Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 3, 2005

A Generous People

The idea for this Pledge Sunday sermon came one day when I hit upon a website by the Catalogue for Philanthropy, which gives various statistics in a listing called the Generosity Index. They have several different listings related to this, but the two that caught my attention were the “having” index, that shows the richest to the poorest in overall population by state--Connecticut was number one; and the second statistic was the “giving” index that ranked generosity as a percent of income. The most recent data is for 2004, and of the two states from which the majority of our membership here is drawn, Pennsylvania and Delaware, Pennsylvania ranks 18th in having, and 36th in giving. Delaware ranks 13th in the having index and 27th in this giving index listing for the fifty states. That’s pretty good. Of special interest, though, it turns out that the top seven states in having were at the bottom of the giving index of the fifty states.

That this is a congregation of generous people is clear to me. We would not be here in our lovely year old sanctuary this morning were that not so, especially considering that we are still a relatively small congregation. Year after year we make our budgets, and stretch a bit to do more where we can. Yet, this generous spirit remains in many ways remains a mystery. As the Catalogue of Philanthropy Index shows, it is not just a matter of how much we have, since the states with the most are among the worst in giving. And by way of contrast, Mississippi which is 50th for having, is number 5 for giving. That is a statement of generosity that tells us there is definitely something more going on that creates an atmosphere of wanting to give, of a personal expectation of giving, which rests more on character than on resources.

I have a story from Zen Buddhism:

A Western professor, anxious for enlightenment, visits a Zen master and is ushered into the master's home. During their talk, the Zen master pours tea for the professor, pouring and pouring until the tea overflows the cup, spilling onto the table and flooding the cup.

"Can't you see, you idiot, that there is tea all over the place?" the professor asks in"" exasperation.

"You come expecting to learn from me," the master replies. "But you're so filled with your own knowledge that there's no room for any other."

Medical doctor, Stephan Rechtshaffen, included this story in his book Timeshifting, to illustrate that we all need to learn how to give up our perceived notions of control that ultimately relate to how generous we are in our spirits, which in turn relates directly to how generous we are with our money and other resources. He wrote:

In our own lives, when we're preoccupied with work, worries, relationships, and stress, we're too "full" for reflection. Yet reflection is deeply healing, and we need it in order to assess where we are and where we want to be. We can only reflect when our pace has sufficiently slowed to allow us to think and feel, undistracted by events or other people. With time [for] retreats, we can shift our rhythm to embrace . . . periods of peace, and return to the natural rhythm that was engrained in us at birth, and which is frequently blocked for us by the events of daily life.

You see, generosity is the product of reflection, of spiritual growth and understanding that teaches us what is truly most valuable in life.

This past two weeks of constant media attention on the unfortunate case of Terri Schiavo, who was hooked up to life support for almost fifteen years, reminded most of us that the value of life is not in just existing. Life needs a greater purpose.

I have been pleased that many people, out of the generosity of their spirits, have recognized the need to get Living Wills and Health Care Proxies, even my daughter called to tell me she had been prompted by the Schiavo case to take this action. Truly, it is an act of love to make sure our families do not have to make these decisions for us, or refuse to out of not knowing what we would want or other misguided motives. Frankly, I was more than a little astonished to hear some people on the TV news reports say they would want such an existence as Terri Schiavo had, for it seems antithetical to most of the people I know to want to exist in such a limited way, and especially to burden their families with merely providing existence. Most people if you ask them, of course divorced of this media sensation, most will say they want a life that allows them to give, to be productive; a life that is in other words both purposeful and generous.

The Zen master was illustrating an important point when he demonstrated to the professor that he was too full of himself to learn that enlightenment comes from the flow and even the overflow.

Life is often, as the poet said, “too much with us,” earning and accumulating, and while we mostly agree that the basic issue of earning, making a living, is part of life, it should not be all that is life. For, once again, we run the risk of just surviving, just existing. Everyone needs to take time for reflecting on what matters most, and for sharing these things. This is an integral part of the religious life, what draws us to our Sunday morning services, and to engage in all the different parts of our faith community. This is why we give of our hard earned dollars to make this home for our Unitarian Universalist faith; this is why we work in the various committees and task forces to have a vibrant, vital community for ourselves and for others. This powerful need to give emerges from your soul/spirit, from your sense of need, but also from your equally powerful sense of generosity.

