Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 20th of May, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here,
as citizens of the world,
to worship in peace,
to learn and unlearn so that we may thrive,
to respond with our lives and loving,
to bless the world instead of complain about it.
O Love, as the words, silence and music move us,
(assembly) may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together
become…
Preface to Silence and Naming [Next] [back to top]
Said the Talmud sage:
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
Suomi, La France, Héllas, and Nippon
are what they are,
but we see Finland, France, Greece and Japan.
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
Guangzho, Firenze, Mumbai, Moskva are what they are,
but we see Canton, Florence, Bombay and Moscow.
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
Buddhasasana, Sikh Panth, Oceti Shakowin, Dinka, Mende are what they are, but we see Buddhism, the religion of the Sikhs, the Oglala Sioux Native Americans, or African Tribal Religions.
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
Blest are you, Reality beyond all final naming. As you are without a final Name, so are we. And so we bestow ourselves for a time to the silence that precedes and follows all naming.
(bell-sound)
From the silent namelessness of all things rise the ten thousand named things, says the sage of the Dao Dejing.
So it is with us, that up from our silent hearts, names arise, tied to our love or longing, tied to our sorrow or sadness, but always and everywhere tied to our own lives.
We embrace those people whom we love, whom we miss and wish to make memory of, or even those with whom are in conflict, or about whom we worry.
We say their names in silence or aloud, as we feel the need.
(naming)
Blest are the names that make the cosmos.
Blest is that mystery, which I call Love, which makes the cosmos what it is, and we who see the cosmos who we are.
Blest are those who know they are not islands, but connected to the main of all that is.
Blest are the sages, poets and prophets who have reminded us of this truth with their lives.
Blest is the music which signs for us all the beauty of that truth and reality of that Love.
The First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
comes from Marilyn Frye's 1983 book, The Politics of Reality
Differences of power are always manifested in asymmetrical access. The President of the United States has access to almost everybody for almost anything he might want of them, and almost nobody has access to him. The super-rich have access to almost everybody; almost no one has access to them. The creation and manipulation of power consists of the manipulation and control of power.
The Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
comes from the Gospelbook attributed to a physician named Loukas, or Luke,
Scholars ascertain from internal language clues that it was written sometime
toward the last decade of the first century in our era.
Jesus would to the crowds, "You know how it works: you see a cloud rising in the west and you predict 'It's gonna rain.' Then you note the South wind is blowing, and you predict, 'It's gonna be a scorcher.'This is just fooling around. You can find signs on land and lake and predict the weather by them, so why is it so hard for you to interpret the signs of the present age? Why is it that you don't decide for yourselves the right course to take? After all, you know the story…when your opponent drags you into court, you know it's better to settle with him out of court, right? Because if you do end up before the judge, you know exactly what will happen; you'll go straight to debtor's prison, and you won't get out until you've paid the last red cent."
Some people in the crowd then informed him of a recent incident where the Roman Prefect, Pilate, had arranged to kill some Galilean pilgrims who were actually worshipping in the temple, mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Jesus turned to the people when he heard this and asked, "Are you imagining that these people somehow had this coming? I'll tell you right now, if we all don't have a change of heart, we'll all end up in the same boat. And how about those eighteen people down at Siloam who died when that tower fell over on them…do you think they were being punished for their sins or something? Not at all, I tell you, but I also say to you that if you have no change of heart, doom is on its way."
Sermon: UUSC Sunday [Next] [back to top]
This is a sermon about power.
Now power, in and of itself, is neutral, and requires no sermons to interpret it. Power simply is. It is how we use or misuse power, or don't use power, that makes sermons necessary.
Power is. Strength is. Sometimes, it's just a simple fact that attaches itself to no moral lesson.
My younger brother Robert is smaller than me in both size and weight. But by the time he was 15 and I was 20, he could easily overcome me when we arm-wrestled, which is something we used to like to do.
This power does not make him better than me, or me worse than him. He is just built differently than I am. And I am structured differently than he is. He simply and naturally has more power in his arm.
I suppose I could have worked out to equalize the power Differential. I could have tried to make myself stronger by lifting weights. But at the time it was not an important issue. There was nothing wrong or threatening about my younger brother being stronger than I was. It was just an interesting fact.
Now there are other power differentials that are very significant.
The first reading, a passage from Marilyn Frye, clearly notes that "asymmetrical access"exists between people with great power, like the president of a nation, and people with less power.
