thanks be to...  (sermon FUUF Dec 1, 2013)
I'm not proud of it, but I admit it makes me cringe when I hear the
happy winner thanking God for his victory, or even worse, when someone
thanks God for healing from their illness or that they were only
moderately injured in their car crash. I get it that we each
experience the world and God differently, and that my path isn't
everyone's way. And I admit part of my problem is I wish I could
"thank god" with them, without having to sort through all the knots in
the strands of my mind.

I imagine I stand with many of you in that in my mid teen years, when
I was becoming myself, I was horrified to realize that the religion I
had accepted as true, didn't make any rational sense, it didn't stand
the test of reason. I truly thought something was wrong with me.
Everyone around me could praise Jesus and expect to go to heaven, why
wasn't I getting this?

 I read my first atheist writing when I was about twenty...Will and
Ariel Durant...and was ecstatic.....I WASN'T alone in the world. I
still struggled to believe for a few years, then gave it up. I could
live my life and raise my children without doing the mental
calisthenics of Squeezing religion into my world view.

There was one glitch in my secure little blanket of nonfaith. It would
show up from time to time, but always In November. thanksgiving.
giving thanks. I feel a real sense of thankfulness for my life, for my
children, for beauty, I appreciate all my abundant blessings. I want
to express gratitude. I believe it is good to be thankful, to be
mindful of the good things we experience. "counting our blessings"
makes us more aware of each good thing.  G. K. Chesterton wrote,
"thanks are the highest form of thought; and gratitude is happiness
doubled by wonder."

 But where do I direct my Thankfulness, my appreciation, my gratitude?
to God? to Jesus? to a Great spirit? To Gaia or one of the host of
appropriate gods or goddesses in charge of that particular thing for
which i felt thankful? To Luck or Fortune? To nothing at all, just
figuring  that thankfulness is an emotion, a mix of chemicals in my
body, like happiness or desire, fear or anger?

In writing this sermon, i googled "thankful" and "atheist" and mostly
got that atheists are thankful to people who make things
happen...farmers for food, scientists for medicine and technology, the
friends and family in their lives who love and help them. That is all
very nice, and it is good to appreciate  but it doesn't really address
the thankfulness we feel for that which is given to us in GRACE:
The beauty of dawn adding color to the shadowy world, or the
awesomeness of the window to infinity seen in a clear night sky.
Holding a new life in your arms,  all full of future and possibilities,
thankfulness for the beauty of music, be it the song of the wind
touching leaves, or a clear human voice singing in the night, or a
whole orchestra or jazz band pounding into our senses.

I remember only one thing from a philosophy professor who was a
Christian.  he said that in order to appreciate beauty you had to
believe in God, the creator of the beauty. He said There is no beauty
in random evolution. I knew in my gut this was wrong thinking, but
just didn't have the experience  to disprove it, so that thought has
stayed with me all these decades, saying "prove me wrong".  Is this
need to be thankful the hardwiring of God into my brain?    I Don't
know....so I lived with that little dichotomy in my world view...I was
thankful, but I didn't know where to direct my thanks.

What value is in thankfulness? It is a happY feeling. Thankfulness is
expressed with a smile. It lifts us up. It makes us more aware and
therefore we actually enjoy the blessings for which we are thankful.
But does it matter?  I think maybe thankfulness is only meaningful
when it is an action. GIVING thanks means acting out our thankfulness.
It means doing something to express the thankfulness..."passing it
forward." not just saying the words, but making something happen.

Fast forward on this telling of "the journey"  to seven years ago. I'd
had a disruption in my life and was flailing around, unnerved and
unmoored. I needed something to hang on to. I was happy in my atheism,
but I was looking for community, and stepped through these doors.
We here at Foothills UU have learned to nurture each other, and I am
mightily thankful for that.  I feel that for myself I have been
receiving the nurture, and have started to be able to give some back,
but I hope to find a way to also make a verb of thanks, and stand with
members of this faith community as we reach out into the world around
us and make a wider circle of healing and hope and love.

Ive heard this same story from others of you: i was looking for
Community, and I got it, but I also got something I wasn't looking
for. I got a whole new way to look at the spiritual. A lot of this is
from the series of books we have read in book club, and from the many
varied sermons I've listened to here, in talking with many of you, and
especially, learning from our pastor. I became more open, more
receptive. I learned a new language, or rather a new way of
understanding the language I thought I knew. From Forrest Church, from
Martin Buber,  from Karen Armstrong I learned to see  that god wasn't
a  being, that the God I rejected was just too small in definition.
That any word I used to describe God would fail, for being inadequate.

From Thich Nhat Hanh I learn that everything is a miracle.  He says,
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle.
But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin
air, but to walk on earth.    Thich says..Every day we are engaged in
a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds,
green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes.
All is a miracle.”.

Karen Arnstrong writes in "the spiral  staircase":  “The fact that my
“prayer” seems directed toward no person, no end, is something that
many of the theologians I have studied had experienced. This, after
all, was what I had been writing and talking about. I had constantly
explained that the greatest spiritual masters insisted that God was
not another being, and that there was Nothing out there. Yet for all
this, at some level I had not relinquished the old ideas. I was still
seduced by the realistic supernatural theism that I thought I had left
behind, still childishly waiting for that clap of thunder, that streak
of lightning, and the still, small voice of calm whispering in my ear.
 I had not truly accepted the hard, irreducible fact that “there is
nothing again.”
The Greek Fathers of the church had loved the image of Moses going up
the mountain and on the summit being wrapped in an impenetrable cloud.
He could not see anything, but he was in the place where God was. This
cloud of unknowing was precisely it. I had been expecting the thick
mist to part, just a little, and had not really known, with every
fiber of my being, that I would never know, would never see clearly."


