For those faithful followers, I have been a bit busy and quite frankly the last few weeks before the election I was so distracted watching the pundits sling the bull that I lost track of time and the blog page suffered...My daughters are amazing, and mostly take after their mom when it comes to overall smarts, but after their father when it comes to relationship building and having fun. All three of them have careers where they serve the community and at the same time advance their lives and their family lives, they are truly making a difference. The youngest is a Fellow (Doctor) at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland in Pediatric Hematology and Oncology; the middle daughter has been teaching pre-school special education for nearly 10 years and the oldest is a Minister at the Unitarian Church in Fort Collins Colorado. This weekend I had a chance to meet the people of Foothills Unitarian Church and hear the sermon that my daughter delivered, twice. What a great experience and the members have a great appreciation of my daughters talents, it was truly overwhelming. I was so impressed with what she had to say that I have repeated it below. Although she delivered this the Sunday before the elections, the message is extremely pertinent.
The Rev Gretchen Haley
We
gather this morning, just two days from the end of the election cycle.
Two
days, my friends, two days. And over
these months of the campaign- or has it been years, or an eternity - how many of us have muttered at the radio, the
television, the computer screen - miserable, unrepeatable things....?
How
often have we too wondered what meaning hope could have in these days?
How
often have we sought to hide our hearts, protect them from the weight of this
difficult and broken world with its wars, and its floods, and the way it seems
insistent on reducing the story of human life to the results of the latest
poll....?
Over
these months, these years, this eternity,
perhaps you too have gone out to get the newspaper, only to immediately recycle
all but the comics and the coupons.
Perhaps
you too have sat across from your friends, your partners and children, all of
you with your own electronic device - playing games, or flipping through
Facebook, finding ways to numb and distract yourselves from the pain you each
carry, the stories of your days, the words that were said to you, the words you
have said, the absence of the intimacy you deeply long for.
Perhaps
you too have watched more reality TV, played more Words with Friends, eaten
more of your children's Halloween candy, made more of a ritual out of beer and
potato chips - done all these, or others, more than you would like to admit.
Perhaps
you too have done all you could to keep this world, and its heartbreak at bay.
Let's
just say it. Living in the world with an
open heart can be exhausting and sometimes it can be terrible. Living in this world with the faith that not
only can love overcome all hate and pain and suffering, but that it will - feels so often incompatible with
remaining informed, feels so often incompatible with paying attention, feels so
often so risky and dangerous, and even foolish.
Living
with an open heart in a battleground state, especially foolish. Such an accurate description, more so than a
swing state. No, we’re a battleground. A
battleground where our common humanity is the casualty. Our sense of vision is what we lose, our
sense of common purpose, our sense of trust in our neighbors, our faith in our
common goodness, our willingness to hope.
Hope - like fear - begins in
the imagination.
Hope - like fear - is a
possible response to what we experience in the present as it relates to what we
can imagine about the future.
When we
experience life's goodness and joy today - we may hope, or fear, about whether
this goodness will continue and perhaps even grow in the future....
When we
experience life's brokenness and the darkness surrounds us today, we may also
meet this brokenness with either hope, or fear...
It’s a choice we have. Hope or
fear; trust or anxiety; faith or cynicism.
We all
have a choice, and it is a choice we make every day with our lives.
Rational,
reasonable people might support either choice.
There is much evidence to support either position.
250 years
ago, a man named Thomas Potter faced such a choice. (For those of you who were at Buckhorn, you
might remember I told a version of the story I am about to tell. It's another on my list of top 10 stories I
feel like all Unitarian Universalists should know, and so even if you heard it
at Buckhorn, it’s ok. It’s an important one.) [1]
About
250 years ago, in one of the places hardest hit by the storm last week, the
shores of what would become New Jersey - on those same shores, Thomas Potter, a
farmer and what today we'd call a religious seeker - was spending a lot of time
thinking about some big questions. The
nature of life. The question of hope. And most of all, whether or not love would
have the final word for us all. Which in his day, was a matter of - whether or
not hell existed, and what determined whether you'd end up there.
In his
search for answers, Thomas Potter stumbled upon the ideas of Universalism, and
its hopeful claim that a loving God would never send God's people to hell, and
that instead all would be reconciled in Love. All.
Unfortunately
for him, however, in 1770 America, there wasn't yet a Universalist church, and
there weren't any Universalist ministers.
And so Thomas Potter's deep longing to hear a message of hope, and to be
a part of a community that embodied that message, remained unfulfilled.
