April 2007 Sermons

• 4/1 Sermon -- The Radical Love of Jesus
• 4/8 Sermon -- The Power of Forgiveness
• 4/15 Sermon -- 
• 4/22 Sermon --
• 4/29 Sermon --

April 1, 2007 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 1, 2007

The Radical Love of Jesus

Today is Palm Sunday in the Christian calendar. The Sunday that precedes Maundy (or sad) Thursday, followed immediately by Good Friday, the day Jesus is said to have been taken to the hill called Calvary in the place called Golgotha, just outside the holy city of Jerusalem, to be crucified. Easter Sunday follows, as the day the many Christians believe Jesus arose from the dead. It is pertinent here to point out that many Christians, what might be called liberal or progressive Christians, do not believe in the resurrection as a miraculous event; but most moderate to fundamental Christians believe he did arise from the tomb. For you not steeped in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection as several of us have been, the whole point is that Jesus is the final act of sacrifice God requires of humanity. Jesus is the supreme sacrifice, for as the story developed, Jesus was God who took the form of a man, in order to be the final sacrifice. You can imagine the kind of theological hay this has made over the centuries. There are dozens of different arguments about the merit or significance of such a sacrifice, how logical it is to think God could suffer, and so on. Jesus, as far as scholars of the Bible can tell, did not make this claim; rather he called himself the “son of man.”

Some people question whether Jesus actually existed at all. My feeling is that it would be unlikely that so many writings about him would have existed and proliferated unless there was some seed of truth in his existence. The only outside source says little; the Jewish historian Josephus in writing about an uprising, in connection with which he mentions one James, the bother of Jesus called the Christ.

Miracle stories attached to religious leaders and heroes existed widely in the world of Jesus’ time, and down through the ages, for whatever reason followers tend to attribute miraculous acts to their leaders. The Buddha claimed no such acts, yet in the centuries following his death many such stories emerged and continue to be believed by many followers of the Buddha.

This week even, we have been hearing that a miracle of healing occurred for nun who had Parkinson’s disease, as did the late Pope, and who prayed to him for this miracle. The Catholic Church will make a saint of John Paul if at least three miracles are attributed to him, and out of the millions of Catholics worldwide who are praying to him, no doubt there will be some. After all, miraculous things happen in the world all the time, even to non-Catholics and non-Christians, so it seems logical to assume John Paul will soon become canonized to sainthood. All of which reminds us that in many ways we are not so far from the historical Jesus as we often think.

For you UUs who have a problem with the concept of miracles, I would draw your attention to the current slogan of the great icon of science, the DuPont Corporation who advertises the “Miracles of Science.” Miracles, it would seem, are largely a matter of definition. Human existence in and of itself seems miraculous to me.

Josephus the historian does seem to substantiate that someone by the name of Jesus did exist and was called the Christ, meaning savior. Further, he was part of a family if he had a brother James, as we are also told by this independent source, and by the gospels. Talk about sibling rivalry! Can’t you just hear the ten-year-old James saying to his elder twelve-year-old brother Jesus who wandered off by himself to the temple creating a stir in the family, making his parents have to go find him.

“Jesus, you’re a jerk. Whatda ya think? You’re God or something?”

It would have had to have been a dysfunctional family, what with virgin births, later, we assume, non-virgin births, Joseph and Mary trying to keep up with this son of God. A challenging concept to say the least.

Jesus is approximately thirty years old, give or take a few years, when, according to the Gospel of Mark which is the oldest of the Christian writings, he goes from the countryside where he had been teaching in the company of his disciples to Jerusalem to confront his critics. Or to meet his destiny, as many believe.

The reason this is called Palm Sunday, is that according to the stories in the gospels, as Jesus rode into the city on a colt, or young donkey, the disciples and others spread either their cloaks or branches on the ground like we would roll out the red carpet today for a dignitary. The kind of branches are is not stated, but as the tradition developed, they became palm branches, and it seems likely in that part of the world.