So, for me,  can  I live with mystery, with knowing that I will not
know? I can't go back to the old me who thought something had to be
measurable to be real. That would be like a modern scientist rejecting
quantum physics and saying, She believes only in Newton. I can be
thankful and send my thanks into the mystery, I can send my thanks
into my community of friends here, and everywhere. I can try to make
giving thanks an action verb, and live my life in a way that will make
the lives of those near me possible just a little better. I can not
worry whether or not I believe in God, I can just know that I am loved
and be open to the grace  that is freely available.

Peter Mayor teaches us that if we are aware, we will experience God in
everything.
This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now

I can be thankful to be always in the presence of God, even though I
remain fuzzy on what that is,  because  everything is holy now.

Living Water. (sermon for water communion FUUF August 2012)

My mother says, while most people describe their travels by roads and towns, her daughter names rivers. I have lived by the Monongahela and the main, the wWabash, the Detroit, the Little, and the tennessee. I have visited the Thames and the Tiber, the Virgin and the Columbia, the Delaware and the Colorado. I love to follow rivers on a map. I love to look at rivers, watching the water in constant change. I love to put my feet in wild rivers, and become part of the river. When I was younger, I thrilled to test my skill and courage against the rapids. Now I just chart a mental path through them.

What is so fascinating about water, and especially moving water? Water is life. We start life in the water of the womb , our lungs filled with fluid. We are born to the air with the breaking of the water, the first flowing water we experience.

People have followed, lived by, been nurtured by rivers since before we were human. Several cultures use the snake as a symbol for life and fertility. The snake symbol can represent a river. The Rainbow Serpent is a common motif in the art and mythology of Aboriginal Australia. It represents the snake-like meandering of water across a landscape. The Hopi of the American southwest also use the snake motif to represent rivers, water,  life and fertility. At the climax of the  Hopi snake dance, snakes are released into the fields to bring fertility.  The snake represents the life giving water.

In the desert, the river is the current bringing life, and rivers are life in motion. I remember standing in a high place looking over a huge valley north of Brice Canyon in Utah.  Red rocks, hoodoos, bluffs were breath-takingly gorgeous. But here is what really made them beautiful: all the red was accented by a strip of bright green in the valley floor. We descended from the mountain on a long switchback road, through all the Martian red.  And then we arrived on the bottom. A landscape of the occasional dull green sage or cactus suddenly burst into bright green cottonwood, tamarind and grasses. Then we reached the water. Calf creek, maybe 20 feet at its widest, bubbling happily along, bringing all this life to the desert. Deer were taking a drink, and humans had a campground. Children were splashing in the water, and upstream, a fisherman was trying to fool fish onto his hook. I have always thought  I loved the desert, with its spareness, its clean lines, its dry air and deep blue skies, but honestly, it is the desert RIVERS that I love.

The biblical poets, living in their dry land, felt the soul soothing effect of living water. No wonder water is used over and over to sing songs of the spirit.

 Still water can be beautiful, and peaceful, and inspiring of beautiful poetry and awareness of spirit.  Maybe today someone has brought in water from a lake or pond. This is nourishing water, a thick soup of life, bringing peace and restoration. The psalmist in the desert wrote: "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul".

Jesus uses flowing rivers as a metaphor for the holy spirit
Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”

Again the  psalmist sings of Joy caused by the river:
There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most high

 and Isaiah sings in ecstacy.
 "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert."

We have the picture of John the Baptist, standing in the river Jordan,  baptizing the sinless Jesus and proclaiming him Messiah.  Did this really happen? I neither know nor care, but it is a lovely story of life beginning in the river, and it is part of our cultural mythology. Maybe the fundamentalists are on to something with their insistence on baptism in the living waters of the river. The symbolism is powerful. The river gives life and cleanses, speaks of the holy spirit and joy.

Even in the lush lands, rivers are the corridors of life. Most of the great cities have  grown from riverside villages. Name any city in the world, and there is a river associated with it. The great human migrations have been along the rivers. Americans followed the Hudson, the Ohio, the Shenandoah, then the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Platte. They were the first highways, sustaining life while the people traveled to new places of hope and opportunities.


Rivers are water  with purposeful motion, going somewhere,  doing something. Cutting canyons, eroding mountains, carrying nutrients, bringing the water of life.

Last week we sang
And by union what we will can be accomplished still
Drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.

As the drops of water form rivulets and the creeks come together, so do we come together,  to work, to share, to laugh and love. As all rivers run to the oneness of the sea, we, in our shared experience, come to realize our oneness with all humanity, and ultimately, with all that is.

I started writing this piece early in my UU experience, and go back to work on it from time to time. It has grown as I have grown.

Rock and water

I tried to stand on  the rock,
but I had outgrown it.
It wouldn't support me.
 I knew I must yield myself to the water,
but I was afraid.
The water was unknown,
to what would I cling?

I left the rock behind.
Not so much by my will.
Instead, I was carried away by the force of the water.
It was freeing. Preconceptions  gone.
No revealed knowledge.
Unlimited possibilities.

Freedom to explore, yes, but freedom is also FROM.
There are so many negatives. Not this, no to that.
But where are the YESSES?

Why does the rock support everyone else, but not me?
What is wrong with me?
I flail around in the water.
I am angry.

 My stream brings me to a larger one.
Here are other people who have leapt
From their rocks of childlike faith.
Some are flailing around like me.
BUT  some embrace the fluidity and prosper in it.

There is hope!
I give up grieving that the solid is not for me
I discover a new truth
The YES to center life
I believe in US! WE!

Giving love and support to each other,
SEEING and encouraging each other
As each of us swims our independent journey,
Confident in our own strengths,
Yet returning to the community
For joyous reunion
And sharing of learned truths
As we move and change and think and grow and love.