Live Anyway

One of the great privileges and challenges of ministry is that from time to time you get to, or have to, talk about things that make people uncomfortable. There are the main roles you play in the life of your congregation: pastor, preacher, teacher, priest and prophet.  In seminary, they teach you that when you are preaching about uncomfortable things, you are speaking with a prophetic voice.

This doesn’t mean some sort of super-natural prophecy, like that of the poor Cassandra of Greek Myth; doomed to know the future and cursed to have everyone ignore you and think that you are crazy. But in this story lies some of the tension of speaking from the place of the prophetic voice.

It is with that voice that I come to you this morning.

In this season of Autumn where leaves have begun to fall, and final harvests from our home gardens have been reaped, where pumpkins stand guard on front porches, the seasons of life naturally come to mind.

Soon the Earth will turn cold and nothing will grow outside. The animals that can, will hibernate, the rest struggle to find withered, dry cold grass to eat.  Some animals will migrate south for the winter to warmer climates, and some of us will put on warm coats with hats and gloves and tough it out in the kind of luxury our ancestors could scarcely imagine.

The reading that Karl shared with us a moment ago is from a children’s book about dying.  The leaf does not want to die. This however, is the fate of all who begin a life.

Death is merely one more season in a natural life.

Death comes to us in many forms. 

One of the many ways that life doesn’t end in a thirteen note scale, or a major chord is when we are not ready to die. We are not ready to die because we don’t have a sense of completion.

I’d like to share with you some words of Stan Goldberg, author of the book “Lessons for the Living”

My life is tethered to a number few people have ever heard of—a Gleason score of 7. It’s a measure of prostate cancer severity that ranges from a forgettable number 1 to a terminal 9. My lucky 7 pleased me on the cusp of living and dying. Not a particularly comfortable neighborhood to take up residence, but one in which I’m forced to life. During the operation to remove the prostate, my surgeon found that the cancer spread beyond the prostate gland and also into one of the lymph nodes. Three weeks after the operation we jointly decided what to do about it.

“You have two choices,” he said.

“To live or die?” I responded with gallows humor. I only became alarmed when he didn’t smile.

“The first is waiting until the PSA number rises A rising PSA indicates the cancer cells are growing. When it happens we’ll start female hormone therapy. The hormones will reduce your level of testosterone, which feeds the cancer cells.”

“And the second?” I asked.

“To start immediately.”

“Which has the best chance of killing the cancer?”

He replied “Neither.”

Neither? Although he kept talking, it was as if he was speaking an unintelligible foreign language.  Eventually, I heard English again.[1]

Though his words are uniquely his own, the experience of Mr. Goldberg is fairly universal. In my own work as a hospital chaplain, I have been witness to experiences like Mr. Goldberg. In my own work as a parish minister, I have had people for whom I care deeply come to me with a story very much like this.

The average life expectancy for a male in the United States is 76.2 years. For women that expectancy is 81.1 years.[2] There are of course some variations to all of this, but to get into all of that will not serve this morning’s purpose.

First, those numbers are a lot smaller than I thought they’d be, and secondly, I think most of us think of ourselves as above average in general, and probably hope that we’ll be well above average in this one aspect.

I also think that like when a car promises us 35 miles to the gallon, we think “oh, that’s for most people, I’m sure I’ll do better than that.”

But like the gas mileage, in our own lives, we are not in complete and solo control over all the variables involved.

Today there are 53,364 Americans who’ve reached the age of 100, out of a population of 361 million people.[3] The odds are not impossible that you could also reach 100, but you have less than a 0.02% chance of it.

At some point, most of us will have to recognize that we have encountered a diminished capacity in our functioning as a person. This may come in the form of disease or even just plain ol’ old age.

Even though I am not an old man in any sense of the words, unless you’re a ten year old, I have already seen some of this change in myself. When I first heard the words of Bonnie Raitt’s song “Nick of Time”

I see my folks are getting on

And I watch their bodies change

I know they see the same in me

And it makes us both feel strange

No matter how you tell yourself

It's what we all go through

Those lines are pretty hard to take

When they're staring back at you

Scared you'll run out of time.[4]

The words didn’t have too much of a meaning to me. They were nice and poetic, but I was twenty-one then, and my parents bodies hadn’t started to change, let alone my own. Twenty-five years have passed since I first heard this song, and I can tell you that my body has changed, and so have those of my parents.

I’m now older than my Dad was when this song came out.

Again, I say, I’m not old. I have no illusions about that. But I can tell you that about 5 years ago I realized that I had stopped perching on chairs, and really began to sit in them. And I always used to hear this phrase “the blossom of youth,” and I never saw it around me, until I lost it, and then finally I understood what the phrase meant.

It’s in the spirit of recognizing the changing phases of life that causes me to explore this topic of Hospice, and it’s place in our lives.

In the hospital, when a doctor would recommend hospice care to the family of a patient, the family universally became very worried. Hospice, it would seem from the reaction of people means death, and not just death, but a death that will come quickly.

Hospice care does not equal death. In fact hospice care in fact focuses on care, choices comfort and dignity.

Death comes to us all, sometimes suddenly, without warning. Sometimes it comes by our own hand. Sometimes it is a gentle winding down.

The quote from Mr. Goldberg I used earlier is not about immediate death, though at first it is all he can hear, and who could blame him?

One’s mortality is always theoretical, something that will probably happen at some far off date.  And then something like a visit to the doctor’s office seems to change all that.

Of course, it’s not really changed. It isn’t as though Mr. Goldberg, or any of us, assumed that we would never die.

It’s just that a visit like the one that Mr. Goldberg had with his doctor brings the fact of his own mortality into a sharper focus.

One response that Stan Goldberg had to learning of his own, possibly greatly shortened lifespan, is that he became a hospice volunteer at a the Zen Project’s Guest House, George Mark’s Children’s House and three other Bay Area hospice care facilities.