We conduct our Annual Pledge Canvass every year to raise money for our operations budget. We need money, for as many of you have heard me say, money is a tool, a tool that helps us to have the community we need. That helps us build the connections we need. Money is the tool that allows us to reach out to each other and to the wider community. But that is all that money is: a tool. Remember that in Timothy of the New Testament, it says “the love of money is the root of all evil,” not money, but the love of money. When we love money more than we love people, then it becomes a far less constructive tool; indeed, it is likely that it ceases to be a real tool, and just an object for veneration for the power that it gives. Perhaps this is why the people in the richest states are the least generous according to the Catalogue of Philanthropy Index.

You here this morning are both the real and the metaphorical “choir” to which the minister often preaches, meaning you already get it. I know you are generous, not just with your money, but with your time, but I want us all to appreciate that there is a reason we are generous, and it goes beyond the direct benefits you and I realize.

This morning we have introduced our new small group ministry program, Chalice Circles. The reasons we are doing this has to do with having a generous spirit. We all need to share the stuff of our lives, but we all want to share in the reality stuff of other lives, too. I have never personally heard of, nor experienced, an instance, that people have ever felt it a waste of time to be part of a sharing experience where the sharing was really that. Naturally, no one wants to do all the listening; we each want to share, to listen to what others share of their experiences and understanding, to then stop and reflect upon how our lives are touched by others in ways far more potent than we would ever realize under ordinary circumstances.

We have some great facilitators for our Chalice Circles, and I facilitate the facilitators, and I in turn have my own small group to which I go. This is a small, interfaith group of ministers who share our experiences, trials and tribulations, highs and lows. We share all that is our lives. I did not have this group for the first several years of my ministry, and there is no way that I can adequately express how valuable this group has become in my life. Unless I have no other option, two Tuesdays a month, I am at my small group meeting.

My beloved mentor in ministry the Rev. Gerry Krick, who supervised my internship while I was in divinity school, said that getting to know people informs one’s life. Now he said this to me specifically about ministry; that the better I know you, the better my preaching and pastoring will be. Yet, he also said this of the faith community experience. That our wholeness comes from connecting the varied parts of our lives, especially the people part of our lives. This connecting does not happen by accident, but by being intentional in how we use our gifts of life: how we make use of our money, our time, and what we learn. Most of our learning comes in a human context. One minister shared this about how this worked in relation to the annual pledge canvass:

The weekend before the "Stewardship Sunday" kickoff, I hit first on a slogan and then an idea: why not have T-shirts made up for those the canvassers who could then call on parishioners emblazoned with my newly-brainstormed stewardship theme? It seemed the perfect plan.

During the "Joys and Sorrows” time of the morning service the next Sunday, the chair of the pledge campaign, Doug, did an outstanding job of making the committee's case for our controversial financial leap forward. As soon as he finished, I bolted to the front, prevented him from returning to his seat, and presented him with a surprise gift that I announced confidently would give our campaign focus and force.

The color of Doug's face when he unwrapped his surprise should have alerted me to what was to come. His embarrassed refusal to hold up the T-shirt for the congregation to see ("You do it," he giggled) was another missed warning signal. But it was not until the moment that I held up that T-shirt and announced that there were enough of these "surprise gifts" for every one of our canvassers to wear that I realized exactly what I had done. Our stewardship slogan would be, I proudly read:

I Upped MY Pledge

Up YOURS

At first, there was a trickle of giggles, then a torrent of laughter. I tried to preach, but I had lost it. Convulsions of laughter drowned out my sermon.

That moment of my greatest embarrassment and mistake, a moment from which that worship service never fully recovered, was the moment of my ministry's recovery in that community. For suddenly this upstart preacher and hotshot Ph.D. became human, and did something so outrageously stupid and foolish that it redeemed all his jarring strangeness. From that Sunday on, I became their pastor and was bonded to them for life. And for the next several years, as I walked the streets of the town, I would find myself greeted with the query, "Are you the 'up-yours' preacher?"

 

The teachable moment often comes disguised as foolishness, or pride, or sadness, or laughter, but especially embarrassment. These things cannot happen sitting in isolation nearly as easily as they happen in relationship. We need each other. That is the first and last statement of religious community. We need each other to grow, so that we learn how our desires to give and to receive matter at the level of the heart/soul.

You are a generous people, and I know that you will take care of this faith home we have been building for sixteen years now, so that it will be here for the next sixteen, the next sixty, the next one hundred and sixty, and so on.

I will be upping my pledge again this year, and hope you up your pledge as well. But even more I hope you are or will become part of the various parts of this UU Society of Mill Creek, especially our new Chalice Circles. Because this is the reason we give, so that we can have connections that matter at the level of the heart and soul.

