wife, had wanted to take a public leadership role in the civil rights movement, and how often they quarreled about it because Martin felt she should be at home.

When I read about his many girlfriends – especially two women with whom he had a serious and lasting adulterous relationship – I started to give my friend Martin a real dressing down. I’m flipping through the pages and having a fight with him: “Hey Martin, woman are sisters in the struggle, okay? They’ re not just ornaments for your private sexual comfort, okay?” (flip, flip) “Martin, I can’ t believe this! How could you do this?”

With a heavy heart, I traveled the path of disillusionment that I am sure you have been down yourself many a time. It was as bad as finding out a lot of terrible things about Mother Theresa, like the fact that she flew first class on a private jet for many of her travels, and that she refused financial help for lepers in India because she believed in the Christ-like beauty of poverty.

Ah.

Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.

So what do we do? I think for a start, we stop expecting our prophets to be unblemished gods, and accept that hypocrisy and fallability are the hallmarks of the human being; no less so the prophetic man or woman. I think – and this is so important!! — that we must decide to learn from our prophet’ s mistakes and shortcomings as we take up the work of transforming society that they began. And by that, we heed the direction of their vision.

It seems to me, at last, that we get precious few real prophets who walk among us, and plenty of false ones. We know our prophets by this: that they speak truth to power whatever the cost, that they trouble our souls with their passionate indictment of the way things are, and that they urge us with all the strength of their being to put ourselves in the service of the way things ought to be. We know our prophets by the authentic sting of conscience we feel when we hear their words; a sting that actually comes from the recognition of our own moral improvability, and of our power. The implications of using our own power! We know that we are in the presence of the prophet when we sit up straighter in our chairs, and when our feet begin to tingle with the urge to move, to effect change, to do something, to join with brothers and sisters in the struggle, to stop assessing and analyzing and remaining at a critical distance, and to be used, as our prophets allow themselves to be used, in the service of a more glorious reality.

It is hard work, and sometimes intimidating work, to accept the implications of our own power and to heed the direction of the prophets’ vision. In Martin, we had a true prophet, not a saint. A prophet. Let us remember today and all days that his invitation was not to scrutinize him as an individual, but to align ourselves with the dream he articulated and, in his own words, “to be about the serious business of bringing God’s kingdom to this earth.”

May it be so.

I saw a movie about the events of Jesus’ life when I was a young kid – not too tiny but young enough to be very impressionable. I remember one scene in particular, which appears in John’s gospel and only in that gospel. It’s a miracle moment, and what happens is that Jesus shows up at the house of his friends Mary and Martha to find that their brother and his good friend Lazarus has died. He’s been dead for four days. Mary and Martha are totally distraught, of course, and they yell at Jesus: if you had been here this wouldn’t have happened! The response comes in the shortest verse in the entire Bible. Two words: “Jesus wept.” Because he loved Lazarus too.

So the next thing we know(and I’m still remembering the movie version right now), Jesus has worked a miracle and we see this tall, gaunt figure walking slowly out of the tomb. He’s still wrapped in cotton winding cloths, and he’s really pale and blinking into the sun and walking unsteadily and – this is what really affected me – he doesn’t look like he’s really sure he’s happy about being alive again. Everyone around him is crying with joy and rejoicing and it’s almost as if, if he was in private with Jesus, he might have said, “Hey buddy, you didn’t do me any favors just then.” At best, he seems ambivalent to be among the living.

And aren’t we all. Aren’t we all, at times, ambivalent to be among the living? Aren’t we all occasional resisters of new life, rebirth, all of which requires more courage than we sometimes think we’ve got?

In general, human beings love resurrection stories. We live for them. When painful realities slash into our lives, we trade resurrection stories as medicine: “My friend had this kind of cancer, too, and she got incredibly sick and we feared the worst, but today she’s been in remission for six years and has all the energy she ever had.” Or, “We lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and we got ourselves to Baton Rouge with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and it was a horrible time but we’re doing very well now, we have a house and jobs again, and the kids are going to a good school.”

We love resurrection stories. We cling to them as evidence of reason to hope, we store them in our minds the way a chipmunk stores nuts in his cheeks, so we can nibble on them for nourishment on emotionally hungry days.
Easter is a marvelous resurrection story told for thousands of years about a spiritual teacher and man of peace who was executed by crucifixion for the crime of trying to change the worldview of his community. It is told that he died on a Friday and that his tomb was empty on Sunday morning. His best friends and disciples had a shared experience of his living presence after his death that changed their hearts from fear to the fire of faith. They went forth to spread his worldview all over the place, thereby founding the religion we call Christianity.