Part of his response to his own suffering was to attend to those who were in even graver danger than he was. His work changed and deepened his life.

Part of why he began to volunteer in hospice work was to diminish his own fear of the unknown. It was not always a smooth and easy path, he reports, but he has spent over a decade as a hospice volunteer to date.

I hope that our own discussion, abbreviated as it may be this morning, will serve to open up this topic so that we, too, can ease our fear of the unknown.

This is something that is somewhat unknown to me, too.  Though I worked alongside nurses trained in hospice care, though my own beloved worked as a hospice chaplain, I have not yet needed it myself.

I do, however, have one personal experience with hospice care.

When my elderly friend Wallace Palmer Rusterholtz was dying, we had hospice care. I saw we, because until we reached a certain point, Wallace had a health care worker, and I was the relief person for that worker. So I spent sometimes 4 or 5 nights a week with Wallace to relieve the home health care worker.  Sometimes I spent entire weekends with Wallace.

I loved Wallace, but I was utterly untrained in caring for the very elderly. I did what I knew how to do, like cooking and cleaning, and reading and entertaining him. I did his shopping, helped him manage his books, etc. There were things that I learned along the way that were part of caring for him that I will not tell you about because to do so would, I feel, violate his dignity.

And then at some point, I don’t remember know when, we turned a corner and we engaged in hospice care. We got a case worker, a team of nurses and a lot of support.

Engaging with a hospice system allowed me to care for my adopted grandfather and mentor. I no longer had to be concerned about a long list of things, I was freer to focus on our relationship and our connection.

I had the comfort of knowing that under proper Medical Care that as Wallace was declining, he never felt a moment of discomfort.

Wallace chose hospice care, at the recommendation I believe of our minister, and he, and I, were grateful.

Rev. Denis will tell you that most people are only in hospice care for 3 hours or less, and as a former hospice chaplain, this drives him crazy. He worries that those who wait until the last minute miss so many benefits of hospice care…care that is focused on comfort and dignity.

What hospice did for Wallace and me was it allowed us the space and time to work toward a death that was not dissonant, but rather resolved.

Wallace chose. He could’ve easily chosen not to, as well.

He had a choice.

As many of us do, about a great many things.

I—for one—hope that when choices come upon you, that you choose the most life-affirming option.

I also hope that I, too will make those life affirming choices more often then not.

When you feel boxed into a corner, into a place of unpleasantness, I hope that you will live anyway; to bravely face what must be faced and make choices that are consistent with your highest values.

Do this at age 20 or age 98.

And at every age in between.

In spite of the hardships of life, the knocking about, the tripping and falling, the disappointments, among all those things… live anyway.

Bless you on this, our shared journey.

---

[1] Goldberg, Stan. Lessons for the Living. Trumpeter, Boston & London, 2009.

[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005148.html

[3] http://www.census.gov/popclock/

[4] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bonnieraitt/nickoftime.html

Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon

This sermon is in four parts. The Eyewitness Accounts section was shared by 4 people in the congregation.

Eyewitness Accounts 

In May 1850, a 20-year-old Potawatomi tribal leader named Simon Pokagon was camping at the headwaters of Michigan's Manistee River during trapping season when a far-off gurgling sound startled him. It seemed as if "an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me," he later wrote. "As I listened more intently, I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and yet the morning was clear, calm, and beautiful." The mysterious sound came "nearer and nearer," until Pokagon deduced its source: "While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving toward me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season."

These were passenger pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius, at the time the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world. Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would "pour its living mass" hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. "I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America," he wrote, "yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven."

Pokagon recorded these memories in 1895, more than four decades after his Manistee River observation. By then he was in the final years of his life. Passenger pigeons, too, were in their final years.[1]

The passenger pigeon…was once the most common bird in the United States, numbering in the billions. Passenger pigeons lived in enormous colonies, with sometimes up to 100 nests in a single tree. Migrating flocks stretched a mile wide, turning the skies black. Bird painter John James Audubon, who watched them pass on his way to Louisville in 1813, described “the continued buzz of wings,” and said “the air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse…” When he reached his destination, 55 miles away, the birds were still passing overhead, and “continued to do so for three days in succession.” The passenger pigeon, a wild bird, is not to be confused with the carrier pigeon, a domesticated bird trained to carry messages.

With such abundance, it seemed unimaginable that the passenger pigeon could ever become extinct. But due to overhunting, habitat loss, and possibly infectious diseases that spread through the colonies, they became increasingly rare by the late nineteenth century. The last confirmed sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was in 1900. After that, only a few survived in captivity. “Martha,” who lived her whole 29-year life in the Cincinnati Zoo, was the last.[2]

“The number of pigeons [at Clarendon] was immense . . . For an hundred acres together, the ground was covered with their dung, to the dept of two inches. Their noise in the evening was extremely troublesome, and so great that the traveler could not get any sleep, where their nests were thick. About two hours after sunrise, they rose in such numbers as to darken the air.” William Samuel, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 1794.[3]

From at least 1848 to 1853, a nesting site occupied twenty acres of virgin maple and yellow birch in the towns of Stowe and Hyde Park in the northern part of the [Vermont]…. Trees often held in excess of twenty-five nests. Forbush goes on with the story provided him by eye-witness Clayton Stone: “Most of the time during the nesting season large flocks of these birds could be seen coming and going in all direction to and from the nests. The people from this and neighboring towns went to the place with their teams to take up the squabs that had fallen to the ground; they took them away by cartloads. The squabs were distributed free, to be used as food by all their friends and neighbors. . . In 1848 Mr. Stone . . . sprung a net over 528 birds at one cast. Pigeons were abundant in that locality until the fall of 1865, when a man could shoot in half a day all that he could use.”[4]

The Story of Martha, the last of her kind.