As the great Unitarian scholar James Luther Adams of Harvard wrote in his wonderful book, The Prophethood of all Believers:

The church as a community of faith and hope is entrusted in a special way with the ministry of wholeness for the individual and the society, for each member individually and all together. The church is, then, the messenger of hope for [all].

We learn that as we live from a generous spirit, so then do we have generous lives; generous in heart and mind and love.

So be it.

April 10, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 10, 2005

Big Music Sunday Homily: Practicing

                    "Practicing" by Linda Pastan

My son is practicing the piano.
He is a man now, not the boy
whose lessons I once sat through,
whose reluctant practicing
I demanded-part of the obligation
I felt to the growth
and composition of a child.
Upstairs my grandchildren are sleeping,
though they complained earlier of the music
which rises like smoke up through the floorboards,
coloring the fabric of their dreams.
On the porch my husband watches the garden fade
into summer twilight, flower by flower;
it must be a little like listening to the fading
diminuendo notes of Mozart.
But here where the dining room table
has been pushed aside to make room
for this second or third-hand upright,
my son is playing the kind of music
it took him all these years,
and sons of his own, to want to make.

There are times when I believe in a great destiny, though most of the time I don’t. For instance, when the Big Music Sunday, planned months ago, happens to fall on the same weekend as our Joseph Priestley District Spring Conference meeting that featured one of my all-time favorite music teachers, Nick Page, whose acquaintance I first made in a Massachusetts Unitarian church before I was called to ministry, and who taught me so many things then and many more this weekend. Further, that Big Music Sunday and the JPD Conference would coincide with my daughter’s family move back to their home in New York, and in that move they would come to my house for a visit, and in that entrainment (that harmonizing of time, space, and all that comes together from day to day) would be picking up her piano. I bought that piano for her when she was eight years old, and it now goes to live with her and become the instrument for practicing for my twin granddaughters who at almost four-years-old, are at the perfect age to begin the journey of practicing to learn to play piano, even as I also practiced my music lessons in my own childhood. It is but one of our many connections.

Life is really all about practicing. Not just for musical instruments, but for everything. The adages and metaphors of learning to play an instrument work so well for all the other areas of life’s learning, that they come quite naturally even to those who do not see themselves as musical.

I always was reminded that “practice makes perfect.” The idea that we can become perfect is part of our human idealism, but we all agree that practice will, without fail, make us get better at whatever we attempt. The problem is whether we will be willing to continue to practice or give up. My daughter and I gave up our practice of piano, and it may be that my granddaughters will do the same. But that is all right. Practicing teaches us things about ourselves and how we view our place in the world-and that is always good. So, even as we attempt one thing or another, stick to some and give up the others, we are practicing what we want for our lives.

We each have different gifts and talents and possibilities, and no one can do everything. Some of us will become good at playing a musical instrument, some of will become good at sports, some of us will become skilled negotiators, or speakers, or writers, or artists, or carpenters, or painters, or chemists, and so it goes. And virtually all of us will become good at several things, and for each of those skills we learn we have to practice.

One of the great myths is that one is born with a talent to play the piano, or write a book, or be a great scientist, as if all you had to do was be born and just like a an acorn grows to be a tree you get from A to B with no real effort. Studies of human brain development tell us this is mostly not true. We are born with a capacity to learn, this is true, and that that capacity can vary widely, but the capacity itself is fairly neutral. Chances are pretty good that if Mozart’s father had been a stonemason instead of a musician, we might now know Mozart more for the great cathedrals he designed that for the great music he created. But even the genius Mozart had to practice.

Practice makes us better, and it makes everything we do better. But few of us, even the genius talents of the world, ever see that we have achieved perfection. Most of us would not even want to, because that would mean we had reached the end of the road, and where do you go from there?

I know I will be practicing the art of ministry every day; there is no end for the need to practice. This is true of virtually everything we value. I am still practicing being a mother, a wife, a friend, a citizen, a driver, and really practicing at being a grandmother. Being a Nana is important, and I wouldn’t want to give Haley and Morgan anything but my best efforts.

So, my friends, especially my young friends, take heart, for the one thing that is undeniable true is that we are all able to be really good at practicing. There’s an old joke: You know the three things it takes to get to Carnegie Hall? : Practice, practice, practice.

These are the same three things it takes to have a good life, a deeply rich and creative and spiritual life: practice, practice, practice.