This power can be symbolized and maintained by economic differences, or even physical power. When Mr. Pinochet governed Chile, his power was maintained with physical power, symbolized by uniformed military personnel, with weapons, standing on almost every street corner in Santiago.
I was in Santiago years after he was supposedly voted out of office by the plebiscite election. Mr. Frey was president then. But although the free election symbolized power, it was not the real power, because Pinochet was still in control of the military, which held all the cards.
So when I was down there on my sabbatical, seven years ago, the military personnel, with machine guns in hand, were still to be found on every Santiago corner, and in every small town I visited during my thousand mile journey down to Tierra Del Fuego. I found it scary.
The Second Reading, from the Gospel of Luke, speaks of power differentials in ancient times as well, for there never has been a time in human history when political and economic power have been equally distributed.
Jesus is talking to poor people who had lost everything in the recent economic downturn in the Galilee.
As the great cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias were being built, local family farms in the neighborhood were simply taxed out of existence by the local governor, Antipas, supported by the Roman military.
As some of you know, when people have been reduced to poverty suddenly, their protest against their condition is not made toward the people with real power who taxed them into poverty, but against their brother and sister poor people. They would squabble and blame each other for small things, and drag each other into court.
But those who are in debt have no real power when acting alone. And so the civil courts took all the powerless, one at a time, and threw them into debtor's prison where their powerlessness was clearly compounded.
That is why Jesus advises his audience to "settle out of court" since the system itself was corrupt and powerful, and automatically ground the poor and powerless to powder because that is what it was designed to do.
"Why do you not decide for yourselves the right course to take?" Luke summarizes Jesus teaching with that one majestic sentence. In other words, don't wait for the powerful and their institutions to suddenly change their mind. That's foolish. They are not going to do it. You decide for yourselves and think for yourselves and work outside the system to make peace with each other. This way of claiming your freedom in the world should be as obvious and proverbial to you," he says to them, "as your capacity to figure out the weather." "Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor's delight."
Then Jesus addresses another factor that the crudely powerful use to keep the powerless down, and under their thumb: Blaming the suffering for their own downfall.
"They brought it on themselves." "They are paying for their sins. Their downfall is God's punishment."
Jesus points out that this is complete nonsense, theological quackery. Instead, he suggests that we are all in this together. We all have to have a change of heart, and shoulder the responsibility to confront the powers and principalities of this world as a team.
Otherwise, the same doom that takes the unlucky will take us all, he warns. For we are in this together. He is no doom and gloom prophet. He is simply pointing out the facts that our own modern Unitarian Universalist statement about the Interdependent Web of all reality points out just as well. If we are all interdependent, then quite simply, we rise together, And we fall together.
Therefore, it's important that we work together to equalize the unbalanced power and asymmetrical access which hurt so many people.
It's important that we do more than vote. It's important that we confront inequities in the systems that keep us apart.
The BREAD organization that this church is a member of is based on this principle. It is an Interfaith Social Justice Organization with Unitarian Universalist, Jewish, and Christian members, ranging from Roman Catholic to liberal Protestant, from Pentecostal to Evangelical. Tomorrow night, when thousands of members of BREAD descend on Veterans Memorial at 6:30 PM for our May meeting, the tremendous organization of the meeting may actually put off some of the more liberal attendants as it has earlier attendants. There is strict timing at these meetings. There are strongly worded statements, and ritualized confrontations, all of which have been planned in advance with everyone's foreknowledge. This is done for a reason. It has to do with the balance of power. It has to do with making public things long hidden behind the scenes in private. The purpose of a BREAD meeting of this sort is to make access to the power more accessible, and more symmetrical. It is to begin to restore some equity between city and county officials and those who elect them in regards to housing issues. BREAD understands the nature of politics; the preemptive press conference held this week with thirty BREAD members present was an attempt to take the wind out of BREAD's sails during this meeting to tip the balance of power and witness which the BREAD organization has tried so hard to establish, without actually offering a long term solution to the problem of establishing affordable housing in the city.
But BREAD congregations, understanding politics, and the power structure of preemptive strikes, will show up in great number anyway, and not back down on their witness.
The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee offers another very important example. When the Nazi organization tipped the balance of power in Europe, the UUSC was founded basically to try and undermine that power in order to restore justice and equity. In 1939, Martha and Waitstill Sharp were sent by the American Unitarian Association to Europe to help aid many of the refugees from Czechoslovakia, displaced by the Nazi attack on that country. This seed flowered the next year in the founding of the Unitarian Service Committee in May. The Sharps again went to Europe, managing to work with underground networks to get milk products to starving children in France. Martha Sharp got many children to America back in the days when the United States was still neutral about the war, and such immigration was almost impossible bureaucratically.
