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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 13, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
With the help of some folks at the church with Judaism in their heritage, we will have a traditional “booth” in the courtyard that reminds us of the story about how the people were protected on their long journey through the desert. What protects us on our journey?
Lighting the Chalice
May the flame we now kindle light the path back to our center, back to that place of belonging again to our deepest self. And may our chalice remind us that we are held and welcomed whole, without the need to hide a single piece or part of who we are.
Call to Worship
John O’Donohue
You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
A NEW HEART
Chaim SternWho can say: I have purified my heart, and I am free from sin?
There are none on earth so righteous that they never sin.
Cast away all the evil you have done, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.
A new heart will I give you, a new spirit put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and give you a heart that feels.
For thus says the Eternal God: I, Myself, will search for My sheep, and seek them out.
As a shepherd seeks them out when any of the flock go astray, so will I seek out My sheep.
I will put My spirit within you, and teach you to live by My laws.
For I desire love and not sacrifices, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
Sermon
SUKKOT Protection in the Desert
Tonight at sundown those among and around us who are of Jewish heritage begin to celebrate Sukkot, a festival of returning to temporary shelter to remind yourself of how you were protected in times of being lost, in times of wandering, of transition. Those whose holiday this is to celebrate build a hut, a sukkah outside. It has to have three walls and a roof made of natural materials that used to be growing in the ground. You have to be able to see the stars through it, so you have some shade and some openness to the sun and rain. It’s a temporary shelter. Obviously not ideal. Some of our congregation with ties to the Jewish tradition have made a Sukkah out in the courtyard. The sukkah is decorated with fruits and vegetables. The family eats meals out there for seven days.
The layers of symbolism range from “this is the kind of hut the harvest workers used out in the field, so they didn’t have to go all the way home when night felL” To “this is the kind of thing we built in the desert while we were wandering for 40 years.”
Rosh Hashannah, the birthday of the world, comes first. Then, on the tenth day of the new year, comes Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and confession.
Sukkot always comes 5 days after Yom Kippur, when the community has fasted for a day and thought about wrongs they’ve done. They’ve made an apology where it’s needed.
Maybe there is a connection. When you strip yourself out of your routine, let something else drive other than your ego, doing ritual with your people, when you confess, face your wrongs, when you do a “searching and fearless moral inventory,” you can start again, in a way. You might want a ritual that reminds you of how your people started. Maybe the holiday comes right after Yom Kippur because you have fasted and stepped out of the regular day to day, and maybe that gives you a lightness of being. This festival of Sukkot embodies this lightness of being, this acknowledgement that you only need a few things.
It can also remind you that your body is a tiny fragile shelter. Sometimes you are temporarily strong. Other times you get sick, and we all get old.
The Jews are reminded by these sukkot that they were at one time a wandering people, looking for their place to settle and grow things. They were migrants. What they had they carried with them. They didn’t belong back in Egypt where they had been enslaved. They didn’t have a land of their own (although their faith story says God had promised them a land, but it already had people on it, and they killed some of those people and took the land. This is a whole other sermon) If you remind yourself of the story of your people, that leads to a sense that you don’t belong to one place, but rather you belong to the people with this story.
Many of our families have stories about the family: the story of when we came over through Ellis Island. The story that this is the land we’ve been on and fought for for the past 600 years, remember when our great grandparents owned all of that over there. Remember when the dust blew and the whole family got in the old car and moved to Bakersfield, and they called us Okies even though we were from Arkansas? Remember our grandfather and his three sisters who had a band that played at all the dance halls. Unitarians have stories of our people too. Remember when a minister in SF did a civil union between two men in 1957. Remember when our press, Beacon Press, at great risk, published the Pentagon Papers. Remember John Quincy Adams and John C Calhoun, both Unitarians but with bitter political differences, built All Souls Unitarian Church in DC ? Remember Elliot Richardson, the AG who refused to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate Prosecutor, was a Unitarian Universalist. We tell the stories of our people and feel those stories resonate within our spirits.
For the Jews, building the Sukkah outdoors, near your sturdy house or apartment, eating meals out there for 7 days, interrupts your daily routine enough to invite thoughts like “What is enough? What do we really need in life? How grateful I am for the sturdy walls where I can have books and be dry and cool or warm and watch TV, but life at its most basic can still exist, and it is the people who are in the sukkah with you who are part of your heart, you support and sustain one another, just eating outside together, that is enough.
The sukkah reminds us of how fragile our shelter, our bodies, our life plans, our mores and institutions are, and how vulnerable others may be, and what it feels like to be vulnerable. Knowing how little you need can help you be brave, to stand up, even though it means you might get fired in the Saturday Night massacre, to resign, even though it means there might be a mean tweet coming your way. Knowing the fragility of shelter, having just a kind and gentle reminder of what people have lived with and without, makes you strong in the world. That is what makes a mighty spirit.
Let’s turn it around, too. Maybe we are meant to be shelter for one another when we’re see our siblings wandering. This church is now being a shelter for our guest in Sanctuary. Maybe this week your heart, your voice, your stories have been a shelter for someone who is lost. Maybe at a time when you were lost, you felt a protection come from the Mystery, by whatever name you call it. This is a day to be grateful for the protections and the shelter in our lives, and to look for ways to be shelter for one another.
Dr. Brene Brown says people who have the deepest sense of true belonging are those who also have the courage to stand alone when called to do that. They are willing to maintain their integrity and risk disconnection in order to stand up for what they believe in.
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