From the Encyclopedia Smithsonian:

Early explorers and settlers frequently mentioned passenger pigeons in their writings. Samuel de Champlain in 1605 reported "countless numbers," Gabriel Sagard-Theodat wrote of "infinite multitudes," and Cotton Mather described a flight as being about a mile in width and taking several hours to pass overhead. Yet by the early 1900s no wild passenger pigeons could be found. One of the last authenticated records of the capture of a wild bird was at Sargents, Pike County. Ohio, on 24 March 1900. Only a few birds still survived in captivity at this time. Concerted searches were made and rewards offered for the capture of wild passenger pigeons. From 1909 to 1912, the American Ornithologists' Union offered $1,500 to anyone finding a nest or nesting colony of passenger pigeons, but these efforts were futile. Never again would man witness the magnificent spring and fall migratory flights of this swift and graceful bird. Attempts to save the species by breeding the surviving captive birds were not successful. The passenger pigeon was a colonial and gregarious bird and needed large numbers for optimum breeding conditions. It was not possible to reestablish the species with a few captive birds. The small captive flocks weakened and died. The last known individual of the passenger pigeon species was "Martha" (named after Martha Washington). She died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, and was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where her body was once mounted in a display case with this notation:

MARTHA

Last of her species, died at 1 p.m.,

1 September 1914, age 29, in the

Cincinnati Zoological Garden.

EXTINCT[5]

What the Smithsonian does not mention is that Martha was born in captivity in Hyde Park, a neighborhood of Chicago, in 1885, and was raised by a professor at the University of Chicago. She lived with a small group of other passenger pigeons, and this professor donated Martha and two male companions to the Cincinnati Zoo.

Martha never lived in the wild, she never got the chance to fly free through the air as so many of her ancestors did. Because by the time Martha was hatched from her egg, people knew that her species was in serious trouble.

As you could hear from the eyewitness accounts that Linda and I shared with you, passenger pigeons had once been so many that their flocks could be over a mile wide, and take hours and hours to pass over a person.

But they had been so over-hunted as a cheap source of food, and people moving west, creating farms, like right here in the Greater Cleveland Area, gradually took away the natural habitat of Martha’s ancestors.

And so their numbers dwindled, until at the end there was only two males and one female passenger pigeon left on the planet.

Martha was sick and never laid even a single egg that became a bird.

There are theories about this, one of them being that passenger pigeons needed to live in HUGE groups together in order to produce eggs that hatched into new birds.

And of course, Martha didn’t have that.

But what Martha has is a legacy. With the passing of the passenger pigeon into extinction, people finally began to take notice that some species were no longer around, because they had been over-hunted, or their habitat destroyed by people who were trying to make their own way in the world, by doing things like farming and feeding their families, but without paying attention to how they were affecting the other species around them.

This is partly why our own seventh principle is important. Through our seventh principle, we know that we are connected to all life on our planet.

Being Alone      

The part of Martha’s story I didn’t tell you while our kids where here is that Martha spent the last 6 years of her life alone, the last of her kind.

She was transferred to the Cincinnati Zoo from Chicago with two male birds, who died before she did.  She also spent the last of her life in the zoo, having children occasionally throw sand at her in her cage, trying to get her to move around, or sing. 

This last bit of information was, to me, surprisingly upsetting.

Science Fiction and Dystopian British novels are full of stories of people who are the last of their kind. Sometimes they are the last human on the planet, or in a ship. Sometimes, they are seemingly the only ones who hide from the Monitors of Big Brother as often as they can, because they don’t fit neatly into that Orwelllian order. Sometimes, as in Huxley’s famous novel, they are the Alpha male who is thought to be defective because he’s not tall enough, the Beta woman who is thought odd by her friends, because she longs for monogamy in a society where everyone’s body belongs to everyone else, or the last “Savage” who hangs himself because he cannot function in this Brave New World.

There are many times when I, and perhaps you, too, felt like the last, or only of your kind. It is a profoundly lonely feeling.

Perhaps part of the reason I find the story of Martha’s final years so affecting, is that I am anthropomorphizing her. That having felt alone in the world, I can easily sympathize with her, being even more alone in the world than I have ever been, or will hopefully ever be, and having sand thrown at me.

Meditation

Please join me in a spirit of prayer and reflection:

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. These are the words of Paul Tillich, 20^th century theologian.

Loneliness can be so very difficult to bear. It can feel like an impenetrable bubble around us. A film which prevents those around us from seeing who we truly are, and if they cannot see who we truly are, there can be no true love.

There is not one among us who has not felt the sting of the distance between ourselves and those around us.

De-extinction?

When the movie Jurassic Park was released in 1993, just 21 years ago, the idea of bring a species back to life was only science fiction. We could enjoy the thought of dinosaurs hunting us, because it was so far from a possibility that the idea was actually non-threatening.

Well, we’re still not likely to see dinosaurs roaming the earth again, but there has been much talk about “de-extinctioning” species.

Among those that travel in the kind of circles where de-extinction is an important pursuit, three animals are high on their list of potentials.  The Wooly Mammoth, the New Zealand Moa and the Passenger Pigeon.

The Long Now Project, which is dedicated to thinking in terms of 10s of thousand of years, in fact, they date all their work by using five year digits, so that today would be October 5, 02014, is a big backer of re-introducing species.

While it might seem that de-extincting a species might be a way for us, as a species, to turn back the clock and right the wrongs we have visited on this planet, ethicists and scientists do not agree about whether or not this is a good idea.

The Wooly Mammoth, last decade's de-extinct cause celeb, if we were to bring that back because humans hunted them into extinction 10,000 years ago, where would they live?

The mammoth poses many questions like this. Has our environment changed so much in 10,000 years that the mammoth would be brought back only to die out again, because that species, while not “alien” in the sense of extra terrestrial, would certainly be “alien” to our time period.

And what would we do with herds of mammoths roaming the Great Plains?

Would we revive them, only to keep them in zoos?

Now, the passenger pigeon, though was alive a mere 100 years ago. Surely, it’s a better candidate for a return. In Science magazine from April 2013, Henry Greely and Jacob Sherkow write about potential complications of reviving species.