So be it

April 17, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 17, 2005

Water Sustains Us All

This sermon comes to you compliments of Marianne Riding, who bought a sermon topic at our last October Service Auction, and she requested that I devote this sermon to subject of water. That this week we celebrate the 35th Earth Day on April 22, is but another reminder that for at least thirty-five years we have been concerned about water as a central issue of environmental awareness. This year I am devoting sermons to these elemental things, which are: air, water, fire, and earth. These are the necessary or elemental needs of all life on this planet, and to neglect any of these elements is to risk all life. It is a sobering reminder to me each time I buy a bottle of water, that, not so long ago, about thirty-five years ago, the idea of buying water to drink in the way people buy soda pop, was unheard of in this country. Now it is a common occurrence.

Not surprisingly, all the elemental things-- air, water, fire, and soil--have been used to lift up the most important issues of human experience in rituals, so that there is no religion does not use one or more of them. But water has a special place in religious and secular ritual, so that we all recognize the use of water as a ritual element for baptism, dedication, bathing, and drinking. Indeed, water has since time immemorial been a central part of all human spirituality.

During our human evolution, and in our more recent agricultural past, water was not taken for granted so much as it is nowadays-at least taken for granted in most parts of this country. We turn on a tap, and out comes water; and, while we might not be happy with the taste, we know that the water pouring from our faucets is safe. This is not the case in about half the world, and is not going to continue to be the case in the other half as the world’s population grows ever larger and the demands continue to rise for our rather meager fresh water supplies. As you heard in this morning’s reading only 2 ½ % of the world's water is useable, and two-thirds of that is trapped in the icecaps and glaciers. And as global warming melts those sources, those fresh water supplies run directly into the seas, so we are losing much of that potential source.

Like so many things in our lives, we rarely appreciate what we have until there is a risk of losing it. Or as Benjamin Franklin framed it: We will only know the worth of water when the well is dry.

For a more recent take on our human appreciation of water, Jacques Cousteau, the famed deep sea explorer, inventor of the scuba diving tank, reported that when he first began diving in the Mediterranean during the 1940s-50s, the waters were clean, but by the 1990s, they were filthy and sea dying. Cousteau stated: Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

We seem not to realize that we are heading toward problems at an unprecedented and accelerated rate in terms of clean drinking water, and it may be that in the next thirty to fifty years, we will see the cost of water escalating at even higher rates than we now see oil prices rising. I feel sadly certain that our complacency is going to be shaken at the place we feel in most, the pocketbook; but, I recognize also that our appreciation for this vital and precious fluid will rise equally, so that once again we will understand why water is viewed as holy as it is used for baptism, and the many uses of holy water, bathing in holy waters, ritually drinking holy waters. I believe we will learn once again to feel deeply why all these many ways water is seen and used as holy makes sense-indeed come to understand why water is undeniably sacred.

I recall reading when I was in high school about an ancient Chinese proverb that says that all the water you waste in this life you will have to drink in the afterlife. For some reason that stayed with me and has always made me contentious about not blatantly wasting water, though I can hardly say I don’t waste water. But I have always found it irritating to see water running down the street from forgotten hoses or sprinklers, or have my family let the shower run too long before getting in, or letting the water run while brushing teeth. They have all heard me repeatedly remind them about proverb, but since not a one of them believes in an after life, it has taken more pressure related to the effects in this life.

While many people don’t drink a lot of plain water, they often forget that liquids of any drinkable kind must start with water. I do have a story related to this:

In an ancient chateau, an American reporter found an old Frenchman who was quite hale and hearty though his baptismal certificate proved that he was 105. ‘Good eating and good drinking is what has preserved me,’ he told the reporter. ‘Wine is the only beverage for a sensible human being. You ask why am I in such perfect health? Because not a drop of water has ever passed my lips.’

‘I can't quite believe that,’ laughed the reporter. ‘Don't you ever brush your teeth in the morning?’

‘For that,’ replied the old gentleman gravely, ‘I use a light white wine, preferably Chablis.’

The First Earth Day was April 22, 1970, thirty five years ago. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson came up with the idea in 1962, during the Kennedy presidency when environmental concerns were first arising in this country. The people responded in a great grassroots movement with some twenty million participating in that very first Earth Day. As Sen. Nelson himself said later, it had little to do with any governmental efforts; rather, it was just a keen awareness that came to people across the country, in part sparked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, that our environment was in danger and needed protecting. Out of this movement the government formed the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA.

