Fortunate Blessings

November 5, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, this morning we remember the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.” Too often we make grandiose plans about how our lives would/could or will be. We map strategies, we enlist the help of others, we ignore warning signs and push ahead with our plans.

There’s an old saying, updated a bit which runs when human beings makes plans, God, the ground of our Being, the mystery beyond all mysteries laughs out loud. No one likes the idea of their plans not working out, but if laughter is added to disappointment it is possible to engender scorn. Fritz Pearl, the famous Gestalt therapist had a book entitled, Don’t Push the River.”

The problem is we sometimes forget there is a river whose streams make glad the city of humankind. We forget that we are not separate from the Cosmos that surrounds us that as surely as flowers follow the sun, we rise each morning following that same life-giving light.

We seek more consciousness, more awareness. If a man in a rowboat sees another empty row boat drifting toward him he takes an oar and gently pushes the empty rowboat aside. But if the rowboat drifting toward him is occupied, voices are raised, shouts of warning arise and before we know it two men are battling each other in the middle of the stream.

Let us be empty rowboats as we go through our hectic days. Let us see others as empty rowboats, also. Let us feel the currents of life and flow with them – remembering that rich or poor, black or white, Republican or Democrat our ultimate destination is universally the same.

WE pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON: Fortunate Blessings

Introduction:

A Chinese farmer came out one morning to find a fine stallion grazing in his pasture. His neighbors came by and congratulated him on his good luck. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

Shortly thereafter the horse ran off. The neighbors gave their sympathy for losing such a fine horse. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

The following week, the stallion returned and brought with him four wild and beautiful horses. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on his extraordinary good luck. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

The farmer’s only son was good with horses. He had three of them trained when he was bucked off the fourth. He landed on his leg and it broke at both the hip and the knee. He would walk with a terrible limp the rest of his life. The neighbors brought food and sympathy. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

The War Lords of the region were fighting the War Lords of another region. They traveled throughout the region conscripting the young men. All the young men from the farmer’s village were taken except the farmer’s son who was unfit for military service. The neighbors came over to sympathize. The farmer replied, “Could be good news, could be bad news.”

In the War all the young men of the farmer’s village were killed. No one came to the farmer’s house to commiserate or congratulate.

I recently spent two days and three nights in the Berkshires. The foliage was at its peak. This section of the Berkshires is known as the lung of Connecticut. The majority of the wooded hills and meadows belong to the people of Connecticut and are held in trust. No one can cut the timber, plow up the undergrowth or otherwise disturb these nearly pristine forests.

I was there to visit with William Spear. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of Bill Spear, but he’s a mover and a shaker in the world of disaster relief – especially disaster relief for children. Back when I was studying at the Yale School of Drama in 1990, Bill called me from Chelyabinsk, Russia. There was a great need for blood since the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor and Bill had made arrangements with the Yale/New Haven Hospital for blood. He called me to transport the blood from the Yale/New Haven Hospital to the New Haven airport where it would be flown to Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains of Siberia, considered, at the time, to be the most polluted and ravaged city on the planet.

Bill went there to work with thousands of children dying from leukemia. He went without a visa (it was then a closed city) and was the first American to enter the city. There he spoke with hundreds of physicians and nurses throughout the region and established an extraordinary program, still in existence today, which feeds and supports 300 people a day, all through volunteer work. He was received by the Mayor of Chelyabinsk and given a key to the city as well as being acknowledged as an honorary staff member of the hospital where the program takes place. To this day Bill continues to work with the medical staff that attends to thousands of children dying from leukemia and the effects of radiation poisoning.

I had gone to the Berkshires to see Bill to convince him that he should come to First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin and be our Distinguished Speaker for the spring of 2008. I am here to report that he has agreed to come – as he put it in an email to me – “I’m happy to have you back in my life and as for spring of 2008, sure — I’m in. I’ll just change that appointment I had to get my teeth cleaned, and we’re all set. Bill?

The man is not only a great humanitarian but also has a droll sense of humor.

While I was there I went ahead and had Bill Spear, the health expert, give me a check up.

I had been concerned when I went to see Bill that there were life-threatening issues and there weren’t. That’s good. Bill was surprised to hear from me after 15 years and he said, people didn’t usually drop back into his life unless they were in a crisis situation in their lives. So – if my crisis wasn’t physical, then it must be spiritual, right?

Bill Spear is the head of the Fortunate Blessings Foundation.