The Easter resurrection story is of the WOW, knock-your-socks-off variety – the kind designed to persuade folks that no matter how ugly the world may seem to be, love is among us as a power far greater than violence, and love will have the last word. In my grandparents’ Russian orthodox church, on Easter morning the priest would say “Christos voskres!” (Christ is risen!) And the people would respond, “Voistenos voskres!” (He is risen indeed!) It is the cry of exultation, of celebration, of mighty wonders, in praise of knock-your-socks off miracles that turn tears of sorrow to tears of joy. For believers, it is occasion to say, “God is good, God will bring garlands instead of ashes, blessed are those who mourn, for they SHALL BE COMFORTED! Hallelujah!”

The drama of the story is wonderful. And yet we live lives that are not Biblical in scale but mostly far smaller and more ordinary. Our Easters can be small, and our resurrections come far more slowly.

I was talking about this with a friend last night and he said, “I was unemployed for seven months last year. I know all about the slow resurrection.” So does the contractor with the chronic back pain who suffers for years and finally has a surgery to heal him – he knows about the small Easter and the slow resurrection, too. Survivors of life-threatening diseases, those with depression and anxiety disorders that finally abate and give them desperately longed-for relief of mind and soul, they know too.

On Good Friday I attended services at the Episcopal Cathedral Church in Boston and a priest there told another story of a slow resurrection that came after a very hard loss. “I had four good friends in seminary,” he said. “Two of us went into the priesthood. Two are dead. They both died young. Four years after my friend John’s death, I married his widow. And so it came to pass that my godson became my stepson.” He said this in a tone full of wonderment, like he still couldn’t believe his bad luck and then his good luck, and how life is so funny that way. You imagine him blinking in the sun, mourning his friend but coming to realize that he is in love with his friend’s wife.

This happened to my distant cousin, too: he married his best friend’s widow after knowing and loving both of them for over fifty years. That’s not an easy resurrection experience. I imagine these men thinking, “Do I deserve this? Can I adapt to this challenge? Can I rise from my solitary life to embrace relationship? Do I want to?” I think of E.M., our friend E., whose wife died several years back after a series of health crises that left her paralyzed. You remember how E. cared for her, and how we all grieved. Today he’s out in Arizona with [C.A.], a long-time friend whose husband David (also a friend of E’s for over twenty years) died two years ago. Those two crazy kids are in love and E. drove out to get C., to assist her with the tying up of her affairs in AZ so he can bring her to live with him here. Godspeed to them, and safe passage home.

New life is a blessing. But it is also new, and newness means change. Change, even change for the better, can be a real strain on our emotions and our spirits. How does the addict, newly sober, come out of the darkness of alcoholism and into the light of sobriety? Some come rejoicing and grateful, some come dragging their heels and full of argument.

How does the young middle-aged single woman, after a twenty-year history of disastrous romances and literally hundreds of bad first dates, respond from the bitterness of her lonely tomb when fate finally drops a trustworthy and good man into her life? Part of her wants to say “Hallelujah, thank God” and part of her wants to say, “That might have been a lonely tomb, but it was my tomb, and I had it fixed up just the way I liked it.”

Resurrection is hard work. Resurrection says, “Here is life. What you do with it is up to you.”

New life. A new baby to the single mother. She says, “Oh my God,” in excitement and then, “Oh my God” in awe at the responsibility that she knows is now hers. New life. The blind young man who has surgery to repair his sight and who initially finds the world too disorienting to navigate. He is shocked to discover that all people have completely unique faces; something he had not expected. Small Easter stories experienced by people like you and me, waking us up, casting sunlight on our shadow, leaving us blinking into the light unsure of where next to step.

The poet Mary Oliver lost her beloved partner of over 40 years in 2005. Her book of poems, Thirst, chronicles her slow resurrection from speechless grief to gratitude for each new day – even a day without Molly in it. I will close with these words from her poem, “On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Mediate (Psalm 145)”:

Every morning I want to kneel down on the golden
cloth of the sand and say
some kind of musical thanks for
the world that is happening again – another day –
from the shawl of the wind coming out of the
west to the firm green

flesh of the melon lately sliced open and
eaten, its chill and ample body
flavored with mercy. I want
to be worthy of – what? Glory? Yes, unimaginable glory.

