Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 27th of August, 2000
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
at the end of the summer,
to worship, to immerse our individual lives
into the flowing river of the Common Life,
and to increase our precious trust
of shared wisdom, hope and blessing.
As we worship, may ours be no small portion of joy.
(assembly) And may we remain true to ourselves
true to each other, and true to our best visions
of what we can together become.
Prayer before the silence [Next] [back to top]
Shall we gather at the river?
The river of our lives,
which flows forever like a parable of the cosmos,
moving and changing,
whirling and flowing.
Waves of joy and eddies of grief
make up the reality of that river,
depth and width and length give it shape,
coolness and refreshment and strength,
its substance.
There are echoes of both beauty and terror
in the powerful weave of its waters.
When it is furious in a storm,
we remember how very little is in our control.
When it carves a pool in its banks,
calm and silent,
as now it does in this house of praise,
we can see ourselves for a moment
in its reflections.
When we understand its tiny source
in a nameless fountain
and its mighty end in the silver sea,
we remember how much transformation
there is in our own lives from birth to death.
O living Water of Life,
refresh us all at this moment,
as we gather by this still pond
carved into the edge of the river of our lives,
and lower ourselves into your embrace,
washed by your gentle caresses,
soothed by your cool, refreshing
and quietly murmuring currents.
[bell-sound]
Along the river of life: many faces, many lives.
Along the journey of our lives, many companions,
many foes, many loves, many losses.
Their faces rise up before us as we sit still
in this pool of silence, their names beckon to us.
We remember them aloud, if the case may be,
or in the sanctuary of our own hearts.
But we remember them.
The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a large section of Diane DiPrima's larger poem "Rant." Note the date, 1973. Note that she uses the metaphor "war" several times in the poem. I would like to suggest that DiPrima wrote this poem as a reflection on her own protests against the war fought in Vietnam. I have written this version down without using some of DiPrima's written idiosyncrasies, such as using "yr" for "your" and I have placed capital letters where they usually are found.
You cannot write a single line, without a cosmology
laid out before all eyes.
There is no part of yourself you can separate out,
saying, this is memory, this is sensation,
this is the work I care about,
this is how I make a living.
It is whole. It is a whole. It always was whole.
You do not "make" it so.
There is nothing to integrate;
you are a presence.
Every man, every woman carries a firmament
inside, and the stars in it are not the stars in the sky.
Without our imagination there is no memory.
Without our imagination there is no sensation.
Without our imagination there is no will, desire.
What you "find out for yourself" is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility.
No one can inhabit your world.
The war that matters is the war against the imagination.
All other wars are subsumed in it.
The ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination.
The ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism.
The ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up,"
Nothing adds up and nothing stands in for anything else.
The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.
All other wars are subsumed by it.
There is no way out of the spiritual battle.
There is no way you can avoid taking sides.
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do…plumber, baker,
teacher…you have a poetics.
You either step into the world like a suit
of readymade clothes, or you etch it in light;
your firmament spills into the shape of your room,
the shape of your body, of your loves.
Bring yourself home to yourself.
Enter the garden.
The guy at the gate with the flaming sword is yourself.
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise, it is practical.
People die every day for the lack of it.
It is vast and elegant.
There is no war but the war against the imagination.
It is a war for the world,
to keep it a vale of soul-making.
The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is from the Gospel book of Luke, or Loukas as he was called in Greek. We do not know for sure if this man, supposedly a physician, was the author…we only know that the name Luke has been attached to this work since the second century. Many modern scholars have suggested that Luke may have been written in part by a woman. This is culled from chapter 3.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilatus was the prefect of Judea, and Herod (Antipas) the regent in The Galilee, when Herod's brother Philip was regent in Iturea and Trakhonitis, and Lusanias the regent in Abilene; during the tenure of the ranking priests Hannas and Kaiaphas, John, Zachary's son, went through the Jordan Valley preaching his message. He told the people that they could change their lives for the better, and be immersed in the waters of the Jordan as a sign of this change of heart and its forgiveness.