The term “fortunate blessings? is associated with the symbol for “wind? in the Asian art of feng shui, based on the I Ching, the ancient oracle. The I Ching identifies the primal qualities present in the universe and all beings; the quality of “wind? signifies the blossoming of energy, prosperity, expansiveness and potential transformation. In the name of Bill’s organization, “fortunate blessings? symbolizes an openness to the experience of gratitude for whatever life brings. (Repeat this line)

Bill was with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross when she was dying. Opra did a program on the famous psychologist and innovator in the field of death and dying. The television crew traveled to Elizabeth’s house and many people were on the program to thank her for all the work she had done in the area of our mortality.

Bill said that when the program was over and the lights had been taken down, and the television personalities had departed and it was just he sitting there by her deathbed she looked around the room and said, “I failed.”

Bill looked at her and asked what she could possibly mean by that statement?

She replied that there were two courses in death and dying – one was the course on how to help people through their impending deaths, that course she had designed and completed with an A+. The other course was on being able to receive the love and affection of those who wished to help you when you were dying. In that course, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had failed miserably.

This isn’t surprising. People who give are giving because that’s what they know how to do, but this doesn’t mean that they are also able to receive.

I’m a person that has trouble receiving. Jesus said, it is more blessed to give than to receive. Jesus knew.

What I want is to tell you a story. It’s one of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s stories and it’s called “The Final Lesson.”

“When I first met Thomas, he was over seventy, a family-practice physician who had been in solo practice for almost fifty years. Whole families, from grandparents to grandchildren, looked to him for help in their trouble, counted on his counsel, and called him their friend. He looked the part too, gray-headed, kindly, his body as spare and gnarled as an ancient oak tree.

At the time that we met, he proposed that we open a series of conversations about his life. He had done some reflection in recent years but felt that sharing the process at this point might be helpful in readying himself for death.

Thomas felt death to be an unqualified ending to life. Raised a Catholic, he had left the church early and embraced science as a way to bring order to the chaos of life. It had not failed him.

It surprised me that a man this altruistic, compassionate and reverent toward the life in others, this man awed by the beauty of anatomy and physiology, held no religious or spiritual beliefs. Curious, I asked him about the circumstances under which he had decided to leave the church. Open and frank about other details of his long life, he was reticent in the extreme about this. He had left at sixteen over a specific happening. I never found out what it was.

Very early on in our discussions, I asked him how he saw his relationship to his patients. Looking at a small figurine of a shepherd with his flock that a patient of mine had given me, he smiled and said, “Like that.” The shepherd was a steward of the life in the flock, he protected them from danger, helped them to find nurture and fulfill themselves. He delivered their young. He found strays and brought them back to the others.

Thomas told me many stories of his shepherding and the life of his flock. We examined these stories together, sharing our thoughts and perspectives. In the telling and the reflection, he seemed to be unfolding a much deeper sense of what his life had meant to others and what he had stood for. In these discussions, he often used the odd Victorian word: they “sheltered” with him. He was their safety, their support, their friend. He was there for them, constant, vigilant, and trustworthy. The person of a shepherd emerged as a symbol for wholeness.

Who did he shelter with, who was the shepherd’s shepherd? “No one,” he said, the words holding more pain than he had expressed before. It became clear that he did not believe that there was a place of sheltering for himself. Shepherd though he was professionally, personally he had become separated from the flock, a nonparticipant, a lost person. He seemed unwilling to go much further with this.

Puzzled, I asked him to make up a story about a lost lamb, and haltingly he described a lamb that had been lost for so long that he could not even remember there was a flock. He had learned to survive by himself, to eat what was available, to hide from predators. “Does this lamb know that his shepherd is looking for him?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the lamb had done something very bad and the shepherd had forgotten him.”

“As a shepherd yourself, would you look for a lost lamb who had done something bad?” He seemed puzzled. I reminded him of the young patient from the projects he had told me about, the one he had taken on as a guardian from the juvenile courts, the girl who eventually went on to college. I asked him why he had gone after her and brought her home. “Why,” he said, “she was one of mine.” On Christmas Eve I received a call from his hospice nurse. Thomas had been in a coma all day. Would I come? As soon as I saw Thomas, I realized that he was dying. His breathing, always labored, had become shallow and intermittent. The nurse with him was young and seemed a little uncertain and so I invited her to stay as I talked to him. He did not respond in any way. We changed his sheets and made him more comfortable. Then we sat down together to wait. Gradually the space between his breaths lengthened and after a while his breathing stopped.

