December 2005 Sermons

• 12/4 Sermon -- All Saints Day
• 12/11 Sermon -- 
• 12/18 Sermon -- The Bad Apples of the Holiday Spirit
• 12/25 Sermon -- 

December 4, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

December 4, 2005

All Saints Day

A couple of people noted the title for the sermon today and pointed out to me that All Saints’ Day is November 1st, which is certainly true; but I feel bound to point out that as far as Unitarians are concerned every day is All Saints Day, and we are not bound by the Christian calendar any more than we are bound by Christian beliefs. (While it does get some of you to pay attention, occasionally, in good UU fashion, I just like to flout convention and exercise my independence.) In addition, note that we are in the month of the favorite saint of all times, at least as far as mention in all media and the mouths of children are indicators--I speak of Santa Claus/St. Nick/ Father Christmas.

Santa Claus is the bringer of gifts, and such a person who unselfishly brings us good things is by any measure a reasonable definition of a saint. Further, along with most people in the West, we here in this congregation are moving into our festive holiday time and our gifting time, when our charitable impulses are rising along with the daily requests for our charity. So, it seemed to me a good time to consider what it is that sets a person apart in such a way as to earn the honorific of saint, and that this also is a good time to remind each other that we are surrounded by saints, even if we do not always see them in that light.

According to religion writer Joan Range: In the New Testament the word saint refers to any baptized follower of Jesus Christ.

As the Latin origin of the word indicates, a saint is a holy person, and has come to be mostly associated in the West with Christianity, and concentrates in Catholicism. But the concept of the holy person is to be found in most of the religions of the world. A holy person is generally someone in whom we see the divine, or as it came to be understood in the Catholic tradition, a person either chosen by God or recognized by God as particularly devoted to the faith. Saints were/are recognized by the unusual nature of their devotion.

The early martyrs, those who died for the Christian faith, were the first saints of the religion, but as Christianity spread over the Holy Roman Empire, the number of saints multiplied dramatically.

The Bollandists, named for a Belgian Jesuit whose focus was hagiography, which is the study of saints, were given the work of cataloguing the saints. By the 17th Century the number of saints, real and questionable, had grown into a massive and untenable number as far as Rome was concerned, and in the 19th and early 20th Centuries the Bollandists were additionally charged with the job of doing a bit of house cleaning, to decide who really qualified for sainthood. Many, like St. Christopher the popular patron saint of travelers, did not make the cut. It should also be noted that Pope John Paul II who died this past year is reported to have canonized 482 new saints, many in the Latin American countries, and beatified (claim as worthy of veneration) 1332 people, most likely giving him the record for officially creating new saints. All together the other 20th Century popes following Bollandist restraint only canonized 98 saints.

Still, the point is that people have always had the good sense to appreciate the ideas of self-sacrifice, altruistic love for others; further, in some religions a veneration of such people both in life and after death became commonplace. To see someone as saintly, then, is most simply recognizing that some people are especially good people, even if we do not believe any special intercession with the divine is possible. This issue of intercession was a major problem for Martin Luther and the Protestants who came after, because they opposed the idea that anyone needed any intercession in order to gain God’s forgiveness or grace; you should just go straight to the source as did Jesus. This was also Jesus’ main teaching, that everyone had access to God’s love, and you did not need any third party intervention from the temple, or do a lot of human-constructed hocus pocus, in order to have God’s love. That is my position as well: whatever the nature of God or Ultimate Reality, it is available to one and all.

A saint in my opinion is a person who thinks big. Big, as in beyond the smaller entity of the self. Saints are altruistic, meaning they think of others, and want to help those they can, in the ways they can. And, without exception, such kindly people do not think of themselves as special, they certainly not think of themselves as saints. That is not in their personal calculus.

I once heard this story:

Three saintly aged men died and all arrived at the gates of Heaven at the same time. As part of their orientation, St. Peter asked what kind of remarks they would most like to hear from their family and friends at their funerals.

"I would like to hear them say I was a caring doctor and a good family man," said the first.

The second man then said: "I would like to hear that I was a wonderful husband and that, in career as a schoolteacher, I made a difference in many lives.”

"Those both sound terrific, so worthy," replied the third, "but the truth is I'd like to hear them say, 'Look! He's moving!'"

