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Rev. Marisol Caballero
March 30, 2014

The way we speak about our beliefs is powerful. Language can either serve to connect or distance us from others, based on our emotional associations with the words chosen by others. We will explore the possibility of religious language as limitless metaphor and poetry.

Yesterday, I learned the happy fact that a group pugs is called a grumble. My soon-to-be in-laws are a pug-owning family, so there is a constant grumble underfoot in the kitchen during every major holiday. Being a lover of words and their multiple meanings, I searched out other nouns to describe congregations of animals. Among the best were: a flamboyance of flamingos, a murder of crows, a memory of elephants, a business of ferrets, an unkindness of ravens, a prickle of hedgehogs, and a piteousness of doves. As cute and hilarious as these are, they all make some sense, don’t they? Each collective noun describes either the behavior or an attribute of the animal. I remembered that a colleague’s wife had once named our meeting of a group of ministers a “cackle of ministers.” That’s pretty accurate.

It delights me to think that each of these spot-on collective nouns originated in someone’s imagination and the terms stuck. Among new terms accepted into the Oxford Dictionary are cyberespionage, selfie, and mochaccino. Last week, I was called out by our high school youth for trying to coin the term, “sing-along-ability” when giving them guidance on hymn selection for their upcoming youth-led service.

As many of us do, I love playing with words and giving them new meaning. I am a fool for a good pun. For example, this past couple of weeks, I’ve been under the weather and when the doctor told me that it was caused by a virus, my fiance declared that I had “gone viral.” I can assure you that I have stretched the mileage considerably on that joke.

But, as much as I enjoy entertaining nuanced definitions of familiar words, I can say with some confidence that I am in good company in admitting that I have had some squeamishness around words such as: God, faith, prayer, salvation and sin. Many in this room, no doubt, have come to Unitarian Universalism from other faith traditions who use these terms in specific ways, and many of the ways that they are commonly used have left still, bleeding, gaping wounds on many. That pain, those memories and the suspicion of those who will wield such words as weapons, are real.

Although, in her attempt to find a happy medium between head and heart, my mother did cart us around occasionally between the Catholic Church and every flavor of Protestant Christianity available in Odessa, TX, I had been exposed to Unitarian Universalism early enough that my family’s “church hopping” did not rock my UU foundation. For the most part, I was sure that we would always return to our tiny UU fellowship, where we didn’t have to turn our brains off. At least that is how I saw it, as an inquisitive child. I would have made a terrible “Handmaiden,” too. At our little fellowship, we talked a ton about the beliefs of others’ religions. We learned that, as UU’s, we drew value and wisdom from each. We even had a beautiful mural on the wall, with portraits of prophetic men and women throughout the ages, including Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi, though we didn’t really talk much about the value of Jesus’ teachings.

In West Texas, I experienced some of the worst expressions of Christianity: a P.E. coach telling me that I worshiped the devil in 5th grade, a 7th grade classmate began her six-year attempt at attempting to persuade me to attend her church with her because she was genuinely worried about my soul not making it to Heaven, and, at age seventeen, the rage-filled screams of a disgusted call-center co-worker when she found out that I am gay and she had been sitting next to me for weeks. And, I have heard stories from others that my own seem like a walk in the park.

I, like the many who find their way to UUism, wanted to distinguish myself as much as possible from the Christianity that I had known, that I found myself often explaining my faith by talking about all that UU’s don’t believe in and lacking a clear vocabulary to explain what it is that we actually do believe. I could speak to shared ideals and point to the Principles and Sources, but failed miserably at sharing descriptions of how this faith moves my spirit.

Blogger, John Halstead, touches on this an article published this week entitled, “The Baby is the Bathwater: Why I haven’t joined the Unitarian Church,” “William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism in America, wrote in 1820 that Unitarians had sacrificed “imagination and poetic enthusiasm” to “the rational and critical power”. Emerson bemoaned the lack of enthusiasm in Unitarianism. Theodore Parker decried the absence of a “deep internal feeling of piety”: “Most powerfully preaching to the Understanding, the Conscience, and the Will, the cry was ever, ‘Duty, Duty! Work, Work!’ They failed to address with equal power the Soul, and did not also shout, ‘Joy, Joy! Delight, Delight!'” Orestes Brownson, a Transcendentalist who converted to Catholicism, wrote of Unitarians, that they “had pronounced the everlasting ‘No.’ Were they never to be able to pronounce the everlasting ‘Yes’?” And Unitarian minister, John Trevor, a generation later, regretted the absence of “enthusiasm and personal abandonment” in Unitarianism: “It is the last word of the Old Gospel, sifted small through the riddle of the Intellect; not the first word of the New Gospel, bursting up irresistibly from the Spirit.” These were all men who had great respect for Unitarianism and its ambition to advance social justice, but who found it lacking in something essential.”