O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am
not ready, not worthy, I am climbing toward you.

My friends, Easter with its attendant new life, is not something that comes as planned. Therefore, we are never really ready, and who is to say whether or not we are worthy? New life and resurrections occur constantly; the gift of the resilience of the human spirit and its tenacious longing to be whole, and awake and fully plugged into unimaginable glory. May this glory be yours – whether in fleeting moments or in long beauty and love-drenched stretches of time. And when it comes to you, for however long it does, share the joy of it, share whatever bit of Easter perches in your heart and makes its home there.

You are the resurrection and the life.

Amen.

It’s the sixth principle of our Unitarian Universalist Association. Liberty, peace and justice for everyone, and a sense of kinship between all the peoples of the world. A great idea. I’m for it. I’m for it. But how? I hear those words, which are easy to remember because they so closely echo the words of the pledge of allegiance we all learned as kids. Words that slide easily out of the mouth, with starry eyes, hand over the heart. Peace, liberty and justice for all. A tall order indeed. If you hold yourself personally responsible to fill that order, its expectations could feel a bit crushing. How are any of us supposed to bring peace, liberty or justice to the whole world, let alone all three?
The short answer is, we’re not. We can’t. But the longer answer is more complicated, and it has to do with what we can bring to the world where we are.

…

What most particularly inspires me today is that Jesus was able to have that breadth of influence without ever being on television, without access to any kind of form of communication, without ever writing a word for posterity, without a computer, with no home, no credit card, no personal secretary, and he never even traveled that far beyond his own hometown. He did all that with nothing but a heart on fire and a pair of dusty sandals to walk around in.

If we have ever thought that saving the world required more than that, friends, we have been thinking too big, very likely over-reaching ourselves.
“Since what we choose is what we are,
and what we love we yet shall be,
the goal may ever shine afar,
the will to reach it makes us free.”
We sing those words as our Doxology on most Second Sundays, when we send our financial gifts – our offering — out into the world. These words remind us that bringing about peace, liberty and justice in any way, no matter how small or how significant, require first that we choose what we shall love, and then that we strive to reach it. That striving doesn’t need to take us geographically far, just somewhere new in the heart, new in our insides.

When he was saying goodbye to his community, Jesus said, “My peace I give to you. My peace I leave with you. Not as the world gives do I give you.”

Peace. The peace of knowing who we are and what we want to work toward, not just the peace of being comfortable and unbothered. We should not confuse the latter with the former. The peace of being comfortable and unchallenged is not peace but apathy. Our sixth principle tells us that we are communally committed to the goal of peace, liberty and justice for all. Not peace, liberty and justice as the world gives — through bureaucracies, and by government administrations that create a program in one era but demolish it the next — but peace, liberty, and justice as a way of being, as a way of ordering the way we look and think about things, as a way of disciplining ourselves and setting priorities that make demands on us.

What we love we yet shall be — and we are trying to love peace, liberty and justice for all people, a global goal that we mostly pursue here in our own local community. It can be done, friends. You know, Palm Sunday is notable for many reasons, but not least of all because it’s the one time we see Jesus riding on an animal rather than walking. He walked everywhere. As I said earlier, this man who changed the entire course of history never traveled very far from his own hometown. Think about that. A person can be an agent of peace, liberty and justice by walking around where they are; by letting their hearts be aflame with passion for the contribution they might make from right from where they are.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19th. I’ve had a lot of rage about it, especially when I think of your children in harm’s way, and all the carnage of the Iraqi people and culture. I am angry that my country has still required no sacrifice from me in order to make this war more real. I remember the monks who set themselves on fire in Vietnam to protest the war when the U.S. was fighting there, and I think, “We cannot set ourselves on fire, but we should allow our hearts and souls to catch fire. That fire is the divine presence in each of us, and it will not let us rest. And thank God for that. Nothing of worth happens without it.”