Dorothy Day, the well-known Catholic social justice activist, who many people have referred to as a saint, once quipped after such a reference: “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

Day was noting in that statement both her own basic humility, but more importantly, she was naming the problem that sainthood confers; which is, that people believe the person is above the normal run of human being, or somehow enlivened with a special divine strength so that they are no longer mere mortals. Dorothy Day strongly disagreed with this notion that working for moral causes was anything but mortal, for it is really only the mortals, the mere humans that we all are, who get the work done of making change in the structures that create injustice. As a believer, Day would certainly have accepted the divine essence as a spur toward these changes, but not that it is something any one person has more access to than another.

For non-theists, this might be accepted on the face of things; yet, even the non-believer, or agnostic, can believe in a notion of dedication that is somehow extra-ordinary, super-ordinary if not supernatural. As James Luther Adams noted, the growing religious spirit must deliberately impose upon itself the conventions of some tradition. . . meaning in part that we will or should recognize the good and not fear ritual or religious sanction as a way to honor that goodness. To see that people like Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony were not a special genetic variety of the good, decent human being, but ordinary people who felt compelled by conscience to do extraordinary things. Also, saints are not for the most part of the extra- or super-famous variety.

The saints that have been part of my life have been pretty regular people, like some of you sitting out there this morning. People who, to put it simply, feel a calling to do something that is greater than yourselves. Generally the reasons are varied, but the impulse remains essentially a need to have greater meaning in life by doing something with a bit more purposefulness that makes our lives better. You are the do-ers, the movers, the shakers who get what needs doing, done. Without you little could happen of substance here. You are the heart of our congregation, and more broadly, the pillars of our faith.

We all have known, and know, these saints of which I speak. If I asked most of you who have been around of any length of time who they are, you easily could name one or two. And, like the saints of renown, many of the saints that people our lives are often far from saintly in appearance, behavior, or manner. A good many saints are in fact downright cranky people. And, if you think about it, it makes sense; after all, if you are trying to help people, and get others interested in helping people, it can cause you get short of patience. So saints on the surface are not all sweetness and light, sometimes they are even sour and dark in countenance. But their motivation is the betterment of other people’s lives--that is the constant.

I remember when I was kid in church, a preacher once said at the offering: The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. He also accepteth from a grouch. Meaning, I suppose, that you did not have to like parting with your money to be found worthy; you are worthy in the giving.

We usually, though, recognize the underlying cheerfulness or spirit of goodness that exists in these special people who are the saints of the world. Sometimes, they do look saintly, are sweet to a fault, but such people are just as likely to be pathologized as unstable in some way. It is usually only upon reflection that we can see the decency that under girds the really decent, good-hearted people. Furthermore, to be a basically decent person or an incredibly good person, does not mean such people are perfect. Most of the great saints of fame had some glaring faults. It just goes to show that there’s a little saint in every sinner, and a little sinner in every saint.

The humor writer Bennet Cerf once wrote about a saintly little old lady who lived on Fire Island, well known for her good works for the community. As she got older and frail, she especially loved the calm, warm mornings when she could take her walk along the shore. However, in the summer when the beach in front of her house got too crowded for her own comfort, she would circulate quietly among the sun bathers, shade her eyes looking out at the water, and exclaim, "Goodness, isn't that another shark fin out there?" In no time flat, she would have the beach to herself again.

Most of us are not considering a place in the pantheon of saints, yet I hope we would be concerned that the people in our lives have some estimation of us that puts us closer to saints than sinners. That is really the work of living good lives. We want our lives to add up to more that is good than otherwise, and that definition of sainthood is most assuredly open and available to everyone.

While we are playing Santa for the ones we love this year, let us also remember that we can have a Santa-mind for all the year. This not about a life of perfection, nor the giving away everything to follow any body else’s notion of the good life, but to be caring and to live caring lives. To be consciously concerned for our larger community, which is always something worth striving for, and something the every day saints always do.

So be it

December 18, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

December 18, 2005

The Bad Apples of the Holiday Spirit

Dolores Curran, a writer for a monthly Catholic publication tells this story about having to give an early morning speech at a religious conference:

I groaned when I discovered that I had drawn the 8:30 a.m. Saturday keynote slot at a major spirituality congress last October because I know what audiences are like at that time of the weekend: zombies. It takes them a full hour to come to life. That being the amount of time allotted to me, I decided to rouse them with this prayer by Dean Alan Jones which I found by browsing the Internet:

"I want to thank you, Lord, for being close to me. So far this day, with your help, I haven't been impatient, lost my temper, been grumpy, judgmental or envious of anyone. But I will be getting out of bed in a minute and I think I will really need your help then. Amen."

