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Rev. Kristina Spaude
July 7, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Together we will reflect on our interdependence as we grow in community through the lens of time and imagination. Rev. Kristina Spaude currently serves as the contract minister for the UU Church of Tarpon Springs, FL. Her six-word story of faith is, “We’re here to build Love’s house,” and she is passionate about making the way for more justice in this world.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
GO TO THE LIMITS OF YOUR LONGING
– Ranier Maria Rilke
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.Give me your hand.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
“A HOUSE CALLED TOMORROW”
by Alberto RiosYou are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win – not finally,
No matter how loud they are.We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise.But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words –
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves.
And that’s all we need
To start.
That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.Be good, then better.
Write books.
Cure disease.
Make us proud.
Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you?
When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
Sermon
Last year during the Festival of Homiletics, a week long celebration of preaching and presentations by progressive and libratory Christian preachers and scholars, I was struck by one particular story. So we are getting biblical this morning. One of the preachers mentioned Lot’s wife and shared that she is the most referenced woman from the scriptures in poetry, I think it was.
Lot’s wife has been sitting with me for months patiently waiting for her turn to teach us. Of course, it is Lot’s wife who is unnamed in the scriptures, but who in the Midrash, the wisdom of rabbis that supplements the Torah, is named as Edith. She is the one who breaks God’s instruction not to look back as she is fleeing from her home, which is being spectacularly destroyed, fleeing with her husband and their children who would leave, and for this she instantly becomes a pillar of salt.
Now, that story begins with God expressing that there has been such an outcry from people that they cannot ignore that the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had fallen into sinfulness, with the greatest sin, perhaps, being breaking the commandment to welcome the stranger, to love our neighbors, to be hospitable.
To assess the situation there, God sends two emissaries to the city, two of the same who had just visited Abraham and Sarah, who despite their ages are promised their own child. Abraham, just informed that he would be the father of nations despite being ancient, is told by God that Sodom is sinful, so they are preparing to make their way to Sodom, where one of Abraham’s nephews, Lot, lives.
Abraham pleads with God, “What if there are 50 good people. What if there are only 45? Maybe there are only 40. What if there are only 30, 30 good people in the city? What if there are only 20? What if there are only 10. What if there are only 10 good people? And God says he will not destroy the city if 10 are good.
They arrive and Lot who has been at the gate welcomes them into his home. Initially the angels decline but Lot urges them to stay with him. They eat well, and as night falls, the home is surrounded by the men of the town, demanding that the two be sent out. Lot begs them to behave and offers his daughters instead, and the crowd gets angrier. They only stop banging at the door when the angels strike them blind, and they can no longer find it.
This story is often misconstrued as one condemning homosexuality, but it is not about that at all. It is about the inhospitality of the residents who have wealth and food in abundance. And somehow this has made them cruel instead of generous. It has become the practice of the men of the city to violently assault their visitors, which is why people cried out to God for help. And so God decides that the city must be destroyed.
Lot and his family are given little time to collect their things and make their way out before God unleashes their destruction, sulfur and fire, which leads to explosions and more. God warns them not to look back or there will be consequences. But Lot’s wife cannot help herself, it seems.
So this raises a few questions. I’ve been spending some time with Krista Tippett and her philosophy of asking good questions. And so we begin with what other reason could there be that she would look back knowing that it would be her end. It is natural for us to look back as we leave. We remember in those moments what was, has been, the promises we once felt held by. We think about the community that we had or dreamed of having, our roots, the places we loved, and for Lot’s wife, that perhaps her children also loved.
It is deeply human to recognize that places become homes, that our relationships with places and people are what shape and make our lives. Maybe she was looking back to see if her daughters who had chosen to stay with their husbands had changed their minds. How do you not look back and remember your hopes, the people who loved you into yourself, the memory of firsts and lasts and everything in between?
As I left Pennsylvania to take my position in Tarpon Springs, I looked back as we drove across the Susquehanna River for the last time, wanting to have my last memory of the place not to be one of pain, but of beauty.
Perhaps Lot’s wife was looking back to help her accept that this city was worthy of such destruction. Given how natural of an instinct turning back would be, It seems cruel to believe that God would want to punish anyone already facing such a terrible situation.
So this is the second question. Why would God make such an instruction? In general, the God of the Hebrew Bible isn’t the warmer and fuzzier God we get to know once Jesus enters the picture. But God is also not unreasonable or punishing for the sake of being punishing. So what would inspire them to make this instruction?
Given the context of the rest of the scriptures, my interpretation is because sometimes we humans have a tendency to hold on too tightly to the past, even at the expense of our present and future. We continue to act in the ways we have acted, even when doing so keeps us locked in cycles of creating harm to ourselves. God’s attempt at going scorched earth in these cities of licentiousness is to try to create a blank slate to give the people a chance to begin again, to build something new and one would expect or at least hope better.
