"Why At All Worship Then?"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 25^th of November, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
having entered the great Thanksgiving gate
which opens onto all the Winter Holidays
to worship, to shelter our lives in wonder
and ground the adventure of our hopes
in the reality made clear by humility.
May freedom be our strength, not our excuse,

and may our reason and passion keep us true
to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]
Yes to the dinner which is over,
and yes to the last plate drying on the rack.
Yes to the hellos and good-byes at airports at stations, or curbs or thresholds.
Yes to the tensions that may have been, even as they are subsiding; they are our teachers.
Yes to any somersaulting joys during the week, they are even now beginning to thin
into warm memory like a comforter round our shoulders.

Yes to the winners of games, hoisted on shoulders, and yes to the reality of the sorrow of those who lose as well.
Yes to the weather, balmy, lovely, serene, the powder blue sky and lacy trees.
Yes to our pained concerns over the world's woes,
and yes to our hopes, and dreams that woes come to their end at last.

Yes to our ordinary lives, our ordinary lives stretched out between holidays like a bridge of lights.
Yes to the schedules, the appointments, the quick conversations,
Yes to the sorting of priorities, and emotions,
Yes to the classrooms, yes to the doctor's office for flu shots, yes to the grocery stores, yes to the offices, yes to the libraries, yes to the sidewalks for late autumn walks, yes to the buying of gifts for birthdays and holidays, yes even to brighter light bulbs to match the winter's coming overcast skies.
Yes, O Love, to the words, the memories, the visions, the music, and to the silence, the purest center holding it all together.

(silence)

Yes to our lives, each particular life, precious and worthy.
Yes to the astonishing weaving of joy and sorrow that hold us in tight embrace.
Yes to the families and friends, the struggling hearts and broken wills intent on overcoming,
Yes to the memories, the leaping hopes.
Yes to it all! Names condense in our hearts like pearls in an oyster,
touchstones of our particular life, names that are letters in our own names.

These shine in our silent heart, or escape our lips and offer themselves to the silence.

(naming)

Yes to this beautiful shelter for our spirit.
Yes to this beautiful assembly of human hearts.
Yes to this beautiful music which reminds us that all of it, all of it, is a dance.

First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from an 1849 sermon on the sacraments by the great Unitarian minister and prophet, Theodore Parker.

He was an abolitionist, and is called a prophet becausehe never shied away from telling the truth even when it was not popular.

To know whom you worship, let me see you in your shop, let me hear you in your trade, let me know how you rent houses, how you get your money, how you kept it and how you spent it.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a poem by the remarkable 16th century mystical poet of India, Mira Bai, who had a special devotion to Krsna. The following version is a conflation of three different translations, since I was trying my best to capture the music of her verse, which in India is always sung.

Those clouds---
I watched as they soared, oh Dark One,
black as ash, and yellowish,
they mounted above me like a mountain range.
They split open, spewing rain
for nearly two hours.

Everywhere the water pooled,
over the fields, over the green, green earth.
My love, you are somewhere on the other side
of those soaked green fields,
maybe in a faraway country.
I too am soaked, standing here in this doorway,
my hair, my body robed in sheets of water.
Mirabai bows to the power that puts mountain
ranges in the sky,
I mean you, o Dark One,
so many centuries old, unharmed,
but never, never, quenching my thirst,
even with all this water.

Sermon: Why Worship At All Then? [Next][back to top]

When I meet someone for the first time, I often dread it when it comes around to the question of my livelihood, my calling; my vocation.

Almost invariably, when folks find out I am a minister, they act different. I am no longer a person, I am an idea, and a very rarified one at that. Folks suddenly apologize for using certain words, or assume that I must think of myself as Christ The Second, a being scarcely to be approached as a mere mortal.

If they are smoking, they put out their cigarette. If they mention the word "beer" in a sentence, they crave my forgiveness. And all the jokes about sex are tucked away quickly behind the lapels of their minds.

I have to admit this attitude confuses me, since all the clergy I knew when I was a kid defined themselves with no such scruples.

