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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 9, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Sometimes it’s when we fail or when we are limited that our creativity is brought to the fore. Agitation can bring transformation.
Chalice Lighting
At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.
Call to Worship
WHY I WAKE EARLY
Mary OliverHello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever wasdear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the uniiverse
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
by Frederick Douglass
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation,
are people who want crops without ploughing the ground;
they want rain without thunder and lightning;
they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.The struggle may be a moral one,
or it may be a physical one,
or it may be both.
But it must be a struggle.Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
Sermon
Today we are talking about butter, and about creativity within constraints. When you use butter you have in your hands a substance with at least a 3,000 year history. According to The Butter Journal, a hunter could have made the first batch by accident. He may have tied a sheepskin bag of milk to his horse and, after a day of jostling, discovered the transformation: Churned milk fat solidifies into butter. Farmers in Syria still take a goat skin bag, fill it with milk and start shaking.
In ancient Rome, butter was medicinal – swallowed for coughs or rubbed into aching joints. In India, Hindus have been offering Lord Krishna tins full of ghee – clarified butter – for at least 3,000 years. And in the Bible, butter is a food for celebration, first mentioned when Abraham and Sarah offer three visiting angels a feast of meat, milk and butter.
A couple of weeks ago we talked about how salt enabled humans to travel, as they could take with them salt-preserved food that didn’t spoil on the journey. Milk spoiled quickly in transport, and travelers could take butter with them more easily and get to where they were going with those concentrated calories still appetizing and available to them.
Butter is made by agitating milk. You put the milk in a container and then shake it up for a time until you get butter. So I’ve been thinking about being shaken up. Our culture doesn’t change without agitation. As you heard Fredrick Douglass say, power never yields without a demand.
We may be the same. We’ve all been faced with challenges. Thrown off our horse by a bad diagnosis, the loss of a job, the death of someone we love, some of our normal comforts removed. Or we are sent on a journey, a quest. Sometimes we know we need this, and take off traveling to new places. We have felt ourselves getting too comfortable, getting sleepy, so we do something to wake ourselves up. More often, agitation happens on its own.
One of the things that agitated my life was reading feminist theology. I was raised in a pretty traditional protestant home, where God was the daddy. When you start thinking of God as the mother, things can change. My whole theology fell apart, because I knew no mother in the world would torture and kill her son because of some construction of sin and forgiveness she herself had set up. Then as I delved into neo-pagan theology, where Gaia, the living Earth, was seen as the divinity, I read things about how you can see god in nature, dolphins, sunsets, mountains….
I knew, as someone who had been camping, that there was more to nature than that. There were the endless forests of the Appalachians, where it got cold, and when the wind whistled through your tent and the bears ate the food you had put in the tree, you could die there and the forest wouldn’t really seem to care. Or else the woods and the moon had a completely different understanding of death than I did and saw it as much less of a big deal. Mother Nature was completely comfortable with death, indifferent, you could say. Praying to her for your child’s illness to be healed felt different from praying to a loving father god. But I had done both, when my mother was dying of cancer, and they had worked similarly badly.
Now I have a theology that feels creamy and nourishing. God is Love, and there is a river of love running through the universe. Every act of love by human or other adds to this river. The river has no hands, though, so the hands of love are ours. We are the ones who make love into action, and the river strengthens us. We can bathe in this river when we need forgiveness or grace, when we feel off track or dried up. The river of love is there for us. The God of my childhood makes no sense to me. Mother nature is too indifferent, but I seek the river of love, and that makes sense to me. Finally, a sweet buttery thealogy that makes sense to me after all that agitation.
The things that shake us can change us. You all have known people who haven’t had any trouble in their lives. They have never had someone they loved die, never been grievously sick or injured, never been completely without resources, never been at the mercy of merciless people. Sometimes it is glorious experiences that shake us, but most often it is the difficult ones. That’s life. It shakes the raw milk of our characters and we become more solid, sweeter, longer lasting, more nourishing to others.
Shaking makes butter, shaking within an enclosed space.
There is a good bit of research on how creativity thrives best when given constraints. Business journals talk about it. How it can be good to be limited in some ways, geographically, in your budget, in your human resources, in time constraints. The limitations agitate, and creativity is born in the situation. Maybe a football team like Green Bay is owned by the town it’s in, not by a rich person, and they have to make do with who they have, and they do well and inspire plenty of passionate loyalty as a side effect.
Some creatives give themselves limitations to spur creativity.
Tell a story in six words. I saw one in the want ads one day “Wedding dress for sale. Never worn.” Another way to impose constraints is to set a timer, try to do a job in 30 minutes. At least get part of it done and then rest.
Most of you know that I write books, stories about my life. Those of you who have tried to write know that facing a blank page, paper or on your computer screen, can be intimidating. If you sit down with the idea that you could write about anything, just anything in the world, it’s a lot harder than if someone gives you some constraints. Writers use prompts. They might be character prompts, like you spin a wheel and get “wears his father’s fedora” and an additional one “blinks rapidly.” Then you put those together and write about that character. The guardrails give you a place to go.
There are lots of examples, and you will now begin to see them everywhere, of how constraints enhance creativity. Lots of us are now watching a show called “Next in Fashion,” where 18 designers compete to win 250,000 dollars. They aren’t just told “make something.” They must make a military inspired look, or a sportswear look, or make something completely out of denim. One of them realizes he doesn’t have enough of the material to make the pants he had in mind because he started with the top and used too much there. What’s he going to do? Make shorts? Use another kind of material? He has to make it work, and you can see his creativity sparking as he looks around in desperation.
Almost all of us have constraints. Children need constraints in order to grow up well. There used to be a stock market commercial that showed a bull out in a field by himself and the song said “To know no boundaries…” It sounded kind of awful. A bull with no boundaries is a dangerous animal. The psychologists say that to leave a child with no boundaries is the same as abandonment. We need boundaries in order to be kind, in order to be patient and generous. We need to know that we won’t be intruded upon, have our agency taken away, or have someone lean on us far more than we are able to bear. We have limitations thrust upon us, but we get to set limitations on friends and family as well. The relationships may flourish, or they may disappear as we say “You can’t talk to me like that.” Or “I’m happy for you to be in my home unless you’re drunk.” Or whatever is important to you.
Most of us don’t need artificial shake-ups. Just know that when the agitation comes, when you experience constraints, know that they may come bearing gifts. When they happen, you may just say to yourself “Making the butter, we’re just making the butter.”
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