In order to do that, not only does Lot’s family, the ones who are to survive, that they need to be far away, they need to be moving in the direction of forward with their hearts and minds as well as with their bodies. Turning back slows us down and risks us getting stuck, whether physically or emotionally. As if looking back might cause us to freeze. As if turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt was just an affirmation of her own unwillingness or unpreparedness to make space for the future or even the present.
The third question is why salt? Why does she turn into a pillar of salt? The Midrash says that Lot’s wife went to other homes in Sodom asking for salt so that she could share that she had guests for the evening. This is not part of the scriptures though, and the text itself does not offer any insight into the question. What we do know is that salt is a component of tears. Being turned into a pillar of salt may be a way to convey tears of loss. Salt is also highly soluble in water that is when wet salt will melt away. And land that is saturated with salt cannot grow anything. Salt is a cleanser, a purifying agent, a sanctifier.
Perhaps being made a pillar of salt which will not last as a monument to the past for long and will become a stain upon the earth as a patch where nothing will grow is what God is trying to warn against, that if there can be no good or healthy growth, there will be no growth at all. Without a future, the past will also be lost because there is no one left to carry it.
Or to quote from Paul Razor in a 2010 UU World article, “Nearly a Century ago, the Reverend Louis B. Fisher, the Dean of the Universalist Seminary at St. Lawrence University, described Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer is that we do not stand at all. We move.” Razor continues, “Yet there are times when the opposite is true. When the realities are so daunting that we freeze up playing out Dean Fisher’s aphorism in reverse, we do not move, we stand. And more, when we decide to go it alone, to look backward more than we are willing to move forward, we lose ourselves. We wander into a wilderness of our own making and without companions, surrounded by what seeks to separate us from one another.
Lot’s wife is a warning to us that where we travel, we must go together if we are to have any hope. To reference another scriptural story, the one about Moses leading the people from Egypt. Too often we focus on the 40 years wandering the desert. And with good reason, we understand that hardship. But in doing so, we overlook the effort that it takes to leave Egypt at all. Some people protest. The journey will be hard. And is being a slave really so bad when you know how the system works?
They clung to their horrendous conditions because they were familiar. The past can feel like a warm comforter on a cold day. Cause sometimes we humans have a tendency to hold on too tightly to the past, even at the expense of our present and future. We continue to act in ways that we have acted, even when doing so keeps us locked in cycles of creating harm to ourselves.
Communities, including congregations that are not moving or resting actively are dying, resting from the lens of doing appropriate care, of catching our breath, of meditating to bring us calm or to help us dream. Of taking the time to ask the hard questions, these are all active resting. Refusing to engage in these practices like refusing to do the work to move forward is an indication of unease of this, we become like Lot’s wife, frozen in time.
The thing is that generosity is not just about money, or your time, talent, and treasures we so often say. It’s about all of that and more, about the ways that we are open to curiosity, hospitality, care. The ways we think about not just this moment, but about this moment in the context of what has been and what will yet be, yet to be possible based on what we do today.
Generosity is temporal this way, it extends from before all the way to beyond. It’s also a conversation that we have, both with the past and the future to give direction to the present. It’s a conversation we have with all that is possible now. Perhaps we are like children who created Roxaboxen, whose imaginations inspire them to create homes and neighborhoods out of boxes, stones, glass, cactus, and other odds and ends. The present offers different possibilities to us just as the future does if we let it.
Generosity is about reaching beyond ourselves into the future, doing just a little bit more than is necessary to make other things possible. We need to be generous in holding space for dreaming, for others dreams that we alone cannot imagine, but that will save us nonetheless. We need to look forward at least as much as we are looking back. Are we reaching forward for the generosity the future is trying to extend to us?
How do we hold space in this moment to honor the past, to name what it has given us, and to allow the future to also be possible? A healthy past wants us to let go and grow forward. When Lot’s wife looked back, she was holding herself back from being able to hold space for other possibilities in that moment.
When I left Pennsylvania, I was already making space in my heart and mind for Florida for a couple of months. My looking back was a last goodbye, an act of closure. Our minds sometimes imagine us living in the future or our hearts and minds may try to convince us that we live in the past. We know how that turned out though.We can only ever live in this moment in the present.
Our own imaginations as we age may become less inspired, less curious, less interesting. Imagination is something that we have to practice. And congregations have to practice this together. And every time someone comes or goes, we have to rework the possibilities we have been imagining to make space for everyone, to practice a generosity of spirit.
And we can if we choose to do so. Choose to make a little more space. Choose to be a little bit more flexible. Choose to dream a little bigger. Choose to lean in a little more. May we choose to do the next right thing, the next caring thing, the next thing worth doing for the tomorrow we hope to build.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
From THE GIFT OF FAITH
Jeanne Harrison NieuwejaarIn the lore of ancient China, there is a story of a philosopher who was asked, “Where is the road called Hope?”
He replied, “It does not exist, but as people move upon it, it comes into being.”I invite you to continue moving forward on this path, this journey called hope, together in Unitarian Universalism with me.
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