He would preach to the crowds who gathered to hear him: "Produce fruits in your lives that befit your noble words. For I tell you what you already know: the axe is laid at the root of the tree. You well know that any fruit tree that doesn't produce fruit anymore will eventually be cut down and used for kindling."
The crowds would ask him questions before accepting baptism. "How should we live our lives, then?"
He said "Simple. If you have two shirts, give one to someone who has none. If you have lots of food, give some away to those who have none."
The tax-collectors (whom everyone hated), came up to him to be baptized and said, "How about us?"
He said "Simple. Stop cheating, and skimming off money beyond what you are authorized to do."
Even soldiers in the occupying army would come up to him to be baptized and ask, "And us? What do you think we should do?"
He would say, "Simple. Enough with all your famous extortions, and all of your false accusations against the ordinary citizens of the land. And stop griping about your pay."
All of this kind of talk aroused people's expectations.
Sermon: Mark the Baptist - A Visit to Israel [Next] [back to top]
When 36 of us, mostly Unitarian Universalists from Ohio, traveled to Israel last February, I expected the worst.
You see, I knew from talking to many of my colleagues, who had toured Israel previously, that the guides there didn't quite know what to make of Unitarian Universalists.. Israeli tour guides ordinarily lead tours for Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, for centrist Protestants (you know, Methodists and Lutherans), for populist Evangelical Christians and TV preachers, and for all varieties of Jews: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstruct-ionist and even Humanistic. I knew they almost never led tours for Muslims, who rarely visit the land. And I knew that Unitarian Universalists, because there are so few of us, must go to Israel even less than Muslim tourists. And because we often do not resemble these other religious groups very much, culturally, we often leave the Israeli guides completely perplexed.
For example, even though we have striking Jewish influence in our history, most of us, I'd wager, don't know how to say V'havta or Kaddish, typical Jewish prayers, or know the proper way to wear a tallit or the tefillin.
And even though our tradition is rooted in the liberal wing of our radical Protestant heritage, we don't sing "I Walked in the Garden Alone" or "God of Our Fathers" during worship. Even those among us whose spirituality is centered on a liberal reading of the teachings of Jesus don't pray the rosary or recite the ancient creeds. And even though our Muslim brothers and sisters have influenced our tradition in many ways, we clearly do not face Mecca as we worship; right now, you are facing north and I am facing south.
No, we have rich, multi-cultural roots, but we are our own people, with our own unique eclectic culture that distinguishes us. I decided it was only fair that our guide be prepared.
So I wrote Danny Levy a long letter and faxed it to him two weeks before the trip. I told him briefly about our history of cheeky heretics, and about our relatively common native skepticism. I even told him about our own, (unfortunately, barely known,) approach to the Bible, which for a 150 years has followed a critical, modernist approach which treats the ancient texts without the painful literalism that distorts so much modern religious conversation.
I told him that we were not likely to get all excited about the so-called "traditional" sites that the tourist industry in Israel has lifted up in the last 30 years. For example, I told him that I would appreciate it if he did not show us "the exact spot" where Jesus first uttered his famous prayer, because I have never found any evidence that convinces me that anyone could know such a thing, let alone knows it.
I told him not to point out where this or that miracle "actually occurred" since it was likely that many of us preferred the stunning ordinary miracle of red poppies in the Galilee to any literal interpretation of ancient wonder tales.
I told Danny that since all religions and secular culture were of interest to us, that it would be best if he took us on tours of Muslim and Druze sites, Kabbalistic Jewish synagogues and secular institutions as well as all the famous gospel devotional sites like the olive garden at Gethsemene. Furthermore, I requested him to stress the archeological and critical instead of the devotional. Finally, I also thought it fair to inform him that we ran the gamut on Israeli-Palestinian politics, and that some of us, at least, might ask him some tough questions about the situation there.
In other words, I really underscored to him that we were probably rather different from other tour groups, and to take that seriously. I didn't want him to be frustrated, and didn't want us to spend our whole time there having some sort of identity crisis.
Mostly Danny responded to my requests, although I have to admit that he confessed to me often that we truly baffled him like no other group ever had. I got very specific in my letter. I knew that if we saw Druze sites we would have to give up other sites.