When Jesus arrives he does some interesting things, and these tell us something about the radical love of Jesus that I wanted to talk about today. First, he goes to the temple and looks around. Apparently nothing more happened initially; perhaps he was just checking things out. Then, when he comes again to the city the following day, he is hungry and seeing a fig tree goes over to it, but finding no figs on it, in a very peculiar act, he curses the tree, and later the disciples see that the tree has withered and died. From this event he returns to the temple and creates a huge disturbance by turning over the tables of the moneychangers and those selling things such as doves for the offerings that were made regularly in the temple. This would be the equivalent of someone blowing up the entrance to the Vatican today. The temple was the The Temple, even as the Vatican is the center of Roman Catholicism. So it was not an act that would get just a small fine and a reprimand from the high priest.

He was soon after arrested, brought before Pilate, who was the Roman governor. This would also indicate the seriousness of his crimes, or threat to the existing order. Criminals of the common variety would not have been brought to the highest authority.

So this is the general story of what makes Palm Sunday so significant for many Christians, and why Christians talk about the love of Jesus, so great that he died for the greater good of his people or all people, depending on the variety of Christian we are talking about.

I grew up on the idea of this powerful love of Jesus, this sacrificial love of Jesus, for which, at least in the very conservative Christianity of my childhood, was a love we could never earn, but simply had by the grace of God. It was freely given, and all we had to do was be as close to perfect as possible and sin no more, or risk the eternal fires of Hell. This seemed to lack balance to me, even as a child.

However, while I an no longer a Christian, I have never ceased to be interested in the person of Jesus, for what I see in my lifetime of reading the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, is a radical kind of love that has much to recommend it as an example for our lives, but also much to question.

As the daughter of a fruit grower, the story of cursing the fig tree always seemed a needlessly destructive and churlish act. Of course, the spin preachers of my youth gave this, was that it was a metaphor for those who would not accept Jesus’ teaching--which still seemed needlessly destructive and churlish.

Yet, there were so many ways in which Jesus did seem

to love that seemed exactly what I thought appropriate to a savior.

For example, in Mark 2:15-17:

15: And as he sat at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were sitting with Jesus and his disciples; for there were many who followed him.
16: And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?"
17: And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners."

Jesus was accused more than once of the guilt of associating with the wrong kind of people. The Samaritan woman, tax collectors, lepers, among others. A sinner could be simply anyone who did not have recognition or status according to the laws of Judaism.

Samaritans were defined more or less as the other, and not fit to associate with good religious people. Sort of how Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson would talk about me as a Unitarian minister. The heathen, the unwashed, the outsider. So when Jesus has the temerity to suggest that God’s love is far greater than these human concocted ideas, he makes no friends among the powerful and influential leaders of the day.

Jesus did love radically, so radically that he died for his beliefs. Keep in mind that the young boy Jesus was by the gospel accounts certainly dedicated to the Judaism of his time. He is found studying with mature scholars, the rabbis, when he is twelve, and somewhere along the way he comes to believe that the message of God has been distorted, even perverted, and that reform needed to happen.

Keep in mind that by the time Jesus came along, the people of Israel, the religion of the people of Israel, is well over two thousand years old, and had developed a tremendously intricate system of laws, rituals, obligations to make sacrifices, and so on. Jesus sees that the people are in effect divorced from the essence of God which he believes in love, pure, uncritical, and beyond the rules and institutions of humankind. He states that he has not come to destroy the faith, but to fulfill it; yet reform is rarely a gentle or peaceful process, even when the reformers would hope for it to be. This is why we can understand the turning over the tables of the moneychangers at the Temple. For Jesus, this was not just a misuse of religion, but a corruption of religion; religion that was less about God than about maintaining the institution.

We can see a corollary today in our own government, for so many of us feel divorced from the democratic process that was supposed to be by and for the people. Much of what we are hearing in the news and from those who hope to be our country’s next leader has to do with corruption, with the need for change, with bringing credibility back to the democratic process. Of course, this is always in a tension from liberal to conservative, as one group claims the high moral ground and then seems to quickly lose it once they have the power, then the pull becomes stronger towards the other pole. In a democracy, this is a reliable tension, one that has ultimately worked reasonably well.

