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Away In A Grotto: Christmas Eve Homily 2017

I was in Bethlehem this past March. It was my first trip to the holy land and there was a lot that was mind-blowing about it – ancient history, and better understanding of the painful Israeli-Palestinian conflict, walking the streets of Jerusalem, a holy city for Jews, Christians and Muslims… it was an amazing experience.

One kind of small but very meaningful thing I got from the trip is that aren’t any stables the way we think of a “stable” in Bethlehem because buildings there aren’t mostly made with wood. It’s the desert, and all the structures are sandstone. So, actually, the barn-like structure that gets translated as “stable” for English readers of the Bible isn’t a building at all but a cave – or a grotto.

Away in a grotto

Away in a sheep cave

It doesn’t have the same ring.

I went into the very cave where Jesus is said to have been born. Of course a big, fancy church was long ago built over the site, so that humble place is now the Church of the Nativity right in the center of Bethlehem. You wait in a long, long line with people from all over the world to get down into the actual place of the nativity, which is, as I said, kind of a little cave.

I waited with some of my minister friends and the people-watching was fantastic. You might think that it was a very holy and religious environment. It wasn’t at all. Kids got bored and ran in and out of the line, couples squabbled in many different languages and people talked about where they were going to eat lunch. American evangelical tour groups sang Christmas carols. In March.

There was one very formal local man with a long beard and Orthodox priest’s cap selling the candles and postcards in the little gift shop (there’s always a little gift shop in these pilgrimage sites) wearing what looked to be a fairly permanent scowl etched into his face. I don’t know if his job is at the high or low end of the priestly totem pole – it seems to me it would be an honor to be a caretaker at such a holy shrine, but he seemed quite irritated by all the unruly tourists. I liked him very much. He’s right: if we were properly in touch with the sacred we would have waited in quiet reverence to climb down into the grotto where Mary had her baby.

When you finally get through the long line and climb down the worn stone stairs into the cave, it becomes very womb-like, warm and it smells good. Many centuries of incense have soaked into the walls and so has the breath of many pilgrims – some true believers, some skeptics, some friendly visitors who don’t think about Jesus much one way or another. Being down there and waiting in another line to press my hand to the actual SPOT of Jesus’ birth (I know it’s silly, but once you’ve waited in the long line to get in, another line is fine), I felt connected not so much to Jesus as to humanity. To our yearnings, our needs, to our failures and endless cycle of violence and repair, struggles about dominance over verses collaboration with.

I knew that many people down in that grotto with me came there believing that the most important thing about Jesus is that he came to “save us from our sins.” What they mean by that is that Jesus saves them personally so they can personally go to heaven. Well. That’s not what I believe. That’s not what this tradition teaches. Personal salvation isn’t enough for me and it wasn’t enough for Jesus, who understood that we are not only individuals who need healing and love and but A PEOPLE. A human people, together, whose fate is interwoven.

I believe that the most important thing about Jesus is that he invited us – in the brief shining flare of his life – to follow his example. If we could manage to do that, we would be saved from a lot of sins, together. We would be saved from greed, first of all. And then we’d have so much more to work with to heal the world, to build it up, to care for and rebuild our tired and overheated planet. We would be saved from a smallness of soul and fearful perspective that tries to convince us that there isn’t enough to go around, and that “I” should hoard my share to look out for “my own” and to hell with everyone else.

I want to tell you that this is not just a minister saying righteous words on Christmas Eve. It is absolutely true, every day no matter what arguments anyone has tried to have with you on the subject: the unmistakable core of Jesus’ teachings is a love, and a blueprint for a social order that unmistakably insists that the poor should be cared for, that the rich shall be humbled, that the stranger and the refugee and the immigrant shall be welcomed and honored and included, that women should be listened to and respected, that those who have been judged by moral purity codes should be included and embraced, that children have an important and valuable perspective and are to be cherished as autonomous beings and not just an extension of ourselves, that the law is never more important than love, and that the greatest force in the universe wants it this way.