So one of the things I suggested to him was that we didn't need to make a special stop at the famous Jordan river, the river touted in spirituals, the river where John the Baptist baptized. I told him baptism was just not our thing. I told him that European Unitarians, called Socinians, had given up the practice over 400 years ago.
Of course, once we got there, you can't actually avoid the river. On the contrary, in The Galilee, we crossed the Jordan river at least 10 times while we circled around the Lake to visit richly splendid archeological sites like Zippori and Capernaum.
I do have to say that the first time we crossed it, I noted that the word "river" is a pretty fancy word for such a small, insignificant trickle of water. The Mississippi is a river. The Danube. Even the Seine in Paris or our own Scioto where it swells above downtown. But the famous Jordan is not a whit different in size or look from the Olentangy just down the street. A rocky, somewhat sloppy creek is what it is. A shallow, reed-pocked curving thing lined with eucalyptus trees imported from Australia is all it is. A shallow green brook. And it hasn't changed in 5000 years.
However, as most of you know, old habits die hard. And Yosi, our skillful, smiling Moroccan driver, was apparently not as clear about our strange itinerary as Danny was. So one day he just automatically lurched into a driveway marked Yardenit in Hebrew. It was the Jordan River site. Peeved at first, I reminded Danny that I had asked him not to take us there. He was just about to yell at Yosi to turn around, when suddenly I stopped him.
"Oh, well," I said, "we're here now. Let's just get out and take a look at the fool thing. It's kind of pretty here with all the gum-trees reflecting in the rather still water of the site. A little natural beauty, without a 3000 year old ruin near by, wouldn't hurt us." Danny and I chuckled a bit. Then we all climbed out.
We threaded our way through the ever-present souvenir store, and then down some steps. The evangelical pastors who like to bring their pilgrims here had built a baptismal site in the river. The river you see, contrary to what modern Baptists seem to believe, is just not deep enough to immerse anyone under its surface. It's about a foot and a half deep at most. So they had to build concrete baths where folks could actually be immersed while standing in water up to their waist.
There was a five-foot wide concrete step or ledge by the shore, about six-inches below the water. I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants, and stood in the water. Why? Since part of my charge on the trip was to teach about biblical and historical things from a Unitarian Universalist perspective, I decided that this little ten minute stop at the Jordan could be profitably spent as a teaching moment.
I spoke while standing in the water, my rainbow colored kipah (hat) protecting my scalp from the sun. I told them:
| John the Baptist was a real historical person. He was called "the baptist" or "the dunker" because he used to plunge people into little bathing pools at the edge of this river. The Greek word "baptizo" simply means "I plunge," thus giving us our English word "baptist." |
| As you can see for yourselves, this river is far too shallow for anyone to be immersed in. The actual site where scholars think John most likely baptized is further south, on the Kingdom of Jordan side, where there are actual bathing pools carved into the rock next to the river." |
I continued.
| John is mentioned favorably by many ancient authors, like Flavius Josephus. And, in modern Iraq, there is still a large religious group, called the Mandeans, who teach that John the Baptist was a much greater prophet than Jesus, whom they do not like very much. The Mandeans still speak the Aramaic language even, the very language John spoke. And, perhaps surprisingly, and to aid your own practice of humility, you need to know there are probably more practicing Mandeans in the world than there are Unitarian Universalists. |
| John, was probably not related to Jesus at all, despite what the gospels say. The very fact that he baptized Jesus was a squirming embarrassment to the early Christians. All four gospels hem and haw in explaining this embarrassment. His acceptance of baptism suggests Jesus felt the need to change his life for the better, that he was unhappy with himself. Thus, all critical modern scholars are convinced that whatever else happened in Jesus' life between his birth and death, he was most certainly baptized by John. |
"What did John preach?" I asked rhetorically.