Scientists are currently working on three different approaches to restore lost plants and animals. In cloning, scientists use genetic material from the extinct species to create an exact modern copy. Selective breeding tries to give a closely-related modern species the characteristics of its extinct relative. With genetic engineering, the DNA of a modern species is edited until it closely matches the extinct species.

 All of these techniques would bring back only the physical animal or plant.

"If we bring the passenger pigeon back, there's no reason to believe it will act the same way as it did in 1850," said co-author Jacob Sherkow, a fellow at the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences. "Many traits are culturally learned. Migration patterns change when not taught from generation to generation."[6]

What these scientists suggest is that to physically bring back a species in no way represents a full return of that species.

There is no “do-over” button.

In an article for the Harvard Science Review, Cailtin Andrews writes

Scientists estimate that 99% of the roughly 4 billion species to ever live on Earth have gone extinct (1). But, although we often hear extinction being associated with human action, most of these events have been a natural part of Earth’s evolutionary history. Since the dawn of life, extinction has represented the constant ebb and flow as species have fought and dominated or struggled and fizzled out. At five points in time, this process has been drastically accelerated by geological disasters or other events, leading to periods of “mass extinction” in which over 75% of Earth’s biodiversity has been lost. As deforestation, poaching, and climate change impact nearly every ecosystem, there is strong evidence to suggest that we are now in another of those periods—a sixth mass extinction (1). Instead of a more natural pace of one to five species per year, we are losing dozens of species every day. Until recently, these losses were assumed to be permanent (2). But, what if we could somehow reverse the clocks and bring these animals back to life? Would we want to do it? Should we do it? And what would our decision mean for our planet?[7]

Obviously, this is a tremendously complex series of ethical questions, and not to be engaged in lightly. For every expert who thinks that we should bring back these, and more species, there’s someone else talking about the problems that the planet would face should this occur. Would restored species restore natural ecosystems, or due with engagement with an environment they literally have had no chance to adapt to, would they be candidates for immediate re-extinction?  Would they carry diseases that humans have no defense against?

Would they just become side-show attractions, a way for zoos to have “exclusives” and draw crowds?

And since I’m asking so many questions this morning, is it responsible to expend millions or billions of dollars on a series of questions like this, when there are people who are mal-nourished and fighting poverty just a mile or two away from where we sit today?

I enjoy the mind exercise of “what if?” as much as the next person, maybe even a little bit more. Martha’s death 100 years ago brought this question of de-extinction to us this morning. And ever since Linda Coulter brought up the idea during a Worship Team meeting, I have enjoyed rolling around these ideas and questions in my mind.

Given a choice between allocating resources to explore reviving a way of life in the past, or investing those resources in today and then in tomorrow’s potential, which do you chose?

May the wisdom of Athena and Solomon be granted us as we work to make our world a more fair, just and compassionate home.

Amen.

---

[1] http://www.audubonmagazine.org/articles/birds/why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct

[2] http://www.mnh.si.edu/onehundredyears/featured_objects/martha2.html

[3] http://www.passengerpigeon.org/states/Vermont.html

[4] ibid

[5] http://www.si.edu/encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm

[6] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/greely-species-deextinction-040413.html

[7] http://harvardsciencereview.com/2014/01/22/extinct-today-alive-tomorrow-the-science-and-ethics-of-de-extinction/

Faith Possibilities

An excerpt from “The Choesn Ones,” from The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. Griffels, David. 2014.

[In 1982] the last-ever passenger tire was built in Akron by a man named Richard Mayo, who paused afterward to look into a newspaper camera, a sturdy man in a V-neck T-shirt, thirty years on the job, his gloved fist perched on his hip, the other against his forehead, hands unsure what to do with themselves. The furrowed brow, the narrowed eyes, the strain at the corners — this was a look shared by men across a vast and hard-to-harness region, one defined ultimately and elliptically by water, by the Great Lakes and the Wabash and Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, routes of entry and departure to and from cities where the certainty of old factories was sagging and imploding.

Until then, for as long as anyone in my city could remember, Akron had been known as “the rubber capital of the world.” Like most manufacturing cities in the industrial Midwest, this was plenty enough identity, and the reputation carried far enough and wide enough for the people here not ever to feel obscure or irrelevant, and this reputation rested on a civic infrastructure that provided solidity and security. Akron was the birthplace and the center of the world’s tire industry, the most singular and therefore the most overtly significant supplier to Detroit’s auto industry. Which, yes, represents a stature something akin to being the Ralph Malph of the American industrial belt, and also a civic identity that requires being inordinately passionate about radial tires. (In defense: the profoundly intertwined, ultimately tragic histories — personal and corporate — of the Ford and Firestone families would have sent Shakespeare positively apeshit.) Anyhow, what more did we need to know? All the major American tire company world headquarters were here. Much of the production. Virtually all the high-tech research and development. The headquarters of the international rubber workers’ union. 

Tire-building was the city’s defining profession. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands had made a good living at it, generation after generation. And then, one afternoon in August 1982, suddenly and completely that was gone. 

What Richard Mayo…Akron…the Rust Belt from Pittsburg to Detroit experienced in the early 1980’s was an utter loss of security. Not only was Mr. Mayo out of a job, but so were all his friends that he’d worked with, some for 30 years. His skill set matched their own, and there were no more jobs in his trade in his hometown.

We have all felt lost at times in our lives.

Individually, and as a nation, we have felt lost at times in the past. Perhaps right now, this is how you’re feeling.

I would love to be able to stand up here and tell you “Just do these five things, and everything will be better/make more sense and like a sitcom, in just 27 minutes we’ll all be hugging and laughing at the lessons we just learned.”

I could tell you that, but I promised that I would never lie in the pulpit.

I mean, trust me, if I knew what those 5 things were, I would share them.  My favorite aunt and I used to ask each other were the operator’s manual for our lives was. “Have you seen my manual?” she’d ask me, and I her.