I have a colleague who is in Kenya right now, and others who have gone to Darfur, and some others who are going to train ministers in Zimbabwe this summer. And that’s all wonderful. But if we can’t go to Darfur or Zimbabwe, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create peace, liberty and justice where we are. Even the Ghandis and the Albert Schweitzers and the Mother Theresas and the Jesuses of the world all carried out their life work in very local communities. Of all of these admired people, Jesus was the least well-traveled.
…

Oh, it would be exciting to be a jet-setting savior of the world, wouldn’t it. To be a Jane Goodall flying from one country to the next inspiring people to eco-consciousness, signing books for hour upon hour for adoring fans like me. To be Paul Farmer lecturing on three continents in two days, so committed to saving poor communities from the scourge of tuberculosis and HIV that he hardly ever sees his own family, beloved of appreciative patients and mentor to dozens of brilliant doctors worldwide. So admired that he’s practically a saint to some.

But then there is this other man, who had no passport, won no awards, never got invited to an industry banquet, never published a book, didn’t have a change of clothes and never even had a wife and kids to neglect for his noble cause. A local man, a hometown boy who took long walks and talked to people, shared his deep and profound admiration for humanity and reverence for his God, and who did nothing but try to set each community’s hearts afire with the idea that we live not for ourselves
alone, but for others, and that we are not a random accident on the Earth but children of a Creator who loves us to every last hair on our heads.

What does it all mean? It means that some lives are lived on a grand scale of nobility and achievement, and that others whose hearts are just as full of passion are lived on a far smaller scale – a very local scale – and are just as noble. The point isn’t the scale, but the intensity of the fire that burns within, and how willing we are to have love lead us in the direction illumined by that fire.
What we love we yet shall be. And we can become it together, right here. That’s good news.

from “What We Love We Yet Shall Be”
The Reverend Victoria Weinstein
Palm Sunday 2008

The outer world follows the same patterns. The preacher, Ecclesiastes, said it in these words, “To every thing there is a season. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time for war and and a time for peace.” People hear this reading from the Hebrew Scriptures and they make a face, “That’s awful! A time to kill? A time for war?” But they misunderstand.
Ecclesiastes is not the voice of one pronouncing a vision of what the world could or should be, but the ancient voice of one articulating how life really is. And boy, it’s hard to hear. It’s ugly to those of us who like to think of the trip from birth to death as happy, clean, blessed with good fortune, where this is no time to kill and no time for war.

But the soul knows. The soul is a dark, silent, undulating swampland of mystery, fate, primordial wisdom, will to survive, and sure knowledge of death that lives largely hidden away beneath the questing, linear self. The soul is eternal, it is immortal — it is, some say, breathed into us at our birth, and it goes free of our bodies when we die. The soul knows that the world is a volatile environment for fragile creatures with enormously complex brains to live in, and that for that reason, one of our earliest and more prevalent forms of managing the existential anxiety of the human condition is to cultivate the illusion that we are in control.
And to that illusion, all the great wise men and women who have ever lived have a similar response. It can best be summed up as “HA. HA.”
“Who, by worrying, can add an hour to the span of your life?” asked Jesus, and the answer is pretty clear: “no one.”

The very heart of the Buddha’s teaching is that change is inevitable and all suffering comes from attachment; and particularly to our attachment to control.

The Buddhist author, Sharon Salzburg, whose excerpt from her book Faith we just heard, likes to tell funny stories on herself about how ridiculous we can get about control. She lives in New England and some friends were planning a visit from a region that has no autumn foliage. Salzburg scheduled the visit just at a time she assumed the leaves would be at the peak of their brilliant color. The friends planned their itinerary. But for some reason, very close to her friends’ scheduled arrival, the leaves were not doing their thing. There was mostly green and maybe a little yellow out there. Salzburg found herself driving along urging the leaves to change color already. She’d be stepping on the gas, looking out the window and murmuring, “Come on, let’s get some oranges and reds going here!!”

She said, “I had to admit to myself at that point that maybe I was having just a little bit of a control issue.”

We laugh, but the need to be in control can literally make us sick: physically sick with chronic anxiety, phobias, high blood pressure, back and neck pain, headaches, gastrointestinal illness — all results of our bodies tightening with dread and rejection over what we cannot anticipate.