| First, he preached against the developing war between Herod Antipas, the regent, and the King of Arabia. Herod was dragging the whole of the Galilee into financial ruin to fight this war, because he had divorced his first wife, the daughter of the Arabian King, in favor of a wealthy woman who was his brother's ex-wife. He called, in short, for peace in his own nation, peace in all of its ramifications, social and military and political and personal. |
| Second, he preached that change for the better was actually possible if you imagined it and worked for it. Nothing was keeping you from your dreams but yourself. The word John used for this turn-about in people's lives is rendered in Greek as "metanoite" which is dishonestly translated by the King James as 'repent' but which simply means "to turn around and go the other direction." |
| John was a passionate Jew who sensed that almost all people, Jews and Gentiles both, longed for both justice and a sense of depth in their lives. So he told them "It's up to us all. Do you really think we are not all in this together? Do you think we are all perfect, holy, and always right, and that all the messes in the world are entirely someone else's fault, the responsibility of the clergy or the government? |
| Third, John invited people to be baptized. Now you need to know that John did not invent baptism or ritual immersion. It was a common Jewish practice. The priests immersed themselves in the temple to make themselves pure to offer sacrifice. John did not have much use for them, as a caste set apart and above the people. The folks who lived at the utopian desert community called Qumran also bathed daily to purify themselves. John, although he surely had some initial connection with them, did not think much of their solution to social problems, which was just to run away into the desert and hide, and revel in their purity by pretending that they never were part of the world in the first place. They even patted themselves on the back by calling themselves the "Children of the Light." You know what that makes the rest of us. |
| And saddest of all, village males told women who had given birth, or who had completed their monthly cycle to baptize themselves (in a mikvah) to "purify" themselves from their physical realities before coming back into the house. John found all of these uses of baptism repugnant in that they were not tied to justice for all the people. He himself dreamed of justice, but found the ways people tried to make their dreams come true to be highly unjust. So he left the city and its temple, left the self-congratulatory desert community of Qumran, and left the woman-demeaning rules of the patriarchal villages. He moved out into the far wilderness, the desert, the raw natural world. He lived as a hermit until he gathered enough strength to preach. Once he started, he was apparently so spellbinding people traveled 30 miles or so to hear him, no small journey in those days. |
Let me reconstruct one of his sermons for you.
"Immerse yourself in this river water," he said to his hearers, "as a sign that you do not need the bureaucracy of the priesthood to make you pure. You already are pure. Pure as this flowing river water. Immerse yourselves in this river water as a sign you do not need to separate yourself out from society and think of yourself as better than others. And, immerse yourselves in this common water to show that women and men may have solidarity with each other. Be baptized as free human beings. Women and men are both naturally pure, since they are part and parcel of wild, free nature. Their bodies are not evil…they are wonderful parts of a wonderful world." |
"No, said John, the wild world where we stand now itself announces your purity, without priests, puritans or stupid rules. It signs your freedom with its very wildness. The priests do not make us free. The puritans do not make us free. We make ourselves free…by changing our own ways in the world, by being wild enough to stop dividing ourselves into cliques, castes and superior genders enough to understand that we are all in this together. All of us." |
"Why separate ourselves into castes? We are all part of the same world…one world. And we have work to do to make that world better. You came out to the wilderness to hear me say these things. But now, immerse yourselves into this living, natural flowing water, and then turn around, (metanoite) and go back to your ordinary lives. Make changes little by little in your lives to embody your dream of fairness and justice. Allow your very heart to move from fear toward real engagement. Stop thinking of yourselves as 'miserable sinners.' You are not. You are powerful creatures, flowing with the spirit as this river flows with water. You can make your own dreams, and all the dreams of the ancient prophets come true." |
John didn't just preach and baptize. He offered concrete suggestions. The Gospel of Luke points this out with great clarity. He first suggested to his hearers exactly what any kindergarten teacher first says to a child…"learn to share." But he was not naïve or romantic, this John. He did not expect either the tax bureaucracy or the occupying army to just disappear with a blast of lightning. He did say that they could begin to change their heart too within their own positions…by refusing to abuse their very real power by taking advantage of folks. John, you see, refused to let anyone off the hook." |
And with this, I ended my little teaching moment in the Jordan.