The priests I knew tossed their whiskeys back without embarrassment. And my French teacher in High School, Fr. Derosier, taught us the first person singular for "I smoke" (Je fume) at least once each day by lighting up right there in the classroom and puffing away. And frankly, sex jokes were the specialty of the religious order that taught me.

So I explain that I am not the sort of minister before whom they need to shuffle in shame all the time, I add that the church I serve is not defined by such narrow channels of religious practice. They usually then ask me to describe the congration.

But when I am finished telling folks about the typical theological variety in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, including the agnostic approach favored by so many, they are completely baffled.

"But why worship at all then?"

Of course, I used to get the same question from the inside of the congregation when I first started to serve Unitarian Universalists congregations.

"Doesn't worship mean bowing and scraping to someone? Isn't it degrading? Isn't it undignified? Why use the word worship at all?"

Well, it's not a terrible question, really. I think it's a good one. I want to explore it a bit this morning.

Okay, yes, its true. Many of the Hebrew words translated as "worship" in the Bible---segad, shakhah, do mean literally, "to bow oneself down."

But it strikes me as a very fussy European prejudice to look upon bowing with such distaste. Far more than half of the inhabited world sees bowing as a greeting of respect no more degrading than doffing a hat, or shaking a hand, or kissing a hand for that matter. People raised in the various European Protestant and Unitarian Universalist traditions may, in fact, find the upsetting part of bowing to be its physical nature, that is, it involves the body more than the mind.

Certainly the Puritans in this country were a bit hesitant about certain bodily things. Oh, I know, I've read the books, the Puritans were hardly the prudes, as the modern Hugh Hefner mythology made them out to be. But, in their attempt to remove all so-called Papism (a derogatory term for Catholicism) from their ritual, they removed some very interesting lines from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer their inherited service book. At the wedding ceremony from that book, in my 1549 first edition, the vows read "with thys ring, I thee wed: thys golde and siluer I thee geue: with my body I thee wurship: and withal my worldly Goodes I thee endowe. (Note: This is the original spelling)"

"With this ring" is all that is left in the American version of that ceremony. The sexual, affectional statement, "with my body, I thee worship" has been ripped out, as has the statement of economic commitment "with all my worldly goods I thee endow."

And so now, all that is left in most modern ceremonies is a simple promise of love; the vows of worship and generosity…flesh and money, are dismissed as unworthy topics for such a ceremony. You never want to talk about sex or finance in public. It's embarrassing, right? Some things are better left tastefully unsaid.

But as far as I am concerned, the Puritans did us a disservice by reducing the concept of marriage to something so ephemeral as "falling in love." Something it's much easier to do than stay married.

But the word "worship" in that phrase surprises many modern people. It cannot it any way be construed to mean "bow down before" as people seem to want me to believe. It is a noble word, clearly, a sacred promise to value, to respect, to honor the other…with one's own body.

And of course that's exactly what worship means in English, for the wor in worship is our word "worth" or "value." Whenever you worship, you are in the act of valuing something deeply, of singing its singular worth.The ship is the same as the ship in friendship and it's a form of the word "shape."

Thus worship is our human way of trying to shape our understanding of what is most valuable, most worthy, most honorable. It's a process not much different than taking silver out of silver ore, or sifting the wheat from the chaff. Worship insists that the theory of relativity is fine in physics, but it wreaks havoc when you apply it to human behavior. Gandhi is not Herman Goering, even though Gandhi was obnoxious sometimes, and Goering had his kind moments. Mother Theresa is not Pol Pot, even though, Mother Theresa could be controlling and Pol Pot was known to laugh. All human things are not the same. Some behaviors have greater positive value than others.

Bertrand Russell, in his famous essay "The Free Man's Worship," asserts that Nature itself is value free, and that only humans ascribe worth to things. Only people say that some things are good, and some things, evil. Unfortunately, he does not have a very high hope for human beings to suddenly become sensible about things. When criticized by other philosophers, like Brightman, for his sense of absolute cosmic relativity, and general pessimism about humanity, Lord Russell agreed that he did himself see some things as more valuable than others. But, he could only see such judgements as emotional in origin, not objective. For example, when he interviewed Vladimir Lenin, and Lenin talked with ease about having some of his enemies liquidated, that is, killed, Russell was disgusted. He thought that such a cavalier attitude toward human life was utterly terrible. I agree.