I’m afraid that moving away from that feeling of being lost is going to take some effort, and the path itself may be less than direct.


So what can you do when you feel lost?  You can have faith.

Now, aren’t you glad you came to church today?  We’re all done, let’s go have coffee!



There are different kinds of faith, of course.

There’s blind faith, which is supposed to be a type of faith that never questions. Often we like to think that we’re above that kind of thing here, after all, we’re Unitarian Universalists, but we too practice blind faith.

That chair you’re sitting in right now, did you wonder, before sitting in it, if it would hold you? Were you concerned that it’s structural integrity might be compromised?  Probably not, you just sat down in it, believing without knowing, that all would be well.


One of the great gifts of this congregation is our Director of Lifespan Development, Rina Shere. Today is Rina’s one Sunday off a month, during the week she and I were talking about this topic and navigating it. During our discussion, she said something wonderful, which I’m going to share with you in a moment.

When I was younger I had a friend named José, and he was one of the few other Latinos in my high school. Toward our senior year he and I had a couple of classes together and began to hang out quite a bit. In the fall of the next year José started school at the University of Michigan, and his new roommate was a born-again Christian.

Upon their arrival for classes in their freshman year, this roommate began to really work hard on bringing José to Jesus, and even back then, this sort of freaked me out. But since José and I were friends, I tried to get along with this guy. He tried to tell me about Jesus, too, and I told him that I frankly wasn’t interested in his Jesus, but I was glad it worked for him.

José was less successful at resisting this guy’s charisma, of which he had plenty I might add. I was sure he’d end up as some kind of televangelist with a very own sex scandal of his own some day.

So José and I began to drift apart after a while, because like many new converts, his new faith became the center of José’s life, and it became increasingly important to José that I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior.


Aside from the sadness of losing my friend to his new faith, there was one burning sadness within me about the whole thing.

It was kind of a jealousy, really, but it wasn’t an angry jealousy, more of a sadness.

The more José believed in his Jesus, the more José was convinced that Jesus was with him, his constant companion through thick and thin, that José was never truly alone to face the world.



I have to admit that there are times when I feel alone. When I feel like I could really use a boost of energy to deal with some thing, or event, or person. When I wish that I had some extra or additional source of strength that I could tap in to for a moment when facing seriously unhappy or upsetting events.

I wonder if you also have these moments….


José has Jesus for this, and I don’t.

I don’t because I don’t believe in the same kind of God that José does. My faith is not the same kind of faith.

On Sunday mornings, in most every church in our nation, the pastor tells people about the friend they have in Jesus. I can’t tell you that.


What I can do, for today, is quote Rina Shere.  When Rina and I were talking about this topic, she said to me that she often relies on what she calls “The Reservoir of Human Caring.”

She and I agree that we humans have each other to turn to, to rely on, to inspire us to be the best person we can be, and to bolster us up in times of need.  And it is for us, not to turn to a theology that we would LIKE to believe, but rather for us to turn to a theology that resonates with both our hearts and our minds.

For you, that theology might well and honestly be, a theology of The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and if that is so, that is fine. But yours might also be a theology of “I believe in what I can experience with my five senses,” or “the scientific method of proof.”

Here in this church we strive to make meaning in our lives, and in this pursuit, we look to many sources of inspiration.

This morning is the Autumn Equinox, the place of balance between Summer and Winter. Today there will be as much sunlight as there is moonlight. It’s a time of turning.

What new leaf have you been waiting to turn over?

Today is a terrific day to turn that leaf over.

Wednesday begins Rosh Hashanah for our Jewish friends. It is the beginning of a new year. There is forgiveness sought and offered, and there is sometimes a tradition of casting stones into water to symbolize the letting go of things from the past.


This morning I shared with you the story of the last tire ever made in Akron, Ohio. It was thirty-two years ago. Mr. Mayo worked thirty years making tires, so he was probably approaching fifty years of age when he pulled the last tire off the line, looked at his empty hands and wondered just what the Hell he was going to do.

Perhaps you’ve had a moment or two in your own life when you looked around you and wondered what you were going to do, too. Where you wondered how you’d get through.


There are times when you have to do something extraordinarily difficult for many Unitarian Universalists. You will need to go to the Reservoir of Human Caring and ask for a little sustenance.

I’m not sure why this is so hard for us, as a people. I have some theories, though.

One of them is that we are a proud group of individualists. We love to offer help! For us, helping others makes us feel good, makes us feel like we’re making the world a better place.

But to need the help, that makes us uncomfortable.


One of the great advantages of being a minister and getting the great privilege of writing and offering sermons to a congregation is that while you’re all looking at me, I’m looking at all of you. And the great thing is that I get to see you almost each week.

I see you when you come in all happy and you sit up very straight and there’s an air of happiness swirling around you.

I see you when you walk in, somewhat slowly, shoulders bent forward under the weight of some problem you have.

I see when I preach something to you and it strikes a chord with your spirit or your mind.

I get to see you.

And deeper we get to know each other, I’ll be able to see you even more clearly.

But I know that in this church, like the one I last served in California, and the ones I served before, I know that there are people who are in need of help.

That, because of who we are, rugged individualists who like to help more than be helped, I know that we shy away from asking for the help that we need that might make our lives easier.


On this day of balance between the warmth and the cold, between there being more light than dark and soon more dark than light, I’m asking you to turn over a new leaf.

Come to the Reservoir of Human Caring. Come not just to deposit caring into it, but come also to rest near it, and to have someone offer you kindness.

This community cannot solve all problems, or even all your problems, but it is filled with caring people who, like you, get a deep sense of well-being by helping others.

So, sometimes you help others, and sometimes you ask for a little help.

This, not a unified theology, a unified belief system that we all, to varying degrees believe in, this coming together in mutual aid, this is our covenant.

This is why we come here.

