What if you can't keep your promise?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 15, 2013

Yom Kippur is the final day of the Jewish High Holy Days, which are about repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. It is also a day when you may work to be released from a vow you cannot keep. Let’s talk about forgiving others, and forgiving ourselves too.

Yom Kippur is the final day of the Days of Awe, celebrated at this time of year by our sisters and brothers in the Jewish Community. We in UUism are free to dance with many different religious groups, so we are exploring what gifts and insights Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have for us. These High Holy Days are about atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation. Let be talk about atonement first. To do that, I have to talk about sin.

It is difficult for us UU’s to talk about “sin.” One UU web page on the net says that you can attend a UU church for years without hearing the word “sin.” Our denomination began several hundred years ago in reaction to the Calvinist concepts of Original Sin. Jonathan Edwards, a Princeton-educated New Englander, put forth the Calvinist view in his sermon: “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” He described God as holding us as someone would hold a spider over the fire, completely justified in dropping it into the flames, yet in his mercy, moment by moment, keeping it alive.

Present-day Christians don’t usually paint that gruesome a picture, seeing the belief in a loving God a s primary, but they still have to deal with the theology of Original Sin. Calvinist Christianity, building on the work of the early North African church father Augustine, teaches that humans are born in sin. We are all broken in our essence, and this brokenness is passed down from generation to generation, making it difficult if not impossible for us to choose to do the right thing. We are bent towards sin, predisposed to run from God.

Unitarians and Universalists, in the early centuries, taught that it is ridiculous that God would have created us to be sinful and then punished us for it. It goes against our best reason to think that God set things up for us to fall and then sends us to hell for falling. Most UU’s feel that humans are born good, but because of influences in our culture or lack of education, opportunity, racism, sexism, or bad examples, we do bad things. UU minister Forrester Church says in the “Nature VS Nurture argument, it’s as if the Calvinists come down on the genetics side of the argument and the UUs come down on the environment side. They say sin is nature. We say it is nurture. There are pluses and minuses to both ways of seeing the world.

Forrester Church says he believes strongly in both He says: “Subscribing to the genetic argument, I believe that we are born sinners; and, equally convinced by the environmental argument, I also believe that over time and through experience, sweet and bitter, we acquire an aptitude for sin.”

Here is what I believe, and I find this to make the most sense and provide the most cheerful out look on life, which is important to me. I don’t think sin is either nature or nurture. I don’t believe in Original sin, and I don’t believe we are born good. I believe we are born some good and some bad, in other words, born human. We keep acting out our some good, some bad nature our whole life long. Some people say “How could you think a baby was born in sin?! They’re so cute and wonderful!” As a mother, I see the romanticizing of babies as sweet and innocent is laughable. They may be innocent, whatever that means, but they are self centered creatures who are beautiful and compelling enough usually to keep you from pitching them out the window the fourteenth night in a row they awaken you every two hours to get fed or just because they got the urge to hang out with you for twenty minutes before they doze off again.

That debate aside for now, whether we do wrong things because it is our nature or because it is the result of forces at work upon us from our environment, or whether we are acting out our mixed regular human nature, the fact is that most of us mess up.

So I think of myself as a sinner. If I’m ready for it, if I know it’s going to happen some time, I can be more cheerful about it. Yep. I messed up again. I’ll do that. I try not to, but it happens. Yep, my partner messed up, or my child, or the person at work, or the treasurer of the church next door. It helps me not be surprised and disappointed by human behavior.

It also gives me more compassion for myself and for others. We do wrong things. Some of those things are mistakes. The popular piece of information to impart these days is that, in Hebrew, the word for sin means “missing the mark.” We just missed. It makes it sound like bad aim. Some wrong things we do are like that.

But some are things we do while knowing full well that they are wrong and damaging. We in the liberal religious tradition need to have ways of talking about this too.

What is our spiritual practice when we do things that are destructive? What do we do when we break promises?

One important thing to know about Yom Kippur is that Jews don’t believe God is in the business of forgiving you what you have done to others. If you have wronged God, God will forgive. If you have wronged someone else, go ask that person for forgiveness.

In the Jewish tradition, if you break a vow, you have an opportunity, during the Days of Awe, when the Book of Life is left open for a time, to make things right. You can go to three members of your community or one ordained person, and tell them what the vow was, tell them you have not managed to keep the vow, and ask to be released from the vow. We can also try to make amends for the wrongs we have done. We can make an honest effort to go to the person we have betrayed, lied to, or hurt, and we can tell them we are sorry and that we have every intention of not repeating what we did. And we can ask their forgiveness. They may give it or they may not, but at least we have done our part.

The Days of Awe are also about forgiveness and reconciliation. What about people who have wronged us? Carolyn Myss, medical intuitive, says that when you harbor anger at a person, when you hold on to something wrong they have done to you, a portion of your life force is directed to that person to keep up that negative connection with them, to wish them ill, to grind at the desire to have them sweat in front of you, realizing what they have done, and “repenting on bended knee.” Given that the odds of that happening are slim to none, she suggests that in not forgiving someone, your life force is being drained off into a bad investment, and that you let it go. There is so much wisdom in that. Our resentment and hatred do those who wronged us no real harm, while it eats at our guts and makes us sick and weak.

I don’t have a problem with forgiveness, but do I have a problem with just “letting it go.” What if someone has done something truly awful to you? Tortured you, abused you, betrayed you, what if they are a parent and they have molested you? What if they molested your children? Do you just forgive and forget in order to grow spiritually?

I’m with the Israelis on this one. They say “Forgive, but never forget.” In the new Holocaust museum in Washington are the words “Never Again.” You don’t have to forget when you forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have to be in relationship with the one who hurt you. It just means that you give them over to karmic justice or Divine justice and quit reciting their wrongs in your mind and heart. Give them their eviction notice in your head. Resign from the job of making them see what they’ve done. If you’re ready. If it feels right to you.

These Holy Days are for us to be reconciled with God and with one another. I have talked about asking forgiveness from God and from one another, but I use the freedom of this pulpit to ask: does God ever do wrong things? Is there some forgiveness called for there? Elie Weisel, in his book Night, and his play “The Trial of God,” has inmates at Auschwitz, in their despair, call God to trial for allowing such evil to exist in the world. At the end, after pronouncing God guilty, the inmates rise and recite the Kaddish, which proclaims God’s sovereignty in the world. For a Jew, it is possible to argue with God, even to accuse God, but not to live without God. Some of us are harboring resentments against God, who somehow did not fulfill our expectations of him. We are angry because she let something awful happen. Maybe during this time we can decide to let go of that draining resentment as well.

These Holy Days are an opportunity, every year, to apologize for wrongs you have done, mistakes you have made to forgive other people, to let go of resentments, and to bring out the vows you have not been able to keep and do the work of being released from them. What I try to give you, each Sunday, is a small excerpt from the “Soul Home Repair Manual,” so we can attend to making the world a better place, starting in our own hearts and our own spirits.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776