There seemed nothing more to do. I stood for a time at the foot of Thomas? bed, thinking about him and wishing him well. Then I left.

It was dark and cold Christmas Eve night. Holding my keys in my pocket, I huddled into my coat and walked a little faster. I had almost reached my car when church bells throughout the city began ringing. For a moment I stopped, confused. Could the bells be ringing for Thomas? And then I remembered. It was midnight. The Shepherd had come.”

On the website for Fortunate Blessings.org there is a quote from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. It reads, “Should we shield the canyons from the windstorms, we would never see the beauty of their carvings.”

Life has a way of carving us into shapes that are appropriate for who we are and the pressures that were put under.

As some of you know I traveled to Washington, DC recently to have a meeting with the Regional Subcommittee of Candidacy. I wasn’t worried about this meeting. Don’t forget I’ve been before Grace Presbytery when I was a Presbyterian and Grace Presbytery’s name is ironic to say the least. Those people were just about anything but full of grace. Yet, I had passed that committee and began the process of becoming a Minister of Word and Scrament. Then, when I had switched to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) I had had three meetings with folks from the Brazos Region. True, the head of the region committed suicide a month after I had my meeting with him, but since I don’t suffer from magical thinking I was sure that our meeting had had nothing to do with his demise. My two other meetings with committees from the Brazos Region had produced no more suicides and as a matter of fact, I had rather enjoyed those committees. They had always given me good feedback as to what my strengths seemed to be, and areas of weakness that I might work on. When I decided to come over to the UUA I had only one meeting with the Brazos Region left – my ordination interview.

So on my way to Washington DC I wasn’t as worried about the subcommittee on candidacy as I was about flying on Friday the 13th. Yeah, I’m a little superstitious.

I got to All Souls Church in Washington DC early. I knew I didn’t want to rush into a meeting out of breath and harried. I sat in the Thomas Jefferson bench in the main sanctuary at All Souls and wrote my thoughts about what questions are – if you were here last week you heard those thoughts. I had so much time I practiced my Tai Chi for 20 minutes. Believe me when I tell you that when I entered that meeting room my feet were grounded and I was not afraid. They asked me if I’d like to say some words before they lit the chalice. I did. I quoted something from The Death of Empedocles by Holderlin.

And openly I pledged my heart to the grave and suffering land, and often in the consecrated night I promised to love her faithfully, until death unafraid. With her heavy burden of fatality and never to despise a single one of her enigmas, thus did I join myself to her with a mortal chord.

The committee started out by asking me two questions about someone who wasn’t in the meeting. I thought this strange, but decided to answer. The questioning continued and I thought all in all it was going rather well. At one point someone asked me something I didn’t know, so I simply said, “I don’t know.” I figured honesty was better than BSing my way through a non-answer.

When they called me back into the room I was shocked to find out that they were not going to offer me candidacy. They considered me inauthentic, poetical and seething with an undercurrent of anger. I looked around the room, not sure who in the room they might be talking about.

The odd thing about these declarations was the fact that only two people out of ten at the table were looking at me while they were being read. The man who was reading them to me, he was looking at me, and a young black woman two seats from my left was able to make contact with me from time to time. The others sat with their eyes cast into their laps. They honestly seemed ashamed.

When the meeting was over I walked around and shook each person’s hand. I thanked the two who had been able to look me in the eyes for being able to do that, and yes, I thanked them loud enough for the others to hear.

The upshot of all this is much to my surprise the Regional Subcommittee on Candidacy had handed me a fortunate blessing in disguise. “Could be good news, could be bad news.” And like Jacob in the Hebrew Bible lesson this morning, I have wrestled with men, I have wrestled with God, I have wrestled with Satan, also known as my shadow self, and in the process I have been mightily blessed.

They recommended a year’s worth of counseling and told me that I needed to get an authentic view of the UUA since, obviously my view had been tainted by – and these are their words – by being paid more than over half the members of the RSCC had ever been paid and by serving the third largest congregation in our region – a congregation larger than most of them had ever served.

My mother told me that when God closes a door he opens a window. My mom had a tendency to get those sayings confused. But I knew what she meant. The window that’s been opened for me will be gently stepped through rather than jumped out of.

It is a privilege to serve this congregation as your shepherd and it looks very much like I will return to more familiar pastures where the majority of the sheep look to the great Shepherd. And, you know what, that’s just fine by me.