We come here because we are and are striving to be a sanctuary for all who enter, to reflect the diversity of the local community, and to work toward a more just and sustainable society.  We see ourselves as a joy-filled gathering of people banding together to make the world better.


But we are also here for when life is difficult.


We are a people who are grieving, a people who are dealing with serious illnesses, a gathering of people who are trying our best to find our place in this world.

We have struggles around jobs, either the one we have, the one we lost, or the one we’re hoping to find. We struggle with depression, anxiety and for some of us, downright poverty.


But here we also have each other.

I like to imagine that Richard Mayo, our hero from the tire story, went home that night, after the photographers left, after the lights in the factory were turned out for the last time, I like to imagine that Richard went home to his wife, and in the privacy of his own home, she held him to her, and said “We’ll figure it out.”


In times of trouble, we have our common humanity.

Come into this circle of caring. Offer the help that you can, but also ask for help when it is most needed.

We may not have a supernatural force to ask for help, to turn to in times of despair, but we have each other, our community, our covenant.

May we all be so wise and brave as to ask for help when it is most needed.


© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
September 21, 2014

Deconstructing Faith

Our opening hymn this morning might seem/feel a little old fashioned, O God Our Help in Ages Past, and it was chosen deliberately.

Its words, concluding in verse 5: O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, be thou our guard while troubles last, and our eternal home.

This is the way that most western people engaged with their concept of God, until the 20th century, and it could easily be said that most people who practice religions that come from the Middle East still do.

The three largest religions in the Western World are the Abrahamic Trio of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The practitioners of these three faiths trace their origins to the same man, the father of their peoples, Abraham.

In the Torah, in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 22, God tells Abraham to take is his son Isaac up to the mountain and sacrifice Isaac, testing Abrahams obedience to Yahweh.  Abraham does as he is told; he builds the altar, gathers the wood, ties up his son Isaac, and as Abraham is just about to put his knife to his own child, God tells him to stop. God then delivers a ram to be sacrificed, and because Abraham is so obedient, God tells him that his children will populate the nations of the world.

This has actually come to pass. Jews, Christians and Muslims live in every nation around the globe.


In more orthodox faiths, people may turn to God for help, as in ages past, so too, today. People who have this kind of relationship with their God invoke the help of God, or Jesus, since the either party is generally felt to be a regular, daily presence in their lives.

I hope that people who feel this way will always be comfortable in my presence, that I never say anything to offend their sense of their own faith—just because my own faith is radically different from theirs.


I was once in an interfaith clergy lunch, and around the table were clergy of many flavors. There was a Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, an Orthodox Priest, a Lutheran Pastor, an Episcopalian Priest, a Congregationalist minister, and several non-Abrahamic ministers…Buddhists, Sikhs, etc.

I looked around the table, and most of the clergy I knew at least by name, having worked in interfaith things with them over the past couple of years, and I chuckled.  When Kathleen, the Episcopal Priest ask me why I was laughing, I said:

Well, as I look around this table I see the journey of my religion. First we were Jews, then we left Judaism. Then after the reformation, along with the Lutherans and Episcopalians, we left the Catholic Church, in the 16th century. Then the Calvinists, represented by our Congregationalist friend, left the Church of England, and then the people in my faith formally left the Congregationalists just about 250 hundred years ago.

Each time we had a theological disagreement, we just packed our bags and started a new church, until that church got too stuck in its ways, then once again, we packed our bags and moved on. I’m just wondering when that will happen to the Unitarian Universalists, and what the new group would be called, and if I would be leaving with them.

Kathleen just shook her head and smiled at me.


Our faith is a liberal faith. This does not mean that we are universally political, but rather that we are a people who are gathered, and part of our religious task and duty is to be self-reflexive, to ask ourselves “What do I believe, and how does it serve me and my life?”

We are not the only liberal faith, by the way, the United Church of Christ is our nearest cousin, as one example, and they, too, spend a good amount of time thinking about their faith.

So while there was a time, not so very long ago, that a hymn like the one we just sang, was included in Singing the Living Tradition, published in June of 1993.

The theology of a God to whom we can turn for protection may seem very old fashioned to many of us, but it’s not too far back in our past.

I have here with me two older hymn books.  The Red One and the Blue One. If you want to engage in some real church nerdery, you should read some of the lyrics in these older hymnals, and see just how far we have, and haven’t come, from a more orthodox understanding of a God to whom we can turn in times of trouble. You can actually trace the theological development of Unitarian Universalism in the lyrics of these books.

From our Teal hymnal, the supplement, you can see where we’ve moved since 1993.


I’ve been talking with you for a few minutes about an old, or older understanding of God and faith with an eye on the global.

But now I’d like to talk with you about the specific, the individual.

If you think about God, the concept, the deity, think about the image of God that comes to your mind.

How old were you when you encountered this image of God that you’re carrying with you?

In my travels, often I have found that if people are arguing with God, it’s this very God that you’re imagining right now.

As adults, they are struggling with the concrete idea of God that there were taught as children, when their adult self can only be satisfied with a more nuanced understanding. This is part of human development. As children first we think of all four legged animals as “Dog.” We think of all adults as being parents, because that’s our model.  As we grow, though, we come to understand that all four legged animals are not dogs and people live a variety of lives, not all of them including children.


Part of what allowed me to become a minister of this faith is that I’m not only allowed to wrestle with this image of God, I’m encouraged to challenge it. To look for nuance, to try to figure out what part of that narrative, or any others, sits well with my mind and my spirit.


Here we are encouraged to deconstruct God and faith, to see what does and doesn’t speak to our soul and intellect.

Stated in a clumsy and over simplified way, Jacques Derrida encourages us to invite a little chaos into the order of our universe. One of his challenges to us is to consider the idea that there is no Ground Zero for common experience.

By this, he means that no one person has the exact same experience as any other.  On the surface one can easily agree, but the problem appears when you then try to craft a collective narrative.