But according to his own stated philosophy, he had to confess that Lenin had his own "reasons" his own logic, for doing what he did, based on his own logical vision of how the world should be. Russell's heart is the part of him that did not approve of this logic. True, he did not feel a need to consult the commandments or God to express his disgust: It was simply human disgust.

Well, maybe Russell is right. Maybe human beings cannot, with their sheer mental might, determine what has eternal worth, and what does not, by studying the natural world of which they are a part. Maybe the universe is silent, and sings out no ultimate moral demands. Maybe the commandment, "You shall do no murder," was carved into stone by a frail aging human prophet and not God's everlasting flame out of the whirlwind.

But, you know, Russell is hardly the first person to say such things. The Hebrew scriptures said what Russell said long before. They say clearly "Do not ever say that you have seen God, for you lie when you do. No image is Ultimate, no way is Eternal, bow to nothing false and foolish, and you know what? Most of the images of God we can think of are not terribly good. Worship No Thing, not Any Thing that simply resembles your own face."

I have no problem with that.

I think sifting out the false from the true, the petty from the sublime, the devious from the honest, is itself good and valuable work, a worthy way to spend one's time.

This is clearly what worship means to me, more than its more localized meaning of a Sunday service Worship is thus a way of life, not just a time on Sunday morning. But in the worship service in our free church, agnostics can worship next to those who lift up images of the divine, because good worship always reminds the atheists that no images are final, and always reminds the agnostics that logic and knowledge alone, as Russell himself was forced to admit when cornered, is not enough. There is this thing called love, or devotion if you will, or even commitment, that figures in how we live out our lives as well.

You know. Love, like the love Grace discovered in the children's story this morning, the love for self and others, that she claimed as she danced her way through Peter Pan, flying above pettiness and prejudice through the faith her loved ones helped her find ….in herself. Or as the teacher Jesus suggested, "Why don't you decide for yourselves what is right?" (Lk. 12.57) The universe won't decide things for you. It has no values within its folds, except human values, that you…an authentic part of the universe… come up with and choose for yourself. And these values are not chosen by just shooting random darts at a target. They are not all just relative, one thing as good as the next, cheating the equal of exertion. Working together, we can figure this all out, and how we shall therefore live our lives for the better.

And thus the worship we Unitarian Universalists have come up with over the years is both emotional and rational, filled both with images and with the breaking of images. Our worship is both cautionary and celebrative, filled with stories and the unusual interpretation of stories.

We long ago figured out that there is no way to thread our way through the maze of conflicts of the kind Amazing Grace faces in the story without help from others, others at our side. Sure you can worship in the woods, by yourself, but we deem worship together to be richer, not to mention that it's easier to sift the false from the true with many hands, not just two.

Our ancestors took the Jewish form of intellectual worship, the playful study of texts, linked it with the Christian concepts of song and poetry and life-confession, and wove them into our own particular spin on things. Rational yet playful. Careful. A bit cautious for some tastes , I suppose. But always we put worship at the service of human deepening. It's never mere excitement for us, emotional release, or, for that matter, cool mathematical logic.

But worship does not just happen on Sunday Morning with the rhythmic artform of silence and song, word and story, prayer and offerings. Theodore Parker in the passage of the sermon you heard read this morning tells us that you can tell what a person worships, or values the most, by watching how they live their day to day lives away from Sunday worship. I assure you, it was an uncomfortable business when he preached that passage the first time, and it's still uncomfortable a hundred and fifty years later, because remember, the Puritans won around the issues of sex and money. Sex is still filthy for modern America, money is still filthy, and its indecent to bring either of them up for any reason, because it supposedly makes people feel guilty or uncomfortable or something. But even if it does make us squirm, I think Parker is right. Our lives are a revelation of our faith. Honorable people are worshipping all the time, not just on Sundays, but on Mondays. How I spend, how I love other people, how I run from trouble, how I divert attention, how I treat or mistreat any one else, with warnings to keep away or with compassion, with innuendo or with honesty…all of these tell me about the object of my worship. Security is it? Or praise from others on tap? Or popularity? Or the competitive edge? A person's God doesn't always look like a God. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson, a colleague of Parker's once said, "A person will worship something. Have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our lives and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming." Strong words with which I have no quarrel. Again, the Hebrews were right to suggest that our ultimate object of worship should not be any mere thing, but rather, No Thing, that which becomes what it will become, the flow of things in the dance called the Universe.

