Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Every year at this time, we focus on the beginning of the holiday season. It’s not the beginning of the year when we had all of our goals, and were so determined about what would be different in ‘06. Rather, as we’re nearing the end of the year, in the face of the past 11 months of good and bad, of meaningful and broken relationships, of gain and loss, of fulfilling and unfulfilled expectations, of significant and disappointing outcomes, of clean bills of health and scary ones, of jobs lost and new ones gained. In that context, we cling to the promise of faith. We hold on. Why is that?

Before addressing that, let me note that in the Christian religion – which we emphasize this Sunday – in the more traditional churches, this Sunday is the beginning of Advent. That means that in the liturgy of the Christian Church, this is the beginning of the Church year, sort of a variation on “Happy Christian New Year.”

I like the fact that it comes a month before the calendar new year, ’07. In so doing, it’s almost a way of suggesting that we should spend a month focusing on the spiritual dimension of our lives, and then come January, we’ll be ready to take those higher steps that always seem to be beckoning.

So back to the topic: Why do we cling to the promise of faith? Since it’s a Christian focus, let’s focus on Jesus for a moment.

There’s a homogenization of Jesus that the centuries have brought us. The worst example is the nursery rhyme: Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. We have sort of cleaned up the Jesus act. He’s almost a member of the Chamber of Commerce, well-dressed, lives in a nice home, has friends of influence and power. Naturally, he’s politically correct, and goes along with the crowd, sort of a Demopublican. Not too hot and not too cold.

But the more likely reality is that as Rebecca Parker stated in our Opening Prayer, he was a “wild one.” He was pervasively poor and identified with the poor; he ignored the prohibitions against lepers and even touched them; prostitutes were part of his retinue; he challenged the practices of the religious leaders; he was a follower of the man whom the king had beheaded; he challenged existing laws; and his message was so revolutionary that it questioned the very roots of his own Jewish faith and practice.

But one tiny component of the message of Jesus that I like the most comes from the content-suspect Gospel of John. Its message is delivered in the context of everything in the ministry of Jesus about to go to pieces. The crowds have turned on him, his disciples are ready not only to run, but also to deny they ever knew him. His treasurer has even secretly gone to the authorities to cut a plea deal and betray Jesus. And the religious leaders of the nation of Israel have asked the occupying Romans to arrest Jesus, and put him on trial.

Facing all of this, Jesus and his little band have sneaked out into their favorite hiding place –a local garden. They’ve said to him, “Jesus, this isn’t exactly what we bought in to. We thought we were going to overthrow the Romans, kick out the temple leaders, and restore Judaism with you as the new King. In the light of what is happening, maybe we ought to rethink the program.”

Here is how Jesus responded, even as the sounds of the armor of the approaching Romans is clinking in the distance, the night is enveloping him, and the curtain of defeat is ready to draw. He says, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Say what! Jesus. Don’t you need a little reality check here? I mean things are bad…really bad. There’s nothing to cheer about. And whatever world you’ve overcome, it’s not the world we’re facing.

The disciples are trying just to survive, and Jesus seems to have gone off in to la-la land. In the face of problems that no one could ignore, he says, “Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.”

Now when we try to apply any of this to our lives, there are certain things to remember.

Jesus was a spiritual leader, and when he is talking, it is from the perspective of the inner world to the outer world. He was not measuring by external statistics, or the latest polls. He was talking about the world of the Spirit. And from that perspective, in the face of everything that could have brought him down to his knees, he looked the outer world in the eye and said, “Not to worry. I’ve overcome it. I’ve said to the outside world, I am not afraid. Why? Because I’ve overcome the inner world.”

I’m well aware that there are many of you who are facing difficult and disturbing days ahead. They are days that rob the morning of joy, and steal into sleep at night. The directions seem to have been lost. The maps are all outdated. And you struggle to restore the smile that has been erased from your face.

And you’re desperately hanging on for dear life. You’re clinging to the promise – any promise – of life or hope. And then from one of the ancient voices of the past, a little postage-stamp sized country known today more for its battles than its beliefs, comes the voice of a wild one who says to you, “Be of good cheer.”

Then he makes the real challenge: This is the acid test, the test where you may have to guess the answer. It’s the one where you may have to fake it until you can make it. But you have to say it first:

I, John Smith…I, Mary Brown…I, Tom, Dick, or Harry…Martha or Sally -- whoever you are -- “I have overcome the world.”

That’s the key when facing mountains you cannot climb and oceans you cannot cross.

Which world? The inner world. The world inside. The world that determines how we will relate to the world outside.

As you well know, there’s little we can do to control what happens around us. Friends come, friends go. Jobs are gained, jobs are lost. Healthy today, sick tomorrow. We never know.

But there’s one barometer which is certain and which we control: It’s how we respond to all that has taken place. That’s a world we are in charge of.

I submit that whatever the hurdles we are facing, the real hurdle is not that outer hurdle, but the one inside, namely, how we will respond to that hurdle.

According to Jesus, when his outer world was smashed to smithereens, he said not to worry. That wasn’t the world I was preaching about anyway. I’m talking about inside: How we relate to the ultimate reality before us. How do we relate to our neighbor? And where it all starts from: How do we understand ourselves inwardly in face of the outer world before us?

Dr. Viktor Frankl, who lived in the pits of humankind’s inhumanity to humanity, what we know as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, said, “Everything can be taken from us, except for one thing: how we choose to respond to its being taken.”

In other words, when the love of our life is gone…we lost our job…our health is fragile…our financial resources diminished…our hopes and dreams all down the tube: The key is…the promise of faith to which we cling. It enables us to see things differently. Same events, but not perceived the same. So what do we do?

One of the most gifted Unitarian Universalist ministers in America is the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker. She is the Dean of the Starr King School of Theology in Berkeley, California. In addition, she also holds dual ministerial membership in the United Methodist Church. It is her prayer that we prayed at the start of the service.

I want to share an intensely personal experience she has written about. It happened while she was pastoring a small, but vibrant, United Methodist Church. An intense and loving relationship she was in, ended. After it was over, she also discovered she was pregnant.

Now there are some situations in which that might not be quite so difficult, but being a pregnant, single woman minister in the United Methodist Church, without even a boyfriend, that’s a problem. As many of you may know from personal experience, and as I have learned from counseling those going through it, time does not wait when making decisions about pregnancy. Rebecca writes that through tears and anger, frustration and misgiving, she “surrendered her child and had an abortion.”

The consequences of those two losses – a love relationship and a potential baby-to-be – began to weigh heavily upon her. By day, she went about her tasks as a minister, but by night, she cried and cried, and sometimes screamed in the large old-fashioned, two-story parsonage in which she lived alone. She missed her lover, and she raged at acquiescing to the pressure to surrender her baby.

Equally difficult, she had chosen to keep it totally secret. The abortion clinic she had gone to in another state didn’t know she was a minister of a church, and no one at the church knew she had gone to the clinic. There was no one she felt safe in talking to.

Eventually, the emotional weight was more than she could bear. She wrote, “I was past living one day at a time, or even one hour at a time, and was down to the question of whether I would be willing to continue to live at all.

“In the depths of that sadness late one night,” she says, “I left my house and walked towards the lake. I was determined to walk into its cold darkness, and find there the consolation that I could not find within myself.”

It was past midnight. She says, “I climbed the last rise before the final descent to the water's edge. As I crested the hilltop, to my surprise, I discovered that between the shore and me there was a line of dark objects, stretching out in the darkness – a barricade that I was going to have to cross in order to get to the water.”

She said, “It had never been there before. But as I edged closer, I discovered it was a line of human beings, hunched over telescopes! It was the Seattle Astronomy Club. A whole club of amateur scientists up and alert in the middle of the night, because the sky was clear and the planets were aligned.”

Nonetheless, she said she was determined to make her way past them to her death. She headed towards an enthusiast in tennis shoes. He assumed she'd come to look at the stars, and said, "Here, let me show you," and began to explain the star cluster his telescope was focused on. Because of the dark, he couldn’t see her tears that she brushed back to look through his telescope. So she looked. And yes, there, was what he had said was there. She could see it! A red-orange, spiral galaxy – filled with wondrous and amazing stars!

How it happened, she’s not sure. More importantly, by seeing the stars, she didn’t keep walking to the lake. Instead, she looked up to the heavens through a telescope and saw a wondrous cluster of stars. Though it’s not quite the traditional salvation story, Rebecca says, she was saved by the Seattle Astronomy Society.

In this world filled with venom and hate, where billions go to bed hungry and millions fight not to eat so much, a group of enthusiasts were up in the middle of the night searching for the stars of the heavens. There was a message their earnestness portrayed, reaching out so innocently to another human being, their pointing beyond themselves to this marvelous Universe of which we’re a part: It had a saving effect on Dr. Parker.

The abortion didn’t. Her lost love didn’t. Her pain didn’t. But the reaching out of another human being pointing her to the stars did. Her abortion didn’t disappear. Her lover was still gone. But she discovered in looking to the heavens a way to keep going on earth.

Whatever the issue you’re addressing…however complicated it may be…know this: There are stars in the heavens. There are people who care. And they want to reach out to you.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz passed away in October. Before passing he made some observations about the human situation. One that I found provocative is, “We start out life with the possibilities of living a thousand different lives, but we end up living only one.”

Think for just a moment how many different tacks you could have taken. For certain, that’s uniquely so in America. We could have been so many different things, chosen different spouses or partners, located in a different city, selected a different career, engaged a different faith community. Geertz said, “We had the possibilities of living a thousand different lives.” But we ended up only living one.

Think of where you started, where you’ve been and where you are. Life’s not a straight arrow and smooth trajectory. It wiggles and wobbles and turns this way and that. But here we are at this good day, nonetheless. Rich with memories, blessed with past opportunities, and confronted with how we will choose to live this moment and whatever moments we may be blessed with ahead. And while it’s true we could have lived a thousand different lives, we chose this one.

And in this life, here this morning, we hear that the promise of faith is that there once was a wild one in our humankind’s past, who bent the earth’s arc towards love. But he knew something that others around him did not know about what was most important in life: a different understanding of why we’re here, and our purpose on earth.

In this Universe,

there moves a Wild One

So be of good cheer, Jesus says. Work at overcoming that inner world of the Spirit. And when you do, no matter what happens on the outside. You are ready. Amen and blessed be.

[1] Given December 03, 2006, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, Ft. Myers, Florida, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister, first in a four-part holiday season series.