In other words, we are great at walking the talk, but we improve on our ability, as Unitarian Universalists, to talk the walk. We need language adequate enough to express and sustain our experience of our transcendent spiritual experiences. In 2002, the then-President of our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, Rev. Bill Sinkford, preached a controversial sermon, “the Language of Reverence,” in which he pointed out that our Seven Principles does not contain one traditionally religious language, but rather focuses on lifting up our shared ethical ideals. He posed the question if this language, while beautiful in its aspirations, was sufficient; if it was “up to the spiritual task [of nurturing and describing “the reality of our religious experience”] and whether we need to expand our lexicon.” Sinkford says, “We believe that our religious theological pluralism is good- it certainly distinguishes us from most of the religious world. But our religious breadth can work against our religious depth.”

In an effort to strengthen the depth of the way we speak about this faith we love, Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar explores this topic in her book, “Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language.” In it, she acknowledges that, In some congregations, worship and community life may be rich with the lexicon of God, prayer, salvation, and sin. In other congregations, although the hymns and anthems may be replete with words like holy, grace, and soul, it is only in the music that this vocabulary is used. For many, it seems easier to sing these sentiments than to say them. We allow a broader margin for metaphor and poetry in our singing than in our speaking. And, in still other congregations and families, these words may not be merely absent, but shunned.”

Further on, Harrison Nieuwejaar names what I later discovered as I entered St. Edward’s University’s Religious Studies Department and then again when I left Texas to attend a liberal Christian seminary in New York City- there is value in common vocabulary, yes, even in traditionally Judeo-Christian words. If we, as the heady UUs we can be, can relax into our imaginations and consider meanings of such traditional religious words that exist outside of the narrowness of our exposure to fundamentalism, we may avoid our own, flip-side version of fundamentalism and enjoy a greater openness to the spirit.

She says, “even as I urge us to use religious language more broadly, I caution that we must hold these words lightly, using them to point and suggest, not to define. These words will serve us best if we allow them to be elastic, perhaps not meaning precisely to me what they mean to you, or to your Jewish neighbor, or to your Lutheran in-laws, but pointing in the same direction, capturing the essence of a shared experience, a shared longing for a deeper spiritual life. We need to go bravely into the tangle of words, wrestle with them, find which of the traditional words can become useful to us and identify which new words are needed.”

Once, as I was leaving a guest preaching gig at a small lay-led congregation here in Central Texas, a woman from the worship committee ran out after me and said that she was glad that I had spoken about prayer, as she finds that most of the staunchly Secular Humanist congregation has very negative attitudes about such things and she has learned not to bring them up. She asked me for advice on what she could say the next time someone from her church is upset that she adds the language of prayer to the service. I told her to simply introduce the language of prayer to those who dismiss it as nonsense as poetic device. God is a word that can have a concrete understanding, as with the image of a guy in the clouds with a white beard who passes judgment on humanity, but god, with a lower case “g,” can be a metaphorical, nuanced, admittedly limited word that does not correspond to any object, but may correspond to every living thing, or a feeling, or a peace that surpasses all understanding… This word can mean a mountain of layers of meaning and depth that, when we begin to release our defensiveness around it and other religious “trigger” words like it, we may find that we have more in common with members of other faith traditions than we thought.

Muslims, for example, have ninety-nine words in Arabic for Allah. Among them are attributes, such as: The Just, The Awakener, The All-Forgiving, and The Protecting Friend. It is said that there are actually one hundred, but that the last is yet unknown.

Harrison Nieuwejaar asserts that, for UUs, “God has been put in a box and has lost its rich metaphorical meaning. We need to open that box and let an expansive breeze of ideas and images and associations again infuse this language. We need to reclaim textured meanings, but we have a strong cultural tide to row against, a double tide of fundamentalism and atheism. The fundamental views- both theistic and atheistic- are the ones that get the most airtime and thus become accepted as the shared cultural understanding of God.”

