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Bear W. Qolezcua
January 20, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
In the midst of so much civil turmoil and violence, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. marched hand-in-hand with others. His life and his ministry of reckless love taught us what it meant to truly care for others through the works of our hands and hearts. Let us explore the possibility that lives within us to do the work of nourishing, transforming, and seeking justice to build our Beloved Community.
Call to Worship
OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE
By Naomi King
When the world’s violence shatters the joy of a moment
We pause and reach out for the hands that remain
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
When despair rises as a monster from the deep
and drags down one of our own, our answer is that
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
When hatred and anger rage in fire and suffering
We bend to pick up the wounded, to bind up ourselves and
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
When fear whispers “build more gates” “add more locks”
“the blessed are those who defend themselves,”
we rock those fears to sleep and let them rest as
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
People will do unspeakably cruel and horrible things;
we know this fact, we live and die this daily,
all around the world, in every community and every wasteland.
But we know the answer is found only with one action, and so
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone can be healed.
This is the truth we affirm.
We live with courage and with a wider and wider circle
of that force that bends our lives to ones of mercy, justice, and compassion.
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
It’s the truth: just by being born you are loved.
There is something within you and every person that can be loved.
WE OPEN OUR HEARTS WITH LOVE.
In love, we pray for those families, those individuals,
all the persons here and everywhere
who are desperately sure that there is not enough love in the world for them
to have some, who are desperately sure that they do not matter.
In love with life, in love with the Beloved,
we turn to answer that desperation with assurance:
you are loved, you are lovable, we will and do love you.
Now, attend to your life’s work: to love.
It’s the only legacy that matters.
AMEN.
Reading
ANYONE’S MINISTRY
by Gordon B. McKeeman
Ministry is
a quality of relationship between and among human beings
that beckons forth hidden possibilities.
inviting people into deeper, more constant
more reverent relationship with the world
and with one another
carrying forward a long heritage of hope and
liberation that has dignified and informed
the human venture over many centuries.
being present with, to, and for others
in their terrors and torments
in their grief, misery, and pain.
knowing that those feelings
are our feelings, too.
celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit
the miracles of birth and life
the wonders of devotion and sacrifice.
witnessing to life-enhancing values
speaking truth to power
standing for human dignity and equity
for compassion and aspiration.
believing in life in the presence of death
struggling for human responsibility
against principalities and structures that ignore humane-ness
and become instruments of death.
It is all these and much, much more than all of them,
present in the wordless
the unspoken
the ineffable.
It is speaking and living the highest we know
and living with the knowledge that it is
never as deep, or as wide
or as high as we wish.
Whenever there is a meeting
that summons us to our better selves,
wherever our lostness is found
our fragments are united
or our wounds begin healing our spines stiffen and
our muscles grow strong for the task
there … is Ministry.
Sermon
In preparation for this sermon, I did what every good presbyterian seminary graduate would do and started researching in the easiest way I could think of. It began with me flipping through the dozens of notebooks and journals from my time studying theology hoping that maybe, just maybe, one of the pages would LITERALLY fly out and tell me it was the perfect place from which I might draw my entire sermon without a single hitch … which didn’t happen.
In all this searching, however, I found St. Augustine, who wrote, “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and the needy. It has the eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of humanity. THIS is what love looks like.”
So there I was writing and writing, trying to fight with my overall theme of the holiness of hands … for a sermon that also needed to involve the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr. For a sermon about uplifting one another and lending a helping hand. For a sermon about mountains and valleys and marches and hope and distress and … I began feeling a LOT like Maria in the Sound of Music … up on that hill, dressed like a nun, spinning around while smiling into the camera at the perfect moment, belting out “the hills are alive with the sound of obvious connections that I’m not seeing”. And I rewrote this thing over 30 times. I’m not one to lead the expedition into theological territory, I leave that to the pastors, but I do believe myself to be an adequate sherpa.
