Flower Communion

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 31, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

It is once again time for one of our most beloved traditions. In a more usual year we would gather and bring a flower from somewhere along our path to share and take one from the altar. Bring a reminder of new life and the movement of the seasons and sharing it with the others gathered is a beautiful way to enjoy the bounty and goodness of our green earth. This year, due to sheltering and striving for safety within our lives, we are doing it differently. We need your help to make it happen!

Chalice Lighting

We light this chalice so that its flame may signify the spiritual strands of light that bind our hearts and souls with one another. Even while we must be physically apart, we bask in its warmth together.

Call to Worship

SEEDS
by Rev. Meg Barnhouse

Who are my children?
One is a baker in Cairo with flour on her cheek.
One is a banker in Oslo with dreams of playing in a tuba band.

One child lives in the mountains of Peru and loves to watch the Oscars.
I have a son who is a monk in Katmandu
and has a bird he has taught to whistle.
And a starving daughter in Kenshasa who dreams of running in the Olympics.

One of our cousins is a pine tree on the side of a mountain in Japan.
And one is a catfish drowsing in the Mississippi mud.
One is a bear in North Carolina.
And one is a butterfly in Finland.

A woman held an apple seed In her hand,
and held it to the sun.
It’s easy to count the number of seeds in an apple, She said.
But tell me, how many apples are in this seed?
How many apples are in the seed?
How many generations are in this child?

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

THESE ROSES
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no more; in the leafless root, there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Sermon

Today is a sad day, a strange day. An angry, sorrowing, overwhelmed, furious day. So many people around the world are dead from this virus. We who have the privilege of having houses and who can work from home slowly notice that social distancing is a privilege. Many people live in households where there are so many people, many of whom are going out into the pandemic to work, coming home, trying to be careful. We who have had the privilege of solid medical care our whole lives notice that those who couldn’t afford medical maintenance of their health are more fragile. The poor are dying at a greater rate than other people. The urban poor are more likely to be black and brown, and the rural poor are all colors, but still dying because of lack of masks, working essential jobs, being on the reservation where grifters are given the job of procuring medical supplies for their Nation.

And now everyone can watch white supremacy culture in action as Amy Cooper calls the police on Christian Cooper because he dared to ask her to leash her dog. In our culture, white people, any white bodies, are allowed to enforce rules on black bodies. Black bodies shock white bodies when they enforce rules like “your dog is supposed to be on a leash.” The white bodies can then sic the police on the black bodies, knowing full well that the police may respond with violence toward that black man because our whole culture has taught us to see black men as threatening. The Washington Post used the phrase “white-caller crime.”

The same day the police killed George Floyd, a black man handcuffed, on the ground, already subdued, begging for his life, bystanders begging for his life. They murdered him callously, in full view, in the day time, radicalized and empowered by an administration openly encouraging racism. The people have had enough. We are responding with rage. Sometimes you have to break things and set them on fire to be heard by the heavy-footed, the comfortable powerful.

It is in this tumultuous yet somehow hopeful time that we come to our flower communion. Hopeful because all of us are feeling together, all of us are grieving, in a rage, disgusted, fed up. The status quo cannot continue.

Flowers have always played a part in how humans express grief. We lay wreaths on the sidewalk where something awful happened. We bring flowers to the cemetery. We toss necklaces of flowers onto the water.

The Unitarian Flower Ceremony was created by a Unitarian minister named Norbert Capek.

Norbert Capek developed this flower celebration for his congregation in 1923. He had been a Baptist minister in Newark NJ, but grew too liberal for the Baptists. He and his wife joined a Unitarian congregation in Orange County, NJ, and then decided in 1921 to take Unitarianism back to Czechoslovakia. They founded the Unitarian church in Prague, and by 1930 were recognized by the Czech government. The Nazis were certain which flowers were of value and which should be erased. They wanted to erase the Jews, the disabled, LGBTQ people, and Travelers, sometimes called Roma, derogatively called gypsies.

When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human person to be – as Nazi court records show — “…too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.” Dr. Capek was sent to Dachau, where he was killed the next year during a Nazi “medical experiment.” This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is widely celebrated today. It is a noble and meaning-filled ritual we are about to recreate. We join in affirming that any culture that declares some of value and some humans expendable is evil, and must be opposed. Our silence is such easy violence. We who identify as white will continue to find our voices and speak. The message of the flower ceremony is still disruptive.

Now we consecrate the flowers with Dr Capek’s prayer

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.

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