Going back to Genesis for a moment, the story about Abraham, Isaac, the ram and God; each of these beings has their own version of the events that took place, how they felt and what the ramifications of that moment brought into their own life.

Derrida says that these differences are so profound that a common narrative can’t be created.

But we are a species who’s very development has relied on narrative story.


Let’s step back a little bit from Derrida and reconsider faith.

Certainly few, if any people, in this room consider the text of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim texts to be the absolute, true word of God.

In a sense, we are already sort of practiced at considering and rejecting the most common of narratives about religion.

After all, we are here.

Sitting together, atheist, Christian, agnostic, pagan and more.


What would it be like if you could completely let go of the collective narrative of what God and Faith mean, and re-discover what they mean to you?


What if you could divorce the idea of Faith from big-box churches, from churches who rhythmically chant anti-gay slogans, or who wish to keep “women in their place”?



Can you imagine a deeply lived faith that frees you? That encourages you to live boldly in concert with your highest ideals?

Follow Jacques Derrida’s thinking and release yourself from the anchor of the common, the falsely collective narrative and into your own fully realized version of reality.


For centuries faith was inspired by, lived and enforced by fear.  Fear of the night, fear of the stranger, fear of an angry God, fear of Hell.


We do not need to drag these fears along with us any longer.

As John Caputo said in the interview that Amy read earlier,

“I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth.

There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god-under-denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?... If you cease to “believe” in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position, for which you will require new propositions.

Imagine a debate in which a theist and an atheist actually convince each other. Then they trade positions and their lives go on.

But if you lose “faith,” in the sense this word is used in deconstruction, everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on.”

As religious people, a non-creedal people who require no allegiance to a singular doctrine, we have the freedom and the duty to cease believing that which we do not or cannot find to be true.

We can arrive, with intellectual honesty and spiritual purity, at places like atheism, or agnosticism, or panentheism, or Christianity, or Buddhism or any combination of these and more. What matters more than where you land, is that you jump into the sometimes disquieting process of examination.

That you let go of the anchor we have always known, the default, the “give me that old time religion,” theology that no longer carries a deep meaning for us.

It is also important, I might add, that we do not engage in this practice once, say when were in college, and then sit for the next 50 years, secure in the knowledge that we have figured it all out.

At 46 I know that I have not figured it all out, and therefor I can say with some certainty that when I was at university, I didn’t have it all figured out, either.

It’s true, we get busy with life. With demanding jobs, partners, children, keeping up our homes and our laundry. The mind reels sometimes at all that must be done.


Let me add one more, never ending task to your list.

Examine your faith.

Do not be afraid to explode it out, and look at all the parts. To examine it’s nooks and it’s crannies to find both gems there and things to discard.


I will admit that some of post-modernism is to me a little bit scary and a little bit annoying.  I was happy being a modern person. I didn’t have any desire to go post anything.

I like the security of having a common narrative. And even though I don’t enjoy having to strike out on my own, understanding that my experience is utterly different from everyone else’s…

truth be told it feels a little lonely sometimes…

I am up here encouraging you to do the same.

In your own way, of course, guided by your own fence posts and markers.


Our goal is to find that which is the truest to us. To arrive at an understanding that was reached in a process steeped in integrity.

To let go of the old, the tried the true, and try them again.

Some may fit, some may not. Undoubtedly, you can be surprised by what you discover about yourself and the world around you.


If our goal is to live deeply and authentically in our truth, then we must invest some time into finding out what is true…for us.



When we have invested time and energy in this pursuit, we will find people around us who’s own truth with intersect with our own.

Perhaps, likely, it won’t be a point for point match with our journey, but we will cross paths now and again, and when we do, it affords us to look at each other with admiration and acknowledge the work we’ve both done, and celebrate our commonalities.

Let go of that image of God you’ve been carrying with you since you were six. Cease letting that image have power over you, either in your obedience or resistance to that image.

Recently, I came across this poster.  I took this photo with my phone, so please accept my apologies about the image’s quality.

The image is of 5 boys, about aged 11 or 12.  Each of them is wearing a football outfit, complete with pads and helmets.

Also in the picture is a violin case, and one of the boys has taken the violin from its case and is playing it for the other boys.

The caption reads “Celebrate the Whole Boy.”

What this image demonstrates is literally a game changer.


This photo is clearly playing on stereotypes of masculinity. But instead of asking a question like “Is there a conflict between what a young man is supposed to be and what this young man appears to be?” the photo evokes questions like “Why is there a conflict between the two?”

“Why must gender stereotypes rule our lives?”

“Why is making beauty wrong or unmasculine?”

If we change the questions, we get whole new meanings from our lives.

Take your religious journey, your faith—ask new questions of it.

May wondrous discoveries of new answers be yours.


© Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to:
The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland
September 14, 2014

Focus On Joy

Reading from the Global Scripture:

Three days after I got the keys to the church, I started to move into my office. I brought books that I’d had in my office as an intern, and they look a little…well…inadequate to the task. Sort of the way I’m feeling right now.

I park in the spot in the parking lot that says “Reserved for Minister.”
Oh My God, this is real. I mean like Real. REALLY REAL.
This isn’t seminary anymore. Ministry isn’t some far off, theoretical thing that happens in East Overshoe, with a congregant called Mabel who is a busy body, and also the glue that holds a church together.
This isn’t my two years of field education, and it’s not my one year internship.

It’s quiet now, on Sunday afternoon. I can hear the occasional car drive by on the country highway that runs along the front of the church, and that’s about all. It’s very peaceful here, and I appreciate it deeply.

I’ve been going through the drawers of “my” new desk, and I find the things left for me by the minister who preceded me. Pens, hand-sanitizer, random paper clips. But it’s the scissors that strike me the most.

They are silver. Solid silver metal, “kleen cut,” patent filed, and they look as though they’ve been well-used. There are scratches along the blades, and a little bit of rust where the two pieces come together. There is goo on the blades, and the very tip of one of them is broken off.

I wonder what Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes would make of a pair of scissors like this?

As for me, they are a symbol of ministry.

They were here before me. I’ll be sure they get to my successor in 18 months.

These scissors belong to a congregation, not to its minister. They are mine, temporarily, to use for the benefit of my work, the work of the congregation and to better the world. But, they are not mine to keep.

Sermon:

Our time together is drawing to a close.

Over the past several weeks, we have done a fair bit of saying good-bye to each other, and before I offer you my last sermon, I wanted to thank you for the adventure of being your minister.

On the cover of your order of service you can see an image, a photograph that I made. On the left there are many, many keys. On the right there is one key.



When I arrived in January 15, 2012, I was given the keys on the left, and today, I hand you back this one key. In some ways these keys represent my ministry with you.

We have spent a lot of time together getting this spiritual home in order. When I got here, there was this giant key ring, and some of the keys went to locks that were no longer on campus, and now, a person needs to carry only one key.

I wrote that piece about the scissors when I first arrived in Modesto. It seems like both so very long ago, and only yesterday. I have learned so much from you, and I hope that you have learned from me, too.

One of the things that I learned while I was here is that some of the best learning for me comes in response to people asking me questions. It doesn't always come from books, though I’ve read plenty of them, and will continue to do so. The greatest lessons come from human interaction, and they might be informed by the training and reading that a minister does, but for me, it’s the connection from one soul to another.

As I looked back over the sermons I’ve given here, I think there are two very strong themes. One is Unitarian Universalism has a deep, rich history of which we can be proud, and the other is that this congregation is full of loving and very human people.

And now we’ve come to this, my last chance to tell you something important.

I want to encourage you to focus on joy.

So much of our culture is focused on what we don’t have, what’s missing, how things used to be. Let’s not be those people.

For a long time, on my desk pad, I have a quote that I study on while I’m in the office. “Find the good and celebrate it.” It was written by a man who changed my life. Alex Haley’s Roots came on television when I was a 9 year-old boy. By then I was already interested in history and my parents allowed me to stay up passed my normal bedtime to watch it.

Roots of course traces the story of Haley’s ancestors from Africa through slavery in the United States and into Freedom after the Civil War.  It’s a story of deep oppression. But in that story, also there were moments of joy. I remember them both.

Find the good and celebrate it, serves as shorthand for me. It reminds me that suffering exists, but also there is joy.

When I first arrived here, and found those scissors that Bill just told you about. When I found those scissors, I wasn’t sure what was in store for me as I served my first parish.

I was very much more nervous and worried than I was joyful, I can tell you.

And there have been times and moments here that I wish had gone differently. As I helped you move from one ministry to the next, there have been painful moments. When difficult decisions had to be made, sometimes feelings were hurt.

Including mine.

But that’s not what I’m taking with me.

Instead, I’m taking the joy I found here with me. The joy will live on well longer.


Sometimes joy gets a bad rap as being frivolous, that it’s not a very solid spiritual practice, but I’m going to tell that it isn’t true.

Keep joy in your heart as much as possible. Keep joy in your mind as much as possible.


We have friends here who believe in magic. Not just the David Copperfield kind, but in a force that flows through the universe. And one of the most amazing things about a place like our churches is that these folks can sing hymns right along side people who believe only in what they can experience through their own five senses.

For a moment, though, I’d like you to imagine that you do believe in magic.

Often, people create a talisman.  An object they charge with an intention.

A key for example. There’s a talisman we all have.

When you reach for your key, and you put it in your door, you are charging that key with you emotions and your intention through your fingers, as you slip it into the lock and turn it.

A little key holds a lot of emotional energy. It could be an energy of exhaustion, or anticipation.

Either way, it looks like a perfectly ordinary thing, but it can be your talisman of joy.

Please close your eyes for a moment. I’m going to ask you to imagine that you’re pulling up to your home. It can be an apartment, or a house you’ve lived in for many years. In your mind, really look at your home.  Notice, are there any flowers or bushes you can see? How many windows, and how many doors?

What heartbreak have you suffered there?

And what joys have been yours there?

Who or what is waiting in there that brings you happiness? Who relies on you, or who can you rely one? Are there pets, or books or favorite memories with which you can just sit and relax?

Please open your eyes.

Your house key has been witness to it all.


Part of the role of a talisman is to bring something to the person who carries it. Now I don’t how exactly this works. Perhaps it is magic, perhaps it is not.

If I charge a rock with some intention… if I focus on a question as I hold the rock in my hand, asking the rock to hold the energy of this question for me… I don’t know if the rock actually does anything, or if it’s the weight of the rock in my pocket that triggers my subconscious to look for that which I am asking.  Either way, I don’t mind.

Our Muslim friends have a practice, a goal, of keeping Allah in their minds at all times. One of the aspects of their religious practice is that they are supposed to keep Allah in every thought. Imagine for a moment the kind of discipline that might require.

I’m not going to ask you do to the same, don’t worry.

But I am going to ask you to, every time you hold your house key, to think about joy.


Opportunities for joy surround us.

In the sudden whiff of almond blossoms.  In an unexpected peel of child’s laughter. In a cool breeze in June.

When these things happen, I encourage to you stop what you’re doing, notice this gift, and embrace the joy of being alive for it.

These can be, and most often are, quiet, simple moments.

Just this spring I realized that if you take a leaf off of the orange tree and bend it, it smells like an orange.


If you make joy your focus, your life will be deeper, richer and happier.

I’m not saying that sorrow won’t come. That frustration won’t be in your life anymore, that there will always be enough time, money and love to go around.

When you lay down to sleep, spend just two minutes every night remembering the joys you had that day, even if they were small.  You might even want to write them down, so that later you can re-read them and see just how abundant your life can be.

If you take on the spiritual practice of focusing on joy, your life will have a better balance.

Fill your life’s journey with as much joy as you can.

May it be so. Blessed Be. Amen.