That’s why there were so many rewrites. I was trying to pack the necessary but bring as little extra weight as possible. The biggest lesson I wanted to impress here is that change begins the moment we decide to touch the divine, using the works of our hands and the strength of our commitment, to lift our world to a higher place.
With our hands we share our power, our energy, our warmth and coolness. They open our “personal bubbles”, they welcome and guide, they stop and redirect. Hands can break barriers and bring us closer to one another in physical and spiritual ways.
When I was younger, I used to sit on a big metal stool and watch my mother’s mothers, Trella and Noni, make challah, or my father’s mother, Maria Josefina, make tortillas.
I often sat quietly on the floor as my father played his guitar or worked on his own sermons, poring through concordances.
I loved watching my mom draw, paint, and sculpt pretty much any pliable material. She chiselled and sandblasted headstones into shape, confidently worked on car engines, built a barn. Her hands clasped together in earnest prayer at temple. They protected me fiercely.
Hands not only touch … they express some of our deepest emotions in ways our words fail. They show hatred, concern, disgust, grief.
When I see people protesting … I look for what they are doing with their hands. Are raised in fists of rebellion? Lifted in protection? Begging for an ear or mercy, for a crumb of humanity and compassion?
I have held hands, both with those I love and those who I did not know I loved, as we marched for our lives, for the rights of others, for the memory of wrongs needing to be made right.
I have held the hands, still warm but cooling rapidly, of people who otherwise would have been alone at their death. They have said hello, thankfully, more than they have said goodbye.
I have felt hands raised in anger, in love, in companionship.
I have picked up children who have fallen, wiped away tears, held sleeping babies, thrown them high in celebration and joy.
Our calling tends to be fueled by the same fires that flare over and over along our journeys and hands, as you can tell by me repeating the word so much, have informed my own calling in this world in some profound way. They fascinate me. And because of all this, they are the tools I choose to empower our communal calling, tasked to do the work of care, to help support one another in our journeys out of the dark valleys and onto the highest plains and mountains of hope.
Dr. King once, very memorably, spoke about being lifted up and standing at that mountain top hoping one day for all the people of earth to see the promised land that lies beyond.
However, in that vision he also recognized that in order to get to the mountaintop we must first make it through the valley. And that valley … is wide and it is a dark place that may feel immeasurably deep from which so many of us feel we will never see ourselves free.
Dr. King knew a lot about time spent there. His valley moments included three separate 108 mile long marches from Montgomery and Selma, for the right to register to vote. It included threats to his wife, his children, his own life. It included suicide attempts as a child. Depression throughout his life. So many sorrows and heartbreaks and losses but he knew that only in the darkest night can we see the stars. His valley was low, but his vision was high. He saw his ministry as one that represented and fought for the voiceless, the erased, the abused and forgotten. He saw his work as a minister in the light of duty to humanity, to equality, and for compassionate care for others.
Now, I feel I need to warn you, I am going to quote a few verses of the Bible. However, I’m considering this to be more … “The Bible according to Bear” …
Dr. King was fond of the parable about the Good Samaritan found in the book of Luke. The story is basically: Jesus was teaching in a temple and a lawyer/scribe … the translation is kinda both … a guy who studied the Torah and knew the WORDS by heart decided to test Jesus on his knowledge and maybe have him slip up on his own teachings about giving ourselves over to the care and service of others … and so he asked “Teacher. What must I do to inherit the promises of eternal life?”
Rabbi Jesus responded with a question, because that’s how Rabbis do Rabbi-ing … speaking from a LOT of experience … and he asked “What does the law say we are supposed to do?”
The lawyer/scribe guy replied “Love God with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus looked at him, probably in some “I am tired, can we please get to the point” but still polite way, and said “you know the answer to your own question. So go and do what you just said you know you are supposed to do.”
Of course, the lawyer wanted to make sure he heard Jesus ‘correctly’ and asked him “well, who is my neighbor?”
Ignoring the obvious, probably just blinking in silence for a moment, Jesus then did his Jesus thing and told a parable.