And then
one day, the story goes, as Thomas Potter worked his fields, he heard a voice
in his heart.
The
voice said, "If you build a chapel, a Universalist minister will come and
bring a story of hope to all who come here." And so Thomas Potter decided right then to
build a chapel near his farm house. He
built it, and then he waited for that minister to come.
Well lo
and behold, at about the same time that Thomas Potter was building his chapel,
a young minister named John Murray was making his way across the Atlantic
Ocean. John Murray - a one time
Methodist minister who had converted to Universalism
only to
be cast out as a heretic. John Murray, a
man who had recently lost his young wife and his child in a great tragedy. A
man whose experience of brokenness had led him to decide to give up on
preaching, to give up on faith and religion all together, and head to the new
world and start over. Specifically, he'd imagined starting over in what is
today New York. But, as John Murray's
boat got close to shore, the winds picked up, and instead, he went aground on
the coast of New Jersey, coincidentally, right near the fields where Thomas Potter
had built his chapel.
Seeking
shelter and help, John Murray went towards the farm house, where he met up with
Thomas Potter. Before long, Potter
discovered Murray's background in ministry, and their shared belief in the
gospel of hope.
You can
just see the light bulbs going off in Potter's head at this point, right? (OK,
maybe not light bulbs, it was 1770...) But just imagine how excited Potter was
as he told Murray about his chapel, and about his vision of a minister arriving
to preach the message of hope.
"So
I heard this voice, and I built this chapel, and you are the minister!"
And
Murray was like, "you're crazy!"
No
really, John Murray had decided he was done with preaching, remember? Done with
this idea of hope. Life was not a
blessing, it was terrible and broken and he wanted to go get lost in the
wilderness.
But
Potter didn't give up easily. And so the
two men decided to make a deal. If
Murray’s ship was still stuck on
the coming Sunday, that is, if the wind didn't change so that they could head
to New York, Murray would preach in Potter's chapel.
Well,
lucky for all of us today, the wind did not change. And so that Sunday - September 30, 1770,
Murray preached a sermon on Universalism in Potter's chapel to Thomas Potter
and to all his family and neighbors. It was the first known Universalist sermon
on American soil, and today John Murray is considered the founder of
Universalism in America.
Today,
we are the grateful inheritors of Thomas Potter's vision. Grateful inheritors
of Thomas Potter's choice to keep hope alive, to create a place for it - a literal meeting house for it, to kindle
the flame of hope in his time, so that it might be here for us in ours. And we are the grateful inheritors of the
ways that Thomas Potter greeted John Murray and all his pain with love and
vision, and reminded him of the power of hope to transform even the deepest
heartbreak.
We stand
here today keepers of this story, guardians of this tradition, stewards of this
message of love - so that 250 years from now, good people like us will receive
the gifts of our broad vision, and continue to take up the mantle, making the
choice, whatever life may bring, to meet it with love. To greet it with hope.
Give them not hell but hope, as John Murray said - give them not hell, but hope. That's our choice. That's our story.
This is
the choice we come here to be reminded of, the choice we come here to help each
other make.
So that
when we too find ourselves confusing cynicism with pragmatism, and turning all
too often to the numbing power of beer and potato chips - or whatever it is
that we might turn to in our lives to keep the heartbreak at bay - we know we
can count on our friends in this community to say to us - "What kind of
self-indulgent whining is this?" In the kindest possible way, of course. [2]
We bear
witness to each other this alternative story.
An alternative to the story of division and separation and greed and
self-interest that so often attempts to claim us.
We - the
people of Foothills Unitarian Church. In
Fort Collins, Colorado, at the end of 2012, in this place called a
battleground, in this life that can so often feel like a battle ground. We come here to this place of hope, and we
kindle this flame. A story of binding the broken, comforting
the world. Healing the brokenness - with a promise of blessing. A story of
light, that we carry into all the places of darkness. A story of hope and heart, into all the
highways and byways, into our homes and into our lives.
We stoke
this story with our lives, making sure it doesn’t ever go out. And we pass it on. May it be so, and amen.
[1]
This
story can be found in many places. In writing this sermon, I consulted with
these versions: http://www.murraygrove.org/pottermurray.html; http://www.uucdc.org/sermons/2012/10/21/how-are-you-saved; and http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/creatinghome/session12/sessionplan/stories/60161.shtml
[2]
This
is a reference to our reading, which was by the Rev Victoria Safford from her
essay in A People So Bold.
A good sermon and some history too.
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