Choosing to Bless the World

Meg Barnhouse
May 5, 2015

The poem “Choosing to Bless the World” by Rebecca Parker is the subject of this Sunday’s sermon. “Your gifts – whatever you discover them to be – can be used to bless or curse the world… What will you do with your life’s gifts?”

Sermon:

Rebecca Parker, who recently retired as President of the UU seminary in Berkeley wrote a beautiful poem that is the text of my sermon this morning. It’s titled “Choosing to Bless the World.” Just the title would have set my people off, the people of my childhood religion. “Hate the world,” is what their Scripture says in one place, and they take that seriously. “Worldly” is a word used for someone who likes this place too much, who knows fine wines or good clothes.

In a newsletter I just got from a spiritual teacher I’ve learned from in the past, she’s now saying that you need to realize everything is an illusion. I just don’t know how that helps. How is it good to live in this live with the people on this planet and spend that life trying to rise above, trying to believe that none of it’s real?

CHOOSING TO BLESS THE WORLD
by Rebecca Parker

PART ONE

Your gifts-whatever you discover them to be-
can be used to bless or curse the world.

The mind’s power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
The gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting

Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
Bind up wounds,
Welcome the stranger,
Praise what is sacred,
Do the work of justice
Or offer love.

Any of these can draw down the prison door,
Hoard bread,
Abandon the poor,
Obscure what is holy,
Comply with injustice
Or withhold love.

You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?

Choose to bless the world.

Many of us have spent the last week thinking and feeling about Baltimore, about more evidence of the brutality of some law enforcement officers toward people of color. We’ve heard the voices asking why it took destruction of property to bring the nation’s attention to the protests, when the peaceful protests have been ongoing but ignored. We’ve wondered why it took a video from South Carolina of an officer shooting an unarmed man in the back as he was running away, then planting evidence at the scene to make us white folks acknowledge that sometimes the police officer will lie about what happened. My heart is broken over and over as another unarmed black man is given an unofficial death sentence for a petty crime, or for no crime at all. I feel rage.

What are we to do? Do we despise people and hate this world? Do we sneer at our neighbors who dance and have drinks on the patio in this beautiful weather as if nothing bad were happening? They have forgotten about the girls living in captivity with Boko Haram. They aren’t thinking about the filth pouring into our ground water. They aren’t aware of the helpless victims of the earthquake in Nepal.

No, we don’t sneer at our neighbors. In fact, we join them on the patio for drinks and we dance under the trees in our Texas spring. There is ugliness in the world, and beauty too. It has always been this way.

PART TWO

The choice to bless the world can take you into solitude
To search for the sources of power and grace;
Native wisdom, healing, and liberation.

More, the choice will draw you into community,
The endeavor shared,
The heritage passed on,
The companionship of struggle,
The importance of keeping faith,
The life of ritual and praise,
The comfort of human friendship,
The company of earth
The chorus of life welcoming you.

None of us alone can save the world.
Together-that is another possibility waiting.

We choose to bless the world here at First UU with an endeavor shared. Our mission is our endeavor. We ask as a community how to bless the world. We choose to bless the world with “a heritage passed on.” We teach our history, the wisdom and bravery of our forbearers, the justice they accomplished. We live ritual and praise. Those rituals help us save the world. We light candles, we sing together, we teach the children or support those who do. We bid one another goodbye when the time comes.

We have had a lot of loss in this congregation this year. We’ve lost people who are very dear to us. We gather in community so that our grief can be shared, so that our memories can be shared as well, so that we can tell stories together.

We remind one another that love does not die with death. We keep loving the people we loved, even though they are physically gone. We sit out in the spring evenings and enjoy the life of our town, our friends, enjoy the parts of our bodies that work well, because it would be wrong to give up enjoyment to grief, to give up living to fight the powers. Yet we do gather to fight the powers of injustice. We share that struggle as well. It’s a good thing, too, since one voice raised for gun safety, one voice raised for fairness for immigrants? one voice raised for more accountability in policing is not heard the way a gathered voice is heard.

When we become “the yellow shirts,” as some people call us, when we go talk to legislators or stand witness at detention centers or repair someone’s home or shelter homeless men in the winter, our presence is felt. And we can have joy in doing those things when we do them together. We can have fun.

PART THREE

The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will,
A moving forward into the world
With the Intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition, a confession of surprise, a grateful acknowledgment
That in the midst of a broken world
Unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.

There is an embrace of kindness that encompasses all life, even yours.

We have all had experiences of the embrace of kindness. I am hoping that we can practice kindness as energetically as we practice being right: about grammar, history and politics. We are so right. It’s fun to be right. Let’s see if we can feel the embrace of kindness encompass all life. Even ours. But that kindness is for all beings, and it demands a guardian attitude sometimes, sometimes a witnessing to what is right, a standing with those who are wronged, a “benevolent rage.”

PART FOUR

And while there is injustice, anesthetization, or evil
There moves
A holy disturbance,
A benevolent rage,
A revolutionary love,
Protesting, urging, insisting
That which is sacred will not be defiled.
Those who bless the world live their life as a gesture of thanks
For this beauty
And this rage.

We are grateful for the beauty and the rage.

My faith (and I may be wrong) leads me to live here in the world, to turn my attention to loving it, to living in the body, not transcending it, not wandering through as if it were all an illusion. Wanting to make it better while we are here. I think we UUs are called to bless the world. Ours is not an other worldly faith, it is a this-worldly faith. Most people use the word “bless” to mean send good wishes. The I Ching says to bless means to help. The Hebrew for blessing “bareich” means to draw God down into a thing, a person or a situation, to expand it with the Holy, to saturate it with the Divine.

This world can break your heart. Time will break your body. We can choose to bless and not to curse with all the powers left to us.

We can bless the world by praying, by saying blessings, by loving, by working to make things better, by writing checks, depending on our time of life, and on our temperament, and on the calling of our soul. We will take a little time to bless the person to our right, then our left. Think good thoughts, wish good things, pray for them by holding them in light or wrapping them in sacred dark or however you do it.

Let me close with part of a poem by Marge Piercy:

THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY (excerpt)
by Marge Piercy

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.

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