“A man was walking down the sloped, windy, kinda scary path from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was attacked by robbers who took everything and left him for dead. A priest walked by, probably on his way to the temple, and followed the laws that dictated cleanliness for those who enter the temple by passing on the other side of the road.
Later, a Levite came along. Levites were usually helpers in the temple so he too was probably scrubbed clean and wouldn’t be allowed in the temple for days if he touched the man. Choosing his work in the temple, he, too, passed by on the other side of the road.
Then a man from Samaria happened by. He was a different race, a different religion, and not hung up on Levitical law. He saw the man, lying at the roadside, pitied him, cleaned and bound his wounds, put him on his animal and took him away to care for him … ” I’ll skip a bit here … So Jesus looked at Lawyer/Scribe guy and asked “out of the three of these who do you think was the neighbor to this poor man?” The lawyer replied “well, the one who showed him compassion.” Jesus, at this point probably rubbing his temples, finally said “Go and do the same, that’s all that you have to do.”
Dr. King would stop and ponder the idea of what was meant by the Levite and the priest not stopping to help the man wounded on the side of the road to Jericho. He would propose what others quite often would, that perhaps they were busy, or there were laws forbidding them helping … but he didn’t dwell on that question or castigate the people who were following the laws of their religion.
Instead, he looked toward the resolution of the story where a man stopped and cared for a stranger in need, lying beaten on the street, naked and bleeding. Dr. King said he saw that unlike the Levite and Priest who asked “if I stop and help what will happen to me?”, the Samaritan thought ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’
For the purposes here I choose to see these questions in my own UU-esque secular humanist context of – if we do not take the time to look beyond the small bubble of the world in which we live and see the greater body of humanity that surrounds us, if we do not recognize our own neighbor, then how will we fulfill our mission, our own principles, and achieve the great aspiration of a truly full, supported, and inclusive human family?
In our hands, personal and communal, lies the power to see the dream through. To take the ink of our work and tattoo it on our hearts so that every moment of our lives is filled with the lifeblood of love, compassion, strength, and unity. To work together and nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community. “We have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that [humanity has] been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them now.”
This great power is ours for the giving and the taking and it is our duty as human beings, participants in this world, to reach and touch one another’s lives. To leave an indelible impression of care and faithful works upon the face of this world. To own the good within ourselves and see it manifest outward, like sparks from our fingers.
Dr. King reminds us that “We have two hands: one for receiving and one for giving. We aren’t silos to hoard away our gifts; we are channels expressly made to share our great wealth of humanity.”
Dr. King did not want us to dwell in the valley. He didn’t want us to live defeated and lost. That wasn’t his idea of our purpose in life. His eyes saw a higher place for us, only reached by marching boldly forward as we climb up to the mountaintop with our neighbor, the folks who trudge and groan for mercy in their own depths, our siblings in this thing called life, and stand in body or spirit upon the shoulders of those who have come before us and continue to raise ourselves, generation by generation, higher out of our past that kept us separated and closed off from the broad spectrum of humanity … He said of his work, in his final speech, that “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter … because I’ve been to the mountaintop. (I’ve been allowed) to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
We must gasp together at the utter potential and diverse beauty of the world that is then set wide before us.
Dr. King dreamed that one day we would climb to that higher place and then set out for the promised land of equity and equality and one day sit at the table together, embrace one another in common humanity, as we finally … finally are able to see that together we are free. And all because we chose to reach out, touch another soul, and the do the work required to make a difference.
Benediction
“We shall overcome. We shall overcome. We shall overcome someday. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome someday.”
Be dangerously unselfish. Do good recklessly. Be kind with abandon. Love brazenly. Be flagrant in your generosity. Dig a deep well from which you draw benevolence. You never know who still dwells in the valley. Don’t make life harder for either of you. Reach out, take a hand, and rise together so that we may all see the dawn break at the mountaintop.
Go in peace.
Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.
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