Mirabai the poet understood this. She is filled with worship, with love, for her invisible beloved, her Dark One, Krsna. She does not claim to see him, only the storm clouds rising like mountains. The object of her devotion is far away, across the fields, maybe in a different country. But she stands in the rain that soaks the fields and looks at the mountain range of mountains in the sky and bows to the power that holds up those cloudy ranges in the sky. She does not know what this power looks like, she just knows it is worthy of her wonder and adoration, her bows. Her will is nothing compared to the mindless power of the storm. She owns her own humility before the majesty of it all, her own fragility with no guarantees of love in return. Her bow is a beautiful expression of private worship, I think, one that expresses well the beauty of the experience for those who are a trifle less cautious about it. And even all that water will never quench her thirst.

Bow. That strange word again. But listen to these words from a young Unitarian Universalist teenager who was taking a religious education curriculum at his church in Ithaca, New York, a curriculum that introduced him to the worship styles of other religious groups. The class attended a Vespers service at a local Benedictine abbey. This is what he wrote in the newsletter. "In the chapel, the monks knelt and rose and bowed, their bodies bent forward from the waist. But I could not move. This is reasonable. I was brought up in a church where no one kneels or bows. Physically, I am very inhibited, so I don't move easily. And when has it ever been suggested I might kneel, even figuratively? I wanted to kneel, that's the important thing. But I could not. To kneel and to mean it would be frightening, because there is a darkness in the kneeling and a darkness in us which we cannot reason about. You have taught me the fear of form without meaning, and that is right. But having avoided forms, you have sometimes avoided the darkness, and it is from the darkness that the real questions arise."

"The real questions." And aren't those questions something, at least, which we say characterizes our religious approach?

I will close with the words of my late ministerial friend, Dan O' Neil. Dan didn't avoid cussing now and then. He drank wine with his meals, and made tender love to his wife. He lived the kind of clergy life that makes sense to me. Sensual, richly human and compassionate. He died of a ravaging cancer at age 50 just a few years ago, a loss to our whole movement. In his newsletter, Dan once wrote these beautiful words that agree with Ken Patton, who in the responsive reading earlier reminded us we do not worship "by bowing down," but which also agree with our young philosopher from Ithaca. "We don't bow down," he wrote, "but we do bow. We bow to the worth of our everyday existence, to the miraculousness of life as it is. We bow to ourselves, the universe itself performing a brief dance of awareness before merging back into the flow of creation. We bow to our companions in this cosmic dance. The act of worship is thus the act of waking up to see the ultimate worth of ourselves and of the universe of which we are a member. It is to remember who we are, and to re-member ourselves (as bodies) in performing the simple sacraments of everyday enlightenment (as one teacher puts it), chopping wood and carrying water."

To you I bow, to the darkness and light before me, to the wonder of it all.

Prayer [back to top]

'Tis a gift to still be able to learn,
even when one has learned much.
'Tis a gift to learn how to say yes and how
to say no, and to know the difference.
'Tis a gift to not see oneself above or below
anyone else on the earth.

Nevertheless, 'Tis a gift to refuse to imagine that my singular life is the template on which all other lives are cut.

'Tis a gift to recover from the wounds granted us by an already wounded world by getting out of the way of the healing that works best when we are not in the way.

Oh Dark and Beautiful Giver of Life,
forever hidden for safekeeping in metaphors
and tucked away in good, struggling lives,
remind me today and everyday that the gifts can never be ungiven, and that there is absolutely no
reason to ever be ashamed of who we are.

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