Sharon Salzburg tells another story about control, a more tender story about her close friend, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, having a stroke, and her subsequent panic and fear and obsession about the outcome of his stroke. She writes that she “replayed each scenario a dozen times, ‘Maybe he’ll be able to speak again but not walk. Maybe he will be able to write but not speak. Maybe he will make a complete recovery.’” Clearly, this was all just the response of a frightened friend, trying to gain some control over the situation — as if by thinking hard enough, she could make the best possible outcome happen. We all do this. We do this about serious crises and small unknowns alike, white-knuckling it through situations we have no control over. Meanwhile, check your medicine cabinet for the Zantac, Xanax, Prilosec, Pepcid, and the odd Valium. There’s some anthropological evidence for us right there.

Eventually, with the help of friends, Salzburg got to the point where she realized that she could not do anything about the situation but pray. She writes, “I called on all the buddhas and bodhisattvas [avatars of compassion] of the universe, those beings who represent freedom to me, who are the embodiment of goodness and wisdom.” Turning to something bigger than herself, she says, made her feel less alone, although still anxious and afraid. Eventually, sitting side by side with her fear of the unknown and abiding with it, she was able to let control go and allow love to enter her heart, a simple compassion for her friend and herself. Her prayer went from “Please let such-and-such happen” to “May my friend know that he is not alone in his time of trial, may benevolence surround him.”

Here’s a question for you: Do you think it matters that she got to that point? If you were lying unconscious in a hospital bed, would you rather your loved ones paced the floors with churning stomachs railing against fate and yelling at doctors, or would you rather they sleep the sleep of the peaceful after having filled their hearts and minds with prayers of compassion and love for you? I ask this with genuine curiosity because I think that many of us were raised to confuse love with control, that is, “I want these things for you and I want your life to go in this way, and that means that I love you.”

Today we have had cause to think of those sisters and brothers who live in such volatile environments that even the luxury of the illusion of control is denied them. A life of constant crisis, poverty and civil strife will quickly remedy any human of the fantasy that how the day unfolds is really a matter of their own will and desire. Today, in our special offering for Women For Women International, we sent out a little bit of our energy in the form of money to some of those who live in the midst of this kind of turmoil, support that might mean a little bit more security for them. But let’s be clear about our motives in doing so:

Whether I show up at your door or you show up at mine when the rug is pulled out from under us,

when the planes collide in the sky and fire falls on the city,

when the diagnosis comes back malignant and inoperable,

when the job has been cut and the mortgage comes due,

when the paramilitary troops have come and taken the husbands and sons from the village,

or the heart and mind have slipped into profound, debilitating depression,

we reach out with food, money, words of comfort or offers of help not to provide security but to incarnate solidarity,

not to stand defiant in the face of what we cannot control and pretend that with our good intentions or generous gifts we can make everything right,
but to say, this too, is life, and even in this time of terrible uncertainty or suffering, life goes on, and we are in favor of it.
We are out of control, and yet we say yes to life, and give our hearts to it again and again, day after uncertain day.

Norwell. Nigeria, Afghanistan. Hanson. Sudan. Herzegovina or Hanover. None of us are in control. The wise ones bid us to open our stiff clenched fists, and not only to acknowledge that we cannot steer this ship by tight gripping, but even to put those hands together in an attitude of blessing, and even to bow, with genuine reverence, to the mystery.

This sermon was preached to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Norwell, MA on February 10, 2008 by the Reverend Victoria Weinstein. Please do not excerpt, quote or “borrow” without attribution.

OT reading: Genesis 32:22-32
NT reading: Romans 8:26-38

“Wrestling With the Word”

I remember visiting Ed in the hospital before he died. I was the minister on summer duty at a congregation in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and Ed was a highly-respected professor of science at U Penn. Maybe mid-60’s. He had gone in for a fairly routine heart surgery and was told, “This is going to be fine. You’ll be out and recovering in a few weeks. Worst case scenario, such-and-such could happen.” And as is sometimes the case, the worst possible scenario did happen, and one day I walked into the Surgical Intensive Care Unit to find Ed small and lost in a web of wires, his mouth taped shut around tube, and clinging to life. He was heavily sedated but still conscious, obviously frustrated by his inability to speak, obviously frightened.

Ed was an atheist. He was a brilliant man, a rational man, a professional scientist and he didn’t have a lot of interest in spirituality stuff. He had told me so after church one day, in the friendliest way. He knew exactly who he was.