As many of you know, I grew up in the valley around Boise, Idaho, which at around 3000 feet above sea level is in reality a high mountain desert; yet this one time desert supports great farms of all kinds of crops (the least of which is the famous potato). My family and most of the people in our area grew fruit, and other crops besides potatoes, in that rich, volcanic soil. But the only reason this can happen is due to an extensive system of canals and ditches that carry the water collected in massive reservoirs from the annual spring thaw of snow in the Rocky Mountains. My father, as did all farmers and fruit growers, spent a lot of time maintaining ditches to keep them free from weeds and debris that could impede the water flow. There was a detailed system of water use, so that as the water came down from the mountain reservoirs in the canals, there was a pattern of usage so that water could only be used at specific times in a strictly monitored pattern. Obviously, if everyone tried to tap the water there would not be enough for any one of big farms and orchards.

I grew up hardly noticing this fact, yet at some level aware always of the rise and fall of water in the canal nearest our orchards. All that fertile soil was only raw potential until water could be controlled from the mountain runoff into the rivers via the dams and reservoirs.

In a large part of our agricultural areas in this country farmers rely on tapping into and channeling this precious water. Just driving from here to the beach, you see the great sprinkler mechanisms on which the farms of southern Delaware rely, despite the fact that we are surrounded by water. But we are not surrounded by fresh water.

The great African-American theologian, Dr. Howard Thurman of Boston University, uses the metaphors of the canal, a reservoir, and swamp for our spiritual being. Reminding us that a reservoir is meant to hold water, to store it for the time when it will be needed; while a canal is meant to channel water, to move it from one place to another in an orderly fashion; but the swamp is different in that a water moves into the swamp but there is no way for it to move out, so the water sits and stagnates with rotting vegetation, and, as Thurman says, there is life in a swamp but it is stale.

Hal Borland, the writer who was so in tune with nature, wrote:

Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.

I hear this from people all the time. How going to the seashore, or a lake, or walking along the area creeks and rivers, touches something deep within. Herman Melville wrote in his epic novel of the sea, Moby Dick, this line: Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.

Here at Mill Creek congregation, we formally begin our new year the first Sunday after Labor Day with our Water Communion, when the members bring small vials of water from special places of spiritual comfort during the summer. We call this water, the Waters of the World, because it comes from around the globe, and becomes our own Mill Creek holy water, because it is made holy by our intention. We here at UUSMC see water as symbolic of our various pilgrimages, our summer sojourns to special places that range from our own back yards to the mountain tops of Africa and beyond; places that touch us in some important, meditative way, so that we will pause to collect some water in a ritual of carrying memory in the form of water from one place to another. When we pour all those water memories together we are recreating the very act of nature, for the water we drink today has been on this earth recycled from place to place, creature to creature, in a great cycle of being. We honor the preciousness of both water and memory as we use this water in our various rituals.

Mikhail Gorbachev, President of Green Cross International, and organization he help found to foster environmental awareness and support, wrote:

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.

How right he is. We all know that we want good, pure water, that we need clean water, that we must have drinkable water, that we cannot live without water. All of us fit into this descending order somewhere. Most of us even in this country no longer have truly pure water, but generally we have clean water. Yet, in all too many parts of the world, the water is not clean, but it can and will be drunk regardless, for the only other option is to die.

For Unitarians there is always a responsibility that emerges from our human spirituality: We can listen, we can learn, we can act. That is the path of our free faith, but to do nothing when there is suffering is not possible. We look to our Seven Principles, and see in our First Principle, that we support and promote respect for the worth and dignity of every person. We look to our Seventh Principle and see that we recognize the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Between these two principles lie all that humanity might contemplate if food and water are not in jeopardy. So it is to our understanding of respect for human life that we are called to support environmental awareness; to insist on protections for our water, air, soil; to call for clean industry practices; and expect of ourselves a greater compassion for the very water itself in our necessity for water.

The Dalai Lama wrote:

Every human should have the idea of taking care of the environment, of nature, of water. So using too much or wasting water should have some kind of feeling or sense of concern. Some sort of responsibility and with that, a sense of discipline.

I keep thinking of the Chinese proverb about having to drink all the water in the next life that we waste in this life, and wish I had a new one for this age, and for this faith, that says something powerful that would be a reminder to us. Something like this: There is a person dying now for want of the water we waste today.

Water is our source and our sustainer. Medical science teaches us that we can live for weeks on our stored body fat without a scrap of food, but we will die in just few short days without water. Water is our sustainer. Water sustains us all; it is the great leveler of human need. Water is our meditation, our ritual to celebrate life, our joy and our sorrow. May it be that we see from our faith the path from concern to learning to responsibility to discipline which can heal not just our own lives, but the life of the world. So be it