Jesus called that force God, and Dad, Abba. You may call it whatever you like: creation, ultimate reality, the meaning of life, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Nature, love. By whatever name you call it, I invite you to work with this congregation however and wherever you can toward the fulfillment of its call in our lives.

Earlier, before my tour group went together to the Church of the Nativity to see exactly where Jesus was said to have been born, we stopped at the field where the shepherds heard the first noel, where the angels appeared to them and scared them witless but caused them to actually leave their sheep and run to see what was happening.

It was brown. It was pretty flat. It was actually pretty boring. The Judaean desert right there where it all happened is no more exciting than Worcester. But I sat there and I looked over that field, now called Shepherd’s Field, and I laughed, and I loved it. What a perfect place for angels to show up. Why would I expect them to come somewhere already shining, already glorious, already awe-inspiring? Why would they waste their energy appearing anywhere where humans are already satisfied by beauty and luxurious things to look at and think and do? They wouldn’t. They never have been said to appear under those conditions.

The field was brown and uninteresting. The boys were making sure their sheep didn’t wander away or get attacked by wild animals. The sky was ordinary until angels made their appearance. The stable turned out to be a warm little sandstone cave. The baby who was born there just wanted to accomplish the radical miracle of making us belong to each other so deeply that when one of us cries, the other shall taste salt. That is what is so deep about this night. A cold winter’s night that was so deep.

Let us love one another.

IMG_0459

The entrance down into the exact, precise geographical spot where Jesus was born. 

IMG_0374Shepherd’s Field, Bethlehem. That’s it. 

 

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Inherent Worth And Dignity: The Starting Point

I thought I’d share this excerpt from a sermon I gave in 2006 since there seems to be a broader challenge to those who persistently and conveniently misinterpret our First Unitarian Universalist Principle to mean that they should not be taken to task for their egotistical and obstructionist attitudes in our community. It has fresh relevance today in our broader conversation about white supremacy.

 

Unitarian Universalists share a set of seven principles. The first among them is a commitment to affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of each person.” I think this is a beautiful principle, and I am happy to see that Unitarian Universalists take it seriously enough to invoke it on a very regular basis in the wider denominational context.

But Houston, I think we have a problem. When it comes to the notion of moral or ethical failings, also known as “sin,” UUs tend very often to jump right to the first principle and to say, “Remember, that person has inherent worth and dignity!” It’ s as though that’ s it, that’ s the final truth, and therefore, we must not delve at all into the question of whether or not there is some moral or communal failing or problem that needs to be named and fixed.

Our mistake is in seeing our first principle as a kind of sociological and psychological claim rather than an ontological claim. (An ontological claim is a claim about the nature of reality itself.) To use simpler language, we have often insisted that because each person has “inherent worth and dignity,” they can really do no wrong, in the final analysis, because to accuse them of doing wrong is akin to accusing them of being wrong and unacceptable in some basic way. This kind of attitude really stymies conversation and stifles healthy conflict. It says, “There’ s no such thing as sin, because we’ re all inherently worthy!”

Well, of course we are inherently worthy. But we are also occasionally terribly wrong and terribly harmful. The first principle should not be the ending point for our view of human nature, and a conversation stopper, it should be the starting point – the first assumption — for our work toward spiritual growth and ethical commitment. The first principle should be the optimistic claim that starts us on our way knowing that we can ascend higher on the ladder of moral evolution.

That first principle was written to remind us that there are many people who voices have been silenced, whose humanity has been denigrated, and whose full participation in the notion of God’ s grace has been questioned. Our first principle calls us to serve as guardians for the humanity and dignity of those people especially, and to promote such conditions for all people as allows that dignity and worth to flourish. It was never intended to be used as a defense plea for my sins or yours, but as a rallying cry toward an ethic of universal kinship.

– from “Inherent Worth And Dignity, The Starting Point”  Delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Norwell, March 12, 2006, The Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein

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What Leads Us: An Election Sermon

This was giving at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Norwell, MA in 2008 by the Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein (“PeaceBang”) I note today, on October 16, 2016, that candidate Donald Trump possesses none of the attributes of leadership enumerated in this sermon. 

The Election Sermon has been a tradition is an old and venerable tradition in this country — I believe the first on record in New England was 1633, far before the separation of church and state, but the tradition has lasted well into our times. And that’s a good thing, I think. By now we’ve watched the debates, we’ve seen dozens of ads, we’ve read the editorials, the blogs, the magazine articles, we’ve watched the talking heads discuss the candidates. And now we come to church to think about the coming election from the perspective of that thing called faith – which, for today, we can define as having confidence that there is more meaning to the events of our shared lives than the random occurrence of events.

We do not go to the polls as machines tallying up numbers and factoids – neither do we go as brute creatures struggling to survive in a wilderness we don’t understand — we are human beings; and the values, hopes and dreams we bring to our civic life have a tremendous impact on our present and future. Whatever decisions we make around our selection of a candidate will be decisions we’ve ideally made from not only a practical and reasoned perspective, but an emotionally and spiritually engaged one as well. Before we go to fill in little circles or to pull levers, we should be sure that we have brought the dignity of our full attention to the decision-making process — in other words, make sure we’re not pulling levers or pushing buttons as a response to having had our buttons pushed.

 

In the Election Sermon, it has always been traditional for the minister to bring to the attention of his or her flock the major issues facing the nation. I feel I hardly need to do that. You know what the issues are. Unless you’ve been living on a very happy planet far from this one, you know that the economy is a major area of concern, to put it mildly.   We have been fighting a war in Iraq for five years; that is another challenge facing the next administration. International diplomacy and policy; our relationship as a nation with other nations. Central to our nation’s future. Some other issues: The Supreme Court and how it and the Oval Office interpret the Constitution. Questions of leaders–who might come along as a team with the elected President and Vice President, what kind of Congress they will be working with. Taxes. Education. Civil and human rights. What are we going to do to address the health care crisis in this country? The role religion plays in policy-making. The role and scope of the federal government.

That’s a long and serious list of responsibilities and concerns. I don’t have to tell you.

I think to myself, “Who on Earth could genuinely want these jobs!?”   Stepping aside from politics for a moment, we have to know as compassionate people that no matter what promises the candidates make, the fact is that they are taking on impossible jobs, really. Whoever achieves the highest office in the land will be bitterly complained about, mercilessly lampooned, accused of being a failed messiah by disappointed supporters and derided by certain heads of state no matter what they do, no matter how hard they work, and no matter how fine and upstanding a human being they may be. The President of the United States, whoever holds the office, is a personage of so much power that we forget he (and someday, she) is also a figure to be pitied. I hate to be a killjoy, but no one is going to “win” this election. This isn’t a game one wins or loses. It is a most solemn mantle of responsibility one assumes, and it comes with, in the words of the old hymn, immediate and unavoidable “dangers, toils and snares.”

 

Winston Churchill once defined leadership as ‘going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm,” and we must assume that those who make the expensive and exhausting run for President and VP do it because they love it and have a calling for it. And I see that in all four of the candidates. No matter what we may think of them individually, there is no doubt that they are excited about, and believe themselves fully ready, willing and able to be the best leaders for this country at this moment in our history. When I watch Sarah, Joe, John and Barack, that’s what I look for: what kind of leader is this? What are his or her ultimate values around leadership itself?