So day after day I drove through the back roads to Bryn Mawr Hospital and stood by his bed, and had no idea what to say that might comfort him. I wanted to pray with him. I wanted to pray, “Dear God, please be with Ed as a healing presence. Fill him with the strength that he needs, and with the peace of knowing that you will never forsake him.” But I knew this kind of prayer would not minister to him, even if it would minister to me. So I showed up every day, and I stammered out the best words of love and consolation I could muster, and I brought greetings from the church. I promised him that his wife was doing well and that she had all that she needed. I told him that what we all wanted most of all was that he not be afraid, that he be well and at peace.

Ed died, and we gave him a lovely memorial service. His wife asked that I sing “Spirit of Life,” and I did. I don’t remember much else, but that it was at the university and the room was full of professors.
I have never forgotten Ed; never stopped thinking up better things to say to him on the last tormented days of his life, things I wish to God I might have had the chance to say.

Paul says that we don’t always know how to pray as we ought.
And he knows what he’s talking about.

But Paul, in all the fullness of his faith, says that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness when we come before such sacred moments with tongues tied. Anyone who has stood by the bed of a dying friend knows this. Anyone who has run into a newly widowed neighbor at the grocery store knows this. How often do we manage to find just the right words of consolation and love at just the right time? Hardly ever. Most often we stammer out some thing or another – sometimes horrid little clichés that we know are stale the moment they come out of our mouths. And we go home and we groan for shame and embarrassment. How could I have said that? Did I really just say, “It must have been his time?” What a klutz I am.

Words are important. In the Jewish tradition, God said the world into being. God said let there be light, and there was light, and so on unto the end of the seventh day. God said it was good, and it was good.
In the Christian tradition, according to John’s mystical gospel, it all also begins with a Word. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was from God. And the Word was God.
The Word was God. There could be no higher designation. No wonder we approach words with fear and trembling.
What we say is important. What comes out of the mouth, said Jesus, is more important than what goes in it. What we say has the power to make or unmake, to heal or to harm, to bless or curse some aspect of creation.

Paul says we don’t always know how to pray as we ought. And sometimes we don’t know if we ought to pray at all! Why? Because faith language in our pluralistic society is dangerous and loaded, and political and multi-layered and potentially offensive. You don’t dare say “God bless you” when someone sneezes anymore. Unitarian Universalists, who mostly gather to worship in theologically pluralistic congregations, are particularly sensitive and careful with religious language. Listen to the way a Unitarian Univeralist minister typically offers up a prayer. It’s not going to be, “Let us pray.” It’s something like, “I invite you to enter into the spirit of meditation and quietness, in that deep silence of healing and holiness.” This works okay until someone raises their hand and asks what you mean by “holiness.” So the preacher tries again.
“As you are willing and able, I invite you to join together in a peaceful time of reflection, sometimes known as prayer, or meditation, or thinking good thoughts.” And at the conclusion of such a moment, not just “Amen,” but “Shalom, a salaam alaikum, Shanti, Peace, Blessed Be.” (We cover as many bases as we can.)

Perhaps it would work better if we simply entered into a time of groaning. “I invite you now to join me in a moment of sustained groaning, a groaning that will express all the suffering, loss, fear, confusion and anger that is a part of all our lives.” And then there would be this wailing together. Why not? We need to wail. People in grief especially need to wail. If there is a God that listens, and our faith tells us that there is, do we think that that great, ineffable, omnipotent Spirit and Source of all is listening for carefully-worded English!??

In the beautiful salvation history that Paul lays out in his long and passionate letter to the Romans, weaving throughout all his doctrine of pre-destination and justification and christology, and all of his discussion of the elect and sainthood and martyrdom, there is this constant affirmation that we aren’t saved by words, but by faith, and by God’s love, and by being conformed to the image of Christ Jesus. Because God loves us, The Holy Spirit, the breath of God that blows through every living thing, intercedes for us in groans too deep for words. Paul doesn’t try to explain this mystery. He is wise not to try. It’s a gorgeous image, it’s a gorgeous intimation and intuition of the way creation loves, holds and blesses us even in our sinful, broken, inarticulate being, and let’s leave it alone.

When I think of the Holy Spirit interceding for me, and God knowing my heart as Paul describes it, it reminds me of when I was a child and would listen through the bedroom wall as my parents talked about their children late into the night. All I heard was Mom’s female murmurings and Dad lower rumbling response, my earthly creators holding me in their care as Paul says my cosmic creators hold all of us in theirs. There is great poetry in this image, and great consolation.

Jesus, the Word made flesh, was apparently a gifted talker. We have his beautiful sermons. We have his Wisdom teachings, and the enigmatic parables that confuse us with their many possible interpretations as they reveal glimpses of the coming Kingdom. But Jesus did not always have words. Jesus groaned too, on occasion. He groaned at the disciples when they were being particularly bone-headed, but he also groaned in prayer and when healing the sick. In Mark 7:32, Jesus spit on his fingers and put his fingers in a deaf man’s ears and groaned, and the man was healed. There is love in the groan, a love beyond words. We are also told that Jesus “groaned in the Spirit twice” when he raised Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus was his friend. So Jesus brought forth the prayerful groan, the sigh too deep for words, and invoked the Spirit that let his friend live.

There is life in the groan.

We, though, are enamored of words, verbal formulas, arguments, hair-splitting definitions, etymologies for everything. We act as though religion is a set of phrases with which we can either agree or disagree, forgetting that religion is how we live, how we are present to God’s people. We make idols of words.

I admit to an idolatry of words. I attended a summer intensive course at Andover-Newton Theological School a few weeks ago, and on the first day we had some opening ice-breakers. We were asked to choose a partner, and for thirty seconds, half of us were to spill out everything that came into our head about certain topics, and our partner’s job was to simply listen without interrupting, and then we would switch roles. It was fun. We laughed and the place was buzzing with noise and friendly exchanges and then the instructor said, “Okay now, pick a new partner. And for the next thirty seconds, unburden your soul about some worry or care you came here with. There’s one rule. You can use sounds and you can use any gestures you want, but you must not use any language. No words.”
First there was a great silence, and then there was a great communal groan.

When it came my time, my mind was a blank of anger and frustration. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to unburden myself except for how much I hated this exercise! I spent my allotted thirty seconds stomping and moaning and making sort of chimpanzee sounds. “Wow,” my partner said. “That was intense.” Little did she know.

Later in the week, I was again asked to tell a story without using any language. Again, I seethed with frustration and found within that frustration a seed of tremendous grief and fear. If I cannot speak, if I cannot employ words, what am I? I, the daughter of a nominally Jewish father and an ex-Russian Orthodox Christian mother, who received an atheistic Unitarian upbringing, have wrestled with words since my teenaged years. Having inherited no language with which to articulate my experience of a holy presence and eternal source of love in the world, I set out in search of a language that I could sing in, pray in, and think about God in. What began as an expedition for expression became a religious life, and then a Christian one. (Who knew? God works in mysterious ways!)

But this did not happen for me until I broke through the words and stumbled, sword still in hand, into the mystery of God’s love beyond the words: the mystery of love that those words so gamely attempt to express.

As Jacob sent his household across the river from where he intended to spend the night before reuniting with his estranged brother Esau, so too did I spiritually separate myself from my family and forfeit my primary relationship in order to wrestle with the God whose presence I felt so powerfully but could not name, and whose blessing I wanted to obtain at any cost. Along the way, I wrestled with many of the words we hear in our liturgy this morning, words from a 1785 prayer book that alienate or trouble many worshipers even today. Words like Salvation. Manifold sins and wickedness (that’s a good one, isn’t it?). Repentance. Righteousness. Lord Jesus Christ.

These words, which once seemed to me mischievous demons which taunted and then turned their backs on me, are now mine. First experiencing them as hostile foes, they are now the threads by which I weave the tapestry of my soul’s journey, thanks be to God. Imperfect as these words are, and troublesome as they are, I have come home in them, and therefore I am a daughter of Israel (Yisroel) – the new name given Jacob after his own wrestling match with God. Israel, which means “one who has striven or struggled with God.”

When Paul is listing, at the end of his letter to the Romans, a catalog of those things that can never, ever separate us from the Love of God, he mentions angels and powers and principalities and height and depth. None of these can cause God to abandon us. Perhaps we might add to that list, “Neither awkward sentences nor confused theological formulations nor sentimental, schlocky Hallmark sermons nor grammatically incorrect prayers can keep us from the Love of God. Neither the worst lyrics in any hymn nor the most sterile litanies can alienate us from the eternal, inviolable love which is God’s nature, and within which we live and move and have our being.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Created in God’s image and likeness, we too are the Word.
May your seeking after that Word that communicates to your soul God’s eternal and inextinguishable love be a wrestling and a struggle that yields great blessing to you.