As I hoped, the audience responded with laughter and began to perk up. At the end of my presentation, however, two women stopped to tell me they enjoyed my talk but felt the prayer was inappropriate. Puzzled, I asked them why.

"It seemed disrespectful," one said, "like you were making fun of God."

The other nodded and said, "We come to a day like this for spiritual reasons, not entertainment."

Which only goes to show that no matter how hard you try, there will always be someone who can find fault with what you do. I have learned this the hard way, always forgetting Abraham Lincoln’s famous dictum: You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time.

I have also been there, and done that; meaning, I have been both the speaker and been one of the sleepy crowd at that early speech. Conferences are, in many ways, like the holidays, because both events require us to be alert, busy, and congenial for longer periods of time and with many more people than we usually have to interact with on our regular days. Therein lies the problem. At least for people who normally get along with most people reasonably well, but for some reason the holidays, these big family events, bring out the worst in them. So, I am differentiating between your typical, everyday-no-matter-what grump/grouch/grinch, and your occasional holiday bad apple.

The bad apples are ever with us, and we are they much of the time. I speak of grouches, grinches, scrooges, grumps; the crotchety, grumbling, sulking, habitually complaining, irritable, and testy among us at any given time or on any given day. The holidays seem to bring out the worst in the chronically ill-tempered, which seems odd and unfortunate when these are supposed to be the days of celebration. These holy days that are manifold in December--and it seems they are becoming increasingly temperamental times linguistically-- are holidays when people are supposed to be filled with joy and hopefulness for peace on earth, joy, and goodwill toward all men, women, and children. No doubt the grumps among us this morning are saying: We ain’t there yet! Of course, they are right, we ain’t, but that doesn’t mean we can’t hope one day we will be.

A bad apple of the holiday spirit does more than take the fun out of the holidays, the bad apples often are bent on making the rest of us into bad apples as well. And if that were not enough, the bad apples seem to crop up all through the year, and not just at the holidays.

We all know the famous bad apples: Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or Dr. Seuss’ Grinch who stole Christmas from the Whos, and Oscar the Grouch and his female counterpart Grungetta. We take it for granted that some people among us will perpetually be bad-tempered, cranky, irritable, snapping, gritchy, and otherwise difficult to get along with. They also notice things like ending a sentence with a preposition, like I just did when I said get along with. Winston Churchill once had someone point out that he ended a sentence with a preposition, and he, far more quick witted than most, retorted. End a sentence with a preposition! Well, from now on that is something up with which I will not put.

Being a generally optimistic person, I was surprised to learn there are a number of websites devoted to grouches. I especially liked a French webpage I found, which is devoted to the constitutionally cranky and proudly proclaims that it is a source of absolutely nothing but bad news with no soft-soaping of life’s hard times nor sharing of any joys. Their motto might be: All the bad and nothing glad. Like the New York Times famous motto All the news that’s fit to print, therefore there are no comic pages. Which just goes to show that even liberals can take life too seriously.

I also noted that Amazon.com has a list of gifts for grouches; virtually all comedies or tales of tribulation like I, Claudius and the Lion in Winter. The Amazon people are sales savvy enough to help out those people who are trying to get the bad apples on board the holiday spirit, even if to no avail.

Life can be hard, life is hard, which is why we need laughter, smiley faces, and silliness occasionally. Certainly, life can be hard, no one challenges that, but that is all the more reason to look for the joy and gladness where we can, or so it seems to me. I empathized with Dolores Curran, the writer of a Catholic magazine from which came this morning’s reading, whose attempt to lighten up a famously difficult early morning conference crowd, got her some grief from some typical gripers, who rather proved her point.

The occasional bad apples of the holiday spirit are in some ways a greater danger to family gatherings than your run-of-the-mill standard grouch or scrooge, simply because they are more unpredictable. We may know such people have the potential to turn, but never sure just quite what will cause it.

In my husband’s large extended Catholic family there is a woman who is famous for her whining and crankiness; since I joined this family some years ago, the best stories are about her and her general stupidity as it emerges in petulant fits about such things as who is seated next to her at the dinner table. I suspect that most of the family secretly hopes she will act up so they can have a good laugh about her antics later. (I was sadly disappointed the only time I met her that she did nothing out of the ordinary, such is her reputation.)