When boxed in, words like God, prayer, sin, and salvation can seemingly serve to keep us safe from those whose narrow views of what such words can mean and tuck us away from the memories of such encounters. But, is adopting our own brand of fundamentalism, an “us/them” fervor, helping us to heal and grow and fully enjoy our spirituality to the fullest?

Also, when we restrict the meaning of language of reverence, as Sinkford coined, are we missing the opportunity to build connections with our neighbors through a common vocabulary?

This conversation was all the rage in UU circles in the middle of last decade, but I don’t believe it has yet become passe, as the character of Unitarian Universalism, by and large was to distance ourselves as much as possible from “God language” throughout most of the twentieth century. That just means that we have at least a century’s worth of baggage to now sift through. We have embraced the fallacy that a certain group of people who we love to point fingers at, have sole ownership of this language of reverence, that such language only speaks of the implausible, that we embrace science over myth. We speak as if there exists no awe, mystery, or transcendence in the natural world, as if we never have cause to connect with one another through clumsy, yet movingly authentic attempts at describing the indescribable.

Each of these terms, alone, could be its own sermon. And, indeed, I have spent some time in past sermons teasing out a few of them, but what I would invite us all to do is to fumble around a bit, as awkward and uncomfortable as it might be, with using traditionally religious words to speak of our religious experience. We will try this together. We have before us the expanse of our imaginations’ poetry as well as the infinite possibilities to which the limitations of spoken language restrict us.

I will leave you with the words of the late Rev. Forrest Church, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”

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

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Rev. Marisol Caballero
February 23, 2014

Not much happens in February. It’s still pretty cold, but there are signs of spring beginning. This is an ideal time to consider all that is to come in what seems like an in-between time and to notice beauty in unexpected places.

Call to Worship 
by Gordon B. McKeeman

We summon ourselves from the demands and delights of the daily round:
from the dirty dishes and unwaxed floors;
from unmowed grass, and untrimmed bushes;
from all incompleteness and not-yet-startedness;
from the unholy and unresolved.

We summon ourselves to attend to our vision of peace and justice;
of cleanliness and health;
of delight and devotion;
of the lovely and the holy;
of who we are and what we can do.

We summon the power oftradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the knowing of the very young.

We summon beauty, eloquence, poetry, and music to be the bearers of our dreams.

We would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts to the amplest dimensions of life.

We rejoice in manifold promises and possibilities.

Reading: “The God’s in My Closet,”
by Terri Dennehy Pahucki

I find them everywhere – in the sunrise, in my toddler’s giggle, in age-old traditions, in the courageous surrender of a friend on the brink of death. Pieces and particles of gods, even whole gods- examined, collected, and eventually stuffed into the back of my closet. Some of them I’ve had for years, hand-me-down heirlooms I may have outgrown but can’t bear to give away. Others I’ve meticulously stitched by hand from an eclectic assortment of fabrics. In fact, I’ve got a closet full of gods that I try on for size when I need one. Some I save for special occasions: the God that Sustains through Funerals; the God of Family Get-Togethers. Others appear when I least expectthem: God the Savior; God the Jokester. I am in awe of the God of Nature and mystified by the God of Time. I’m struggling with the God of Relationships, and grateful for the God of Second Chances.

Amidst my menagerie, there is one god that appears most often, one who refuses to remain in the closet, hidden among the dusty refuse. This is the God of Questions, the God of Human Longing- a god as familiar as my worn-out jeans and as intimate as my own skin. Inevitably, this god arrives just as I’ve begun to sink back into my easy chair and, with one swift blow, knocks me into the world of the living. For I have done more than wear my gods on the outside; I have also swallowed them like a holy wafer and made them part of myself. And they have begun to echo in the still small miracle of my voice – in my questions, in my searching, and in my longing for the discovery of life and all its gods.

Prayer 
by Leaf Seligman

Loving God, We pause in the stillness to rest for a moment, to quiet ourselves so that we can feel what stirs within us. Each breath draws us closer to the pulse of life and with each exhalation we make room for something new. May we find in this gathering the comfort of those who care. May we encounter patience along our growing edges and compassion in our most tender spots. Here may we find the inspiration and encouragement we need to face our challenges and nurture ourselves. And in the presence of suffering across the globe may we redouble our efforts to practice kindness where we are, with the hope that the light of our actions travels like the light of faraway stars. May our gestures of compassion and generosity seed possibility. May we walk humbly with one another, choosing reconciliation over resentment as we try to live right-sized. When life presses in and shifts us off balance, when pain assails us, when frustration mounts, may the rhythm of our breath steady us and bring us back to a place of gratitude.

Sermon “Toward Becoming”

Sermons, like people, have so many ways of coming into this world and living among us. This one had a birth so unusual that I would like to tell you its story.

One of the many reasons that being a Sunday school teacher or youth group advisor is one of the most fun and rewarding ministries to get involved with at this church, is that we have begun holding monthly happy hour gatherings to help grow our friendships and strengthen the bonds between volunteers. It was while chomping on pizza and sipping on wine that I received an urgent text message from Vickie Valadez, our Communication Coordinator. It turns out that she was at home, finalizing the last edits of the February newsletter, when she realized that today’s sermon title and synopsis were not included in this month’s submissions. She needed the information right away.

I said out loud, perplexed, “but I don’t preach in February … “as I checked my calendar, which was then followed by an, “Oh … I don’t preach in March. I am scheduled to preach in February.” Now, I’m not sure how other ministers do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others for whom coming up with sermon topics is second nature. But, for me, choosing a topic and writing a sermon means a way of being in the world. I must be deliberate in remaining open to inspiration. My eyes, ears, mind, and heart must be poised for the Spirit to glide over and land on one of my outstretched branches. Sometimes I sit like this for weeks before I realize success.

I realized that I would not have such a luxury this time. So, in an effort to force the Muse, I did what any other minister might do in a similar situation- I asked table full of pizza-weighted, beer-soaked Sunday school teachers what I should preach on at the end of February!

Luckily, I was sitting across the table from Conner, whose talent is currently employed in religious exploration with three and four year olds, said, “talk about love.”

“Well, it’ll be the end of February. Valentine’s will be over. Everyone’ll already be all “loved” out.” (Disclaimer: I don’t actually believe that this congregation’s capacity for love is that limited. I just wanted to explore other possible themes.)

“Well, hmmm. What else happens in February?” Conner thought out loud. “I don’t know,” he said. “February is sort of the armpit month of the year. Nobody looks forward to February.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in the fall you have school starting and leaves turning. Pretty soon it’ll be the holidays- Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas. Then in January, there’s the New Year and the excitement that comes with that. Then, the next things people are going to look forward to is Springtime and things warming up, everything in bloom … So, February stinks. It’s the armpit month of the year. Everyone wants to get it done with. Maybe that’s why it’s so short.”

“I can honestly say that I never thought of it like that.”

“Yeah, so you should talk about all that is to come, finding beauty in unexpected places, since this is a time that there’s so much that isn’t so beautiful.”

And sometimes, the Spirit just plops down across from you, drinking craft beer and eating good pizza! These are the people we have teaching our littlest UU’s, folks!

I’m not sure I’m ready to call this month the “armpit month ofthe year” yet, but I understood where Conner was coming from, especially since I, and maybe many of you can relate, have been in a funky mood lately. I have no reason to feel grumpy, but I do. I love my job. It keeps me plenty busy! I love my fiance and I’m loving the process of wedding planning. I have great friends, I adore living in Austin, and I’m in good health. No complaints. No real reason to feel anything but contentment. Deep down I do, but I’ve been unusually grumpy.

So, maybe it’s true. Maybe this time of year is one that we naturally would rather skip through. I am sure that those in the colder regions of our country would be happy to rush into spring, at this point! Perhaps it is easier to expect to see examples of beauty and goodness when there is contentment in the now. Searching for Beauty; holding out our expectant branches, hoping to feel the sudden lightweightiness of its Truth, is hard when we’re grumpy, especially when there is a true heavy burden of another sort of truth weighing our thoughts down.

A couple of years ago, my Erin and I went on a pilgrimage of sorts, to Big Bend. We stopped in the tiny ghost town of Terlingua, at a house whose sign beside the dirt road beckoned us to come in and view its “art gallery.” Inside, we found a few paintings by various local artists along the walls, and bought some candles labeled “tranquility” from the woman inside. I noticed a stack of small bumper stickers that read, “Push me Toward Becoming in Terlingua, TX” and was moved to buy one.

It seemed like a prayer. “Push me Toward Becoming in Terlingua, TX.” Though I have heard many verbs used in prayers (guide, remind, teach, hold), I had never before heard one so bold as “push.” I stopped Erin in her browsing to show her what I’d found. She liked it, too, and wondered aloud about what it would mean to be pushed “toward becoming.” Becoming what, more fully human? A better person? Or, it could just mean “becoming.” We are never fully finished. We are always becoming.

We bought the candles and the bumper sticker, which I had resolved to stick on my new bike helmet back at home, and we set off. As we backed out, Erin noticed a small sign above the door to the house. It read, “Becoming.” The gallery’s name was “Becoming.” We had a great laugh, but somehow the bumper sticker’s prayerful message didn’t seem any less poignant. Maybe we an~ not so unlike the bare tree branches of February. Maybe we are in need of being pushed toward becoming, too, even if we’re a bit grumpy.

I like the idea of always being in formation, of never fully arriving. I can imagine that, for some, this idea would bring discontentment with the present self, as we are future focused in a quest “toward becoming.” But, surprisingly, I think that the notion that we can be hoping, striving, working at becoming would allow for a greater sense of peace with the self in the present moment- a forgiveness of all that we have not been and are not; a release of hypercritical self-judgment because we can let go of the expectation of perfection.

If we pray to be pushed toward becoming, we might be awakened to the understanding that there is beauty in not only having already become, but more so in the becoming. Beauty dwells in the in-betweens, the unfinished, unpolished, imperfect, even in the armpit of our calendar.

I spent some time researching various thoughts on beauty, what it actually is, and how it can be located and perceived. Here are some of the opinions I ran across:

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
– Confucius

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful for beauty is God’s handwriting.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is whatever gives joy.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
– Jean Anouilh

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth follow only beau~ and obey only love.
– Khalil Gibran

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
– John Muir

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.
– Miss Piggy, The Muppets

Yes, beauty is subjective. But, I do like the idea of waking ourselves up to it and helping our soul point it out to our eyes, or perhaps the other way around, once in a while. Sometimes we do need a push.

While in Africa earlier this year, I noticed that, in Tanzania, it is popular to decorate a car or van’s windows and windshield with American corporate logos and words in English. Other than a connection to the west, these decals have no apparent context. We saw Nike and Apple computer logos, as well as one windshield that read, “iPod,” in enormous letters. By far, though, our favorite was an overcrowded bus that drove past us, with the giant phrase, “Thanks God,” on its windshield. Something may have been lost in translation. It didn’t say, “Thanks be to God,” or “Thanks [comma] God.” Just, “Thanks God.” This was almost as funny as the church sign further down that highway that told us that we were passing the “Church of the End Times Message.”

Even so, “Thanks God” became not only our inside joke for the remainder of the trip, but also our shorthand for describing our awe and gratitude for moments of discovering immense beauty and kindness. Since returning home, there have been many unexpected moments when a noteworthy sunset, a lingering hummingbird, the smile of a stranger, or an extended hug will provoke a “Thanks God.” Thanks, Tanzania.

If moving toward becoming requires creating inviting branches of our eyes, ears, minds and hearts for Beauty to perch upon, how do we successfully extend such an invitation, in order to seek our Beauty? Outside of what TV, movies, and magazines tell us about it, how will we recognize the truly beautiful about this world? How will we know it when we see it, so that we can properly cherish it? And, how can we then embody Beauty, ourselves?

In her essay, “What Shall We Do With All This Beauty?” Rebecca Ann Parker agrees with James Baldwin when she says that, “the greatest challenge in our lives is the challenge presented to us by the beauty of life, by what beauty asks of us, and by what we must do to keep faith with the beauty that has nourished our lives.” We are living in an age in which the best of ourselves is being asked of us by this beautiful, ailing world. What a mighty gift! Parker encourages us to not be daunted in our “becoming” by saying, “I believe that in rising to the occasion of what is asked of us now, we will discover a depth of strength and a richness of love and courage that we did not know we could claim or achieve. I believe that in rising to the challenge of our times we will wade into the mystery of life to a depth we did not know was available to us:’

In her beautiful, “Benediction,” Parker includes words upon which I could probably hang the entirety of my personal theology and hope:

“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 acknowledgement
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.
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.”

Maybe, just maybe, the cure for the February funk isn’t the hope of March or April, after all.

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