For religion, this is a natural tension, too, but it can take a lot longer for the pulling process from more liberal to more conservative to play itself out.

Jesus, as is the case for all reformers, simply had had enough; had no patience with the system, and decided to change it. His love of humanity called him to this work of challenging the religious leadership of his day. I believe that among all peoples, Jesus would be the most disgusted with the course of many of the religions that profess him as God, who can so easily accept corruption on the one hand, if some good is happening on the other.

When Jesus was challenged on belief, he stated simply and eloquently, what is the greatest teaching of all time, and known in all faiths, even long before Jesus, which is love God first, or Goodness for non-theists, then the next greatest thing is to love others as you love yourself. To love in this way was in Jesus’ time radical, and it is no less radical today.

I was at a workshop with several leaders of this congregation yesterday, in which we heard that UUs have no compelling and unifying message unlike conservative Christians. I sat there and did not rebut what I believe to be an incorrect statement; there was no rebel Jesus in my spirit in that moment. But after a wakeful night of chastising myself for not challenging our teacher, I will say today to you, that I think we have a more compelling message than that claimed by conservative Christians, for we claim as did the radical Jesus that the status quo of religion that does not love the outcaste, the different, or any person of good will regardless of belief or affiliation is not good enough.

I have said it before, not to be flip, but out of a sincere belief, that if Jesus were to appear today, after checking out the Jews—after all, he was a Jew—I believe Jesus would say we are trying the hardest with the greatest honesty among the peoples of faith to live a religion of love.

If numbers of followers are to be taken as a measure, which I hear often from many in our UU movement, Jesus was not successful in his own time, and what emerged after his death looks little like the religion he proclaimed.

One thing our teacher yesterday said that I can heartily agree with is that we are doing a poor job proclaiming the message of love and acceptance that is the essence of our Seven Principles. If we truly affirm and promote the worth and dignity of every person as a place to begin, then we are in the realm of radical love by definition.

If any among us are simply Unitarian Universalists because it is not like whatever we left behind, or that it seems the least intrusive religion we could belong to, then I am missing the boat as your minister, and our leadership is missing the boat as leaders.

Jesus, though, also loved in ways that I would not love, at least as understood from a modern reading of the gospels, for what we are told Jesus says the following, the gospel of Matthew 5: 38-48, I quail at much of it:

38: "You have heard that it was said, `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'
39: But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also;
40: and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well;
41: and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
42: Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.
43: "You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'
44: But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
45: so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
46: For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
47: And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
48: You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Those last three verses, though, ring of a UU theology of acceptance and loving beyond the norm that feels like a challenge we of this principled, ethically based religion can cling on to.

We are creatures who are driven to love; almost all people seek to have love in their lives, want partners, or children, or friends with whom we have the bonds of love. For me this love within us is the most powerful force within human existence, and the greatest reward of ministry. This love is the way I understand God.

But we all know how difficult love is, how hard it is to hold onto it, what work it is to live out of love than is not purely self-love or self-focus. Love is beautiful and rewarding, but it is also the greatest challenge in our human family.

Lynda Barry, the comedienne said: If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile. If you say, "No, I don't want it right now," that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

Jesus would certainly have agreed with this. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke, at least when we truly feel love of the kind Jesus was affirming and promoting.

Just consider this: How many Americans will say, and mean, that they love the Iraqis? How many people in general are able to love those who are different?

My friends, this is core of our UU faith, that we ask ourselves how to love those who are not just like us; how do we learn to find ways of being together in a world where we are not all alike, do not think, act, or eat all alike, and certainly do not all experience religion or faith alike? How do we do this? And if we don’t keep trying to find a way to do this, are we willing to continue in the historically predictable way which is to try to change those who don’t conform, and if they won’t conform to destroy them? This is the path of political and religious fundamentalists like Al Quaeda or the Taliban or the Crusading militant Christians of the Middle Ages and today.

Jesus loved in ways that most people will not, and that is why the love of Jesus is radical. We always call things radical that we don’t agree with or would not want to do.