My husband Tom loves the show The Apprentice, which I don’t love, and rarely watch, but this weekend I saw the taped episode with him, and lo-and-behold, the winner turned out to be a grinch in elf clothing. The two finalists were sitting before Donald Trump, the wealthy developer who hosts this show about people competing for an opportunity to be his apprentice. Trump had named the young man his apprentice, then in a rare move, he asked the winner if he would hire the young woman who lost, and to my surprise, and clearly the audience was surprised, the young man said no. This apprentice winner showed a Grinch side, or at least an aspect of character that is not likely to be forgotten, when he had an opportunity to do a gracious act and hire the loser but refused. The audience was noticeably cooler, after this, even though earlier they were quite clearly hoping he would win.

Grouchy, grumpy, complaining, whining, irritable, bad-tempered, the devil’s advocates of the world are ever with us, but all of us can get into such a state if we are not in touch with our own needs and frustration points. This is the spiritual element; that we need to know what our issues are so that they don’t undo us. The fact is, many of us get together at holiday gatherings with family members we do not like very much, and that is a recipe for unpleasantness. And to make matters worse, we eat all kinds of high sugar-starch-fatty foods that put our digestions on overload, cause insulin to shoot sky-high then plummet like a rock. There was a mention on BBC radio this past week giving suggestions for food alternatives that would help keep the body and mood lighter. But, I doubt most families will be having many of them.

Further, we do things like wait till the last minute to buy presents, find ourselves trapped in crowded malls or stores when we hate shopping, spend too much and regret it immediately. You name it, if it is conducive to regret, ill-temper, and general frustration, it all comes together in one glorious peak called Christmas-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa-the holidays.

Naturally there are jokes about grouches like: A grouch is never satisfied unless he is dissatisfied. Or this: One famous scrooge had a telephone installed -- just so he could hang up on people.

Ellsworth M. Statler who owned several hotels, opened the luxurious Boston Statler Hotel in 1927. It had unheard of luxuries at the time such as private bathrooms and in-room radios, as well as a library of over three thousand books. Statler was a New England Yankee, and knew all too well the reputation many Yankees have for being cranky. In his instructions to managers about what sort of people to hire for hotel service, he wrote in 1917 [note the masculine language]:

From this date you are instructed to employ only good-natured people, cheerful and pleasant, who smile easily and often. This ought to go for every job in the house, but at present I'll insist on it only for people that come in contact with guests …. If it's necessary to clean house, do it. Don't protest. Get rid of the grouches, and the people that can't keep their tempers, and the people who act as if they were always under a burden of trouble and feeling sorry for themselves. You can't make that sort of a person over; you can't do anything with them profitably, but get rid of him. Let the other fellow have him and you hire a man that can be taught.

Statler did not want any bad apples working for him. Let the other hotel owners hire them if they wanted. He knew that no matter how bad tempered the customer, the staff had no right to such luxuries of mood. In our families, we do not have the luxury of getting rid of the grouches, but we can learn to anticipate them, and perhaps find ways to disarm them, so that family gatherings remain the cheerful time we all hope they will be.

I call these unpleasant people bad apples, for there is an aspect of the bad apple that I learned about as a child that seems to apply. The apples would keep longest by laying them amidst straw to keep them dry and storing them in cool places. In the days long past, people stored their apples in straw in crates or barrels then placed in cellars or attics or even buried them below the frost line. One of the jobs was to keep a check on the apples to find ones that were past peak and beginning to rot. The reason the bad apples had to be removed is that they give off gases that will hasten the ripening process in the other fruit, as well.

The human version of the bad apple does the same thing. They give off bad moods that cause other people to get in a bad humor when they probably would not otherwise. While we cannot throw these bad apples out, only perhaps keep some distance for the most part, we can do the spiritual equivalent. We can speak the truth in love. That is the spiritual way to handle such situations. Get the bad tempered adult or child away from the group and have a friendly chat about why this is not the way to behave. Or ask them what it is they want, because sometimes it is a trifle that is causing all this stress and strife, and if we have something we can do, it usually will not hurt to do it-at least most of the time. With many adults, and children, they may simply need more rest, or some time alone to regain their good humor.

For the constitutionally bad tempered, these scrooges neither seek redemption, as did the Scrooge of fame, they usually don’t want it. To be cranky and irritable is their reason for being. They like the attention, they want their voices heard, and compromise or restraint are not in their vocabularies. For my part, I accept them in the way I accept bad weather: they come and they go, but they will never be gone for good.

I suggest the bad apples unite and have an orgy of crankiness, go on the grouch website, and buy enough coal to put in all your relatives stockings if that is what will make you-happy?-well, at least content.

For the rest, let us go forward in joy, prepared to deal with the bad apples of the holiday spirit, but never, never letting them have the final say.

So be it