Peter Senge is a guru of organizational change, whose book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization has been a real treasure-trove for me. Based on Senge’s work, I offer for your reflection ten qualities that I agree with Senge make for an effective leader in our culture and for this specific time in history:

  1. We all look for leaders to have a sense of purpose, but I think we should also look for a quality of non-certainty. Only a fanatic is certain that he or she is right. “Genuine commitment, on the other hand, always co-exists with some element of questioning and uncertainty.” (334)
  2. All leadership involves change, but the mature leader also looks at what is important to conserve. While leaders, collectively and individually, work to bring about “a different order of things,” they must also be stewards for something they intend to conserve.
  3. Strong leaders understand that their lives require sacrifice and service, but wise leaders balance their service with time for reflection and renewal. I was very gratified myself when I learned that Winston Churchill took a nap every day.
  4. I believe that leaders must seek solutions to problems that are sustainable. This may mean taking more time to craft a response to a crisis, and it may mean refraining from heroic measures that contribute to a feeling of being in control and having power, which is a very American way to lead. In this era, our political leaders must consider: can we afford this? What kind of resources do we really have to do things this way? Are we making false promises to preserve the status quo? Can we really work this way over the long term?

My next point is related, which is …

  1. A good leader has the ability to see systemic issues. The old proverb, If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime” is a perfect example of this.   Leadership requires having a broad view, seeing the interconnectedness of things. In five years from now, will the government still be sending billions of dollars of aid to the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast, or will we have figured out systemic, interrelated issues of poverty and climate change are contributing to a chronic problem there? The sixth point is also related, and it is
  2. That a leader must be willing to say the unpopular thing. Yes, everyone loves a great orator, but we also need people in office who can give us the straight dope. Remember Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech of 1979, when the economy was in serious trouble, we had hostages in Iran, unemployment was at 7%, gasoline prices soared, and the prime lending rate stood at 15%? Carter had intended to speak about the energy crisis, but he spoke instead about American’s fall from grace. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” “In other words,” — and I get this from Andrew Bacevich’s book The Limits of Power, “the spreading American crisis of confidence was an outward manifestation of an underlying crisis of values.” (33)

Of course, no one wanted to hear this, and Carter lost the 1980 election in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. I expect my national leaders to have their own take on the national situation, and I don’t mind – in fact, I appreciate it – when they are able to move beyond spin (if their handlers will let them) to speak earnestly about it.

  1. Which brings me to the seventh quality I look for in a leader: the ability to hold a vision while able to honestly confront current reality. I don’t mean a campaigning slogan, I mean a real vision, which is something that leaders develop in conversation with their constituents, and with other trusted sources – and not just people who share all their opinions or party loyalties, either.
  2. A good leader considers him or herself part of a team, and is a coalition-builder. “Reinhold Niebuhr once described the essence of statecraft as ‘locating the point of concurrence between the parochial and the general interest, between the national and the international common good.’” (Bacevich, 174) My vote on Nov. 4th will go to a flawed human being, (both of the candidates are flawed human beings), but it will go to the candidate I believe will build the strongest team around him, and will be the best representative of Team USA, if you will, in the work of international coalition-building.
  3. Leaders are not naturally exceptional in many cases: they are people who work hard and who make a habit of life-long learning and personal growth. I have a great admiration for leaders who are not afraid to change their minds based on new knowledge or understanding.
  4. And there is that final quality that we all look for in a good leader. I call it integrity, and by that I mean wholeness of being, a person with weaknesses and flaws but who is not compartmentalized, not hiding a secret life – someone who knows who he or she is and works hard with what they have in the service of their vision. You can’t buy that quality, and you can’t fake it.

Two Tuesdays from now, this country will elect a new president. I know that you will make your choices carefully and according to your deepest values and feelings. As your minister, I am going to ask one thing of you as you prepare to go to the polls, and it is an unusual request. In your own fashion, I ask that you pray for these candidates, and for this country. For whoever it is that is inaugurated in January of 2009, he has a truly Herculean task ahead of him – and neither John McCain nor Barack Obama can save America. We are not electing a superhero, we are electing a human being. To quote the Unitarian politician Adlai Stevenson, “Who leads us is less important than what leads us — what convictions, what courage, what faith — win or lose.”

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days, for the living of these days.