Many people would define us here as radicals; we who say that to be religious does not have to be exclusionary; that to love is to stretch and exercise our emotional muscles until they grow stronger and firmer and more useful to the common good.

The radical love of Jesus is our Unitarian Universalist heritage. We are the product of generations of people trying to really do what Jesus would do, which is love by trying to find some common ground where possible, and to walk around difference when we cannot.

This is no easy religion in that our message is simple or that our forms of spiritual expression are varied, but rather it is the religion that believes in the power of love, in all its manifold and manifest forms. And in our centuries of work in trying to live this message of radical love, we have grown far beyond the scope of any single doctrine or creed, to be bigger, even in our smallness, than we ever could have imagined in the days of Joseph Priestley, or even Jesus.

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 8, 2007

The Power of Forgiveness

This sermon comes to you by the generosity of Susan Klugerman who bought a sermon topic at our Service Auction last October. Susan has been a real blessing to this congregation, not just because she puts down hard cash for a sermon topic of her choice, but she has been working in the office while we are looking for a new Office Administrator. She, Debra Wood, and Ann Roschinsky have kept the boat afloat these past few months. The sermon topic Susan chose is one of profound importance, a spiritual challenge for most of us at some time or another, which is the need for forgiveness, especially for ourselves.

Today is Bring-a-Friend Sunday in our UUSMC calendar, which is really a reminder to us that there are people out there in our neighborhoods and our families who would enjoy, perhaps need, a liberal faith community like this; in fact, I find this is very often true. I experienced instances of this twice this week. Remember that sharing what a great faith we have with others brings more joy to the people we introduce to Unitarian Universalism, and more joy to us, as well. We have so many wonderful people in this congregation, most of whom came because of an invitation. Consider your own introduction to this congregation and keep that in mind.

This is also Easter, a holiday of pre-Christian days, of spring, fertility, and burgeoning, brought to special significance for Christians as a day of sacrifice and forgiveness in the person of Jesus. God or Goddess as fruitful, and of grace. For our non-theists or those in our nature-based group, Easter is important as a reminder of the cycle of the seasons: birth to fruition to death to rebirth. All of which comes together for me as a spiritual focus for our own possibilities as they come to us in each new day. For there are undoubtedly redeeming possibilities in the cycles of the seasons, and in the cycles of the days of the human spirit.

Forgiveness as a theme is always problematic. A problem of semantics for starters. What does it mean to forgive? What is the purpose of forgiving? Why would I want to forgive someone or some group who has harmed me?

To deal with the semantic issues, when I speak about forgiveness I am generally in line with the American Psychological Association, who define forgiveness (I paraphrase)as the mental/emotional/spiritual act or process of ceasing to feel resentment or anger against another person, usually for some offence or mistake. Forgiveness also may be ceasing to want or demand punishment or restitution or revenge in any form. Forgiving is not about forgetting, nor is it about letting someone get away with murder. Forgiveness may imply for some people that the other or others are no longer to be held accountable, but that is not the case, either. Forgiveness is not condoning abuse, crime, or any act that violates our fundamental ethics or laws. But often forgiveness may require that we move past our sense of what real justice might be according to ethics or laws.

There is a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, that I happened to read at a time in my life when I was harboring a great deal of resentment against someone who had harmed me; harmed me by an act of plagiarism when I was in graduate school, and harmed me because it wasted several months of my life in anger and resentment that I did not want to let go of, because it was a matter of justice. At least that is how I framed it for myself. Now my area of scholarship was British literature, so I perceive it as special that it was from this American author that I got the message.

Hawthorne of course is dealing with how the Puritan community dealt out punishment for sin. Remember in the story that Hester Prine must wear a scarlet letter A to show she was an adulteress. The irony is that it was the town’s pastor, the Rev. Dimmesdale who was her partner in sin, who fathers her daughter Pearl. Here is the passage in which Hawthorne states:

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.

I have seen this passage incorrectly, but telling, quoted to say that except where forgiveness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Perhