Does it hurt to bloom?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 3, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

In this intergenerational service we celebrate the traditional Unitarian ceremony of flower communion. We remember its origins as a vivid resistance to Nazi oppression.

Call to Worship
“Blessing the Bread”
by Lynn Ungar

What a gathering-the purple
tongues of iris licking out
at spikes of lupine, the orange
crepe skirts of poppies, lifting
over buttercup and daisy.

Who can be grim
in the face of such abundance?
There is nothing to compare,
no need for beauty to compete.

The voluptuous rhododendron
and the plain grass
are equally filled with themselves,
equally declare the miracles
of color and form.

This is what community looks like–
this vibrant jostle, stem by stem
declaring the marvelous joining.

This is the face of communion,
the incarnation, once more
gracefully resurrected from winter.

Hold these things together
in your sight–purple, crimson,
magenta, blue. You will
be feasting on this long after
the flowers are gone.

Flower Communion

As we begin our Flower Communion I ask that as you each approach the communion vases, do so quietly — reverently — with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love.

As you bring your flower up, take a few moments to admire all the different flowers. Notice their particular shapes. Their colors. Their beauty. Are there any that particularly speak to you? As you take a moment to look at the flowers, remember that these flowers are gifts that someone else has brought to to this church community today. It represents that person’s unique humanity. If you did not bring a flower this morning, that is alright. Please still come forward and take a moment to admire all the flowers.

Please leave the flowers in the vases for the time being. Everyone will get a different flower than the one they brought to church at the end of service.

Norbert Capek started this ritual to celebrate the beauty of our faith and the people in it. Remembering that the sounds of children are a part of the quiet, let us now share quietly in this Unitarian Universalist ritual of oneness, community, and love.

Please move toward the center aisle and get in line to come to the flower altar in front of the pulpit.

Blessing

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these, thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to thy holy will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of thy most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do thy work in this world.

Sermon

Flower communion is being celebrated in almost every one of the thousand UU churches in our country. It is a ceremony which was made up in a war-torn country where really bad things were going on because the country’s leaders thought that some people were good and other people were troublemakers, dirty, lazy and wrong. A Unitarian minister named Norbert Capek said “Look at the flowers. All of them are beautiful, and they are so different from one another. No one looks at a daisy and says “Why are you not a rose? If you tried harder you could be a rose.” No one looks at a lily and scolds it for not being a poppy. Flowers are beautiful, each in their own way, like we are. Whenever human beings get together, we are like a big bouquet of flowers.

Flowers have to be so brave. Their seeds fall into the ground and are buried by leaves, wind and rain. They stay there in the darkness, which is where they need to be for this first part. Then they split open, and a little shoot comes out. The shoot makes its way toward the sun. Where is the sun, it asks itself, and goes past any obstacle in order to find the light. That is a good picture of our hearts. We love the light of truth, the light of connection with each other. The light of love and purpose. Finally the shoot breaks through the ground, and it sends its stem up with two leaves. Those leaves eat air and sun and rain and they make more leaves and more, and then sometimes there is a bud. The bud is tiny and perfect. I think it might like being a bud.

But then one day its petals start to loosen. OH NO!!! What’s happening? I used to be so neat and compact, and now I’m opening up, ew, spreading out! Nooooooooo! Then — wait a minute, I’m beautiful! This is great!

Then, just when you’re enjoying your beautiful openness, when you are a blossom, and the bees are coming to visit you and you’re all warm in the sun… then your petals open even more and start falling off! OH NO!! But now you are at a great point… you are using your green energy to make seeds, and you’re ready to let them fall into the earth. Bye, little seeds, Blessings on you! See you when you sprout.

This church is in a period where part of it is blooming. I have to tell you that last Wednesday I was grumpy. TOO MUCH CHANGE. I don’t like it. It’s hard having the bathrooms under construction. It’s hard wondering if our concrete will pass the stress test. It’s hard knowing you are struggling to get here, to find parking. I want things to be easy. GRUMPY. It hurts to bloom. Yes it does.

In the words of the poet Dylan Thomas “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age;”

We feel the force. It is the life force, that makes us grow and change. Let us welcome it, with all its surprises and alarms. Let us have faith in it, that if we welcome it and line ourselves up with it, it will take us to the place we need to be.

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