From France, especially in Paris and Marseilles, where USC centers were established, the newborn organization worked tirelessly to tilt the balance of power in a more equitable direction. Working with the Red Cross, the Friends Service Committee and other organizations, our Service Committee quickly spread its work around the world. Including the great and powerful United States.
Texan migrant workers benefited from the work of Service Committee. The UUSC helped to form desegregation projects in Atlanta and Jacksonville. But they also met the larger world. A teacher education program in Cambodia helped that poor country immensely. There were nurses trained in Turkey, social work projects in the poorest regions of Jamaica, and maternal and child health planning in Haiti. Funding programs for women in India, education projects in southern Mexico, funded US Congressional tours of Central American trouble spots where our own nation had contributed to the asymmetrical power trips big time.
But you need to know this. At no time has the UUSC ever engaged in preaching liberal religion, or trying to make converts to the American Way, whatever that is. At no time have they exported values foreign to the places they have visited or been called into, including cities in the United States where childhood poverty is at a high level. At no time. Yet people still mask their discomfort with the inequitable tipping of the power structure by assuming that such an organization must somehow be fostering their own liberal ideas in foreign lands, or even at home. The UUSC only works to balance power. What folks will decide once there is a more equitable power base is still up to them.
The only thing that the Service Committee is doing is agitating, educating, and organizing for a more equitable balance of power. They are helping to empower the powerless, and confront the powers that be to whom the powerless have little access.
They are doing what Jesus tried to get his students to do, to help people think for themselves, color outside the box, and rethink their hopelessness. Literacy is a power. Health is a power. Escaping spiraling poverty is a power. Escaping tyranny is a power. And such power is the business of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
The Service Committee is not part of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It's a separate entity, a self-supporting membership organization. Like BREAD it relies on participating members to show up and support the organization, for both organizations know that only organized power can confront and face organized power. Good will is nice, but it isn't terribly organized.
We free-thinking religious types are little suspicious of strong organization. I know. I understand. Come visit my office and look at my desk and I think you will see that I really do understand.
But I also am convinced that it is in best interests of liberal religious people to become friends with organization and powerful structures while maintaining free-thinking, critical and mystical approaches to religion, which do not require such hard edges.
It's up to us to decide for ourselves what is right. The signs of the times, the signs of the present age are not much different than they were two thousand years ago when Jesus struggled.
The organized and bold only have a chance to tilt the balance of power in a better direction. The disorganized and timid are actually fighting on the side of the truly powerful and self-anointed.
Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor's delight. That's a fun rhyme to remember, but in the end, it won't save your life if you don't pay attention to the much more cool National Weather Service warning you that a tornado is coming your way. You have to organize to escape being swept away.
The ditties in the Farmers Almanac won't help save lives. Organized and scientific weather reporting might.
For I think the teacher Jesus was right. No one deserves tragic events in their lives, the murderous intrusions of governments or social systems that like a great whirlwind flatten lives and families with power. No one is being punished for their sins when tragedy happens, or poverty hits.
But we are all in the same boat together, said the teacher. One day, unless we change our hearts, we could be next, for there is no final salvation that even the powerful and super-rich can buy. We are all interrelated. We are all in the same boat. And thus, the call for a change of heart comes to us. And two of the best organizations that help my heart to change continually are the UUSC and BREAD, both of which organizations I am proud our church belongs to and supports.
I am glad that we are indeed heeding the teaching of the Jewish teacher Jesus so well: "We are indeed deciding for ourselves the true course to take."
My brother is still stronger than me. But we love each other, and it makes no difference. But where a disparity in strength makes a difference, and where there is no love, I for one remain thankful that we can be there to take the right course.
Prayer: [back to top]
The world, O Love, round and blue and green,
all of it, hanging in dark space like a Chinese lantern.
All the cities, all the towns, all the lonely people
and the large families and organized networks,
he poor and the rich, the poets and engineers,
the dying and the healthy,
all of it, nothing left out, not one small speck,
all the arching trees and all the small insects,
every vein of ore, each deep sea current,
the tiniest bluebell on a mountain slope,
the largest whale tossing on the waves,
every fish with names and without, and every clam,
and mussel and crab,
the most beautiful things and the most ugly,
all of it, all of it, all of it, O Love.
This I pray. May it move toward peace. May it bend toward justice.
May it thrive and know joy. All of it. Everyone. Now and forever. Amen.
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