Now after I gave my little historical sermon, a surprising thing happened. Linda DeSantis, a Unitarian Universalist minister who was travelling with us, and who herself was wading on the shelf I was standing on, suddenly bent over and dipped her cupped hands in the Jordan. Without warning, she solemnly poured this water over my head, till it ran down my temples. Then she said these amazing words quite spontaneously: "Mark, I baptize you into the wild free world. You are not some miserable sinner, you are a capable and spirited person who can help to change the world for the better. You are one with the whole world, not separate from it, but a valuable part of it. You have much to do, and it is good work. Immerse yourself into the flow of that task, turn around and go back to your life knowing you are a free person."
Many of the people standing on the shore heard her words. They were deeply moved by how she had interpreted my little lecture while standing in the Jordan. One by one then, some of the people came up to me, and to her, and asked that we might do and say the same thing to them. I was surprised at first, but one by one we did so, pouring water on people's heads, and saying to them words much like I just said. Not everyone came up, but I assure you, every time I poured water on someone's head, and said the words you heard above or something like them, I was moved, quite literally, "beyond belief." And at the airport, many days later, a number of the people who were there told me that their baptism in the Jordan was the most moving part of a moving trip.
I realized a great deal, that day. I realized that Diane DiPrima is right. "It is whole. It's a whole. It always was a whole. You do not make it so." So said John many centuries earlier. But she said more, something that modern people have a hard time with. She lifts up the imagination as central. She suggests that the imagination is our power to color outside the lines of our limitations. We may indeed be too busy, but are we really too busy for justice? We may be too tired, but are we really so tired we have to forgo our dreams? We have to be practical, yes, we have obligations, sure, but so practical we have to let things stay the same, and live claustrophobic lives in the world as it is, divided into classes, races, tribes, true believers and infidels? Isn't our power to imagine a just world our best power, our clearest sign of the spiritual life? For the imagination, DiPrima says, is not only holy, it is precise, it is ultimately, the only practical thing in our lives. It is vast and elegant.
The ancient rite of baptism is too religious for some folks, hopelessly spiritual in a magical sort of way. Social justice visionaries, on the other hand, who often are suspicious of religious distractions, strike others as way too unconcerned with the spiritual. Some folks would have it that there is a serious conflict between the just and the spiritual.
The historic John the Baptist, however, and the modern poet Diane De Prima, do not understand such a division. And I have to admit, as I stood in the flowing Jordan, pouring river water onto the heads of skeptical Unitarian Universalists, I didn't understand such a thing either. I understood with a shiver in my bones how the gift of our imagination washes all the neat categories of our comfort with the status quo down-river. It decries the intent of those who would neatly divide our world into the secular and sacred, the just and the spiritual. The imagination, which actually colors outside the line, and dares to envision the world as a place of grace and wonder for us all, is both just and spiritual at the same time, religious and secular, and dare I say it, humanistic and godly. It is all part of one flow, one river of time, that we all stand in, immersed.
Now don't be foolish. I don't imagine us as Unitarian Universalists returning to baptism as a practice, or lifting up John the Baptist as high as the Mandeans do. But I do imagine that even now, even right here, we can begin to immerse ourselves in the deeper places in our lives to such an extent that we can see how all of our divisions, differences and diversities float on a profound current of unity, imagination and daring, a current signed by every marvelous dream of hope and justice ever expressed by a visionary voice. And if what I say is not true (and I believe it is true) I ask you, why would we…spiritual or secular, skeptic or mystic… even bother to gather on Sunday morning?
Church is not a club, a clique, or an arbitrary guardian of the past. It is a vale of soul-making, a circle where imagination can run as free and fresh as river water, where no one is so foolish for long as to say "merely imaginary" and where life can be really life, love can really loving, truth can be really truthful, and justice itself flies on wings of the spirit.
Prayer [back to top]
As the school year begins, as the church year begins (chanted)
Gonna lay down my no's and nays
Gonna let my excuses go…
Gonna give up my fear and sighs…
Gonna lay down my shell and shock…
Gonna dream of a better world
Gonna let it begin with me
Gonna step in and turn around
down by… the riv-er-side…..
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