Sermons

INTRODUCTION: I read somewhere of a person who went into a Barnes & Noble bookstore looking for a particular kind of self-help book. He went up to the woman behind the Customer Service counter, and asked her, “Where is the self-help section?” She said, "Sir, if I told you that, it would defeat the whole purpose of the section!"

But what if this Service this morning, and this community of faith we call All Faiths, is something like a self-help section? If so, what is it about the beautiful music, the smiling people, the participants who lead us – what are we needing self-help with?

In a group of this size, there are probably any number of possibilities; but, were I to make an informed guess, I would suggest that for several of us it’s something very simple: the past. “If only…if only it wasn’t for what happened in the past, I would…” and then we fill in the blanks with our loss, our heartache, or our disappointment.

And the most difficult thing in the world becomes: letting go of the past. It hurts so bad, that it seems as if it will consume us. How can we quit thinking of it? How can we remove it from the radar screen of our mind? Over and over we say, “If only….”

Unfortunately, “if only” doesn’t exist. It needs to be removed from our vocabulary. There are no miracle doors to reopen yesterday. Day by day goes by, sometimes slowly; other times we look back, and its events seem to have rushed by without even consulting us.

What religious faith says to us about the past is that there is something we can do about it…something very appropriate and on target: its forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not for the faint of heart. It’s not simply a matter of asking for forgiveness, or unloading our soul and dumping our pain on someone else. It’s much more demanding than that.

Forgiveness is a boundary line which when we cross, guess what happens: We give up on the hope of ever having a better past! Let me repeat that: We give up on the hope of ever having a better past! Notice, I didn’t say, a better present or better future; rather, we give up on having a better past. There’s no more retelling the same story, hoping that things will get better. Because the past is over and done. And that is so hard to say and even more difficult to accept.

A significant number of us here have been divorced, or ended a relationship or union of many years. Remember immediately afterwards, how important it was to justify our own actions and to blame the other person. Think back for a few moments on yours or a friend’s breakup. Remember our angelic behavior compared to theirs? I promise that those patterns are not unique to you or to me. It’s endemic to the species.

That’s always reinforced for me at Cracker Barrel restaurant. Sometime if I’m in the area of Daniels and I-75, I love to sneak into Cracker Barrel for a particular dish they have that I really like: beans and greens, with corn bread, relish and onions, and plenty of iced tea. It’s one of the cheapest things on the menu, but I love it.

The other thing I always get a kick out of, is listening to the old time, beer drinking, heart breaking, love losing, Country & Western music they play. Am I in Texas or what! Its central theme is always, she or he “done me wrong.” And if he or she will just take me back once again – actually, once “a-gin,” – then life will be wonderful, once more. (I hate to report to you that Amanda is not yet able fully to appreciate the depth of such music, due to unfortunate deprivations she has experienced in life!)

But one reason the lyrics are so flawed is not their sound (!), but their thesis that we can change the past…that we can make the past better. We can’t. I can’t, you can’t and God can’t. The past is past.

Which means then, if we ever want our lives to take on new meaning, purpose and direction, we have to let go of the past. Release it and let it go. No more “if only’s,” no more, “what might have been’s,” nor “coulda, shoulda, wouldas.” Changing the past is not an option. Period. Exclamation point. No question! We have to give up on any of us ever having a better past. It’s the way things are, that is, that’s the way it was and is.

That means when we forgive, we not only have to give up on ever having a better past, we have to no longer reference or identify ourselves with people or events of the past.

Sometimes though, even years later, when we’ve forgiven and moved on, we can still slip into that mode of making the past better. I let it happen to me last week.

Later, when I got home that night, I went to get something from under the sink in the bathroom, and I thought, “Gee, that’s a mess.” I took everything out and put it in nice rows, and threw away the junk that had accumulated. I looked at all the stuff on top of the sink, and thought, “Boy, that needs to be remedied.” Soon, I had also emptied out the medicine chest, thrown away outdated meds, filled up my daily prescription tray, fixed a towel rack on the wall, and cleaned out the tool chest while in the process of hunting for a tool. Then, on to the bedroom for straightening a desk and cleaning a chest top.

Afterwards, when I sat down to watch the news, I was clearly aware of what had just happened: I needed psychically to get things in the present back in order, even though it was only symbolically. That day at lunch, the past had jumped up and acted as though it could be better. Despite all my efforts to move on, that notion was still hiding out, acting as if only I said this or that, it would make the past better. It didn’t. It won’t. It can’t. You can’t. We can’t. Nothing we can do ever changes the past or makes it better. Forgive it. The present and the future await. We’ve forgiven the past…we can’t make it better.

So whatever your life situation…whatever it is in the past that keeps making you think you can make the past better, let it go. Forgive it.

That’s true not only for us, but for our nation. While Amanda and I were on a cruise over the Christmas holidays, we attended a superb piece of musical theater on the ship. At the end, they played a “red, white and blue” patriotic piece, about how exceptional America is. This was to an international audience with people from all over the world on board.

While I love America, and know how fortunate I am and we are, to be part of this land, for the first time that I can remember, I was embarrassed as they sang, because of what America has become in the last five years:

n We rushed to invade another nation, when the whole world was saying, “Wait. Give the U.N. inspectors time to do their job.”

n During our invasion into Baghdad, we failed to protect their museums, their schools, their hospitals, and only guarded the ministry of oil.

n Contrary to Article III of the Geneva Convention, we tortured prisoners, and then denied that we had, until devastating pictures showed otherwise.

n And we shipped untold numbers of people to other countries for them to do our dirty-work-torture for us, and invented a word to hide it: rendition.

n Iraq’s infrastructure is nonexistent, their once secular society is now in a civil war, battling over religion, women’s rights are vanishing, and our troops are dying almost daily for a lost cause.

-- and millions of middle class Americans are losing their jobs and their homes.

-- The ranks of the working poor, which is those who work full time but can’t afford the necessities, continue to grow.

On the ship, I wanted to applaud the singers and dancers, but not the music they were singing. Not until we can once again raise Old Glory with pride, not until freedom rings from shore to shore, and sea to shining sea, not until Johnny comes marching home again.

So what do we do as peace-loving peoples of this land on this Peace Sunday? Can we do anything?

Before answering that I want to ask you to turn the clock back to 1992. The one-time nation of Yugoslavia is hemorrhaging, with ethnic battles dividing a people who at one time were proud of their unity and diversity. Most never imagined the beautiful city of Sarajevo would be drawn in to the religious and racial hatred that had engulfed the rest of their land. But soon, the once beautiful site of the Winter Olympics was a battleground for ethnic strife.

On May 27, of that year, a line of people had rushed out to buy bread when the only bakery that still had flour opened. A line snaked out the front and around the corner. But at 4 p.m. that day, a cannon shell was lobbed into the bakery in the center of the city and it killed 22 innocent civilians.

The next day people hid in their homes, hungry, but afraid…afraid to come to the bakery, for fear another shell might fall. Then one of the strangest things that’s ever happened in war occurred: From his nearby apartment, Verdran Smailovic, the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Orchestra, appeared with a stool and his cello in front of the bakery. At exactly 4 p.m., in the midst of the rubble he began to play Albinoni’s beautiful, Adagio in G Minor:

For 22 days exactly at 4 p.m., in honor of the 22 persons killed, he came back to play. When the people heard and saw Vedran Smailovic with his beautiful cello in front of the bakery, they took courage, and rejoined the line to buy bread. His “musical prayer for peace” made all the difference in the world.

And when the Bosnian Serbs began to attack the funeral gatherings of those who were killed, Smailovic started attending the funerals and playing there as well.

Everyone of us has a way to make a difference for peace. Maybe not so dramatic. Maybe no one will even know about it. But it’s our part. It’s our prayer for peace.

When our nation was in a devastating civil war, Abraham Lincoln prayed these words:

Grant, O merciful God, that with malice toward none, with charity to all, with firmness in the right as you give us to see the right, we may strive to finish the work we are in:

[1] A sermon presented on February 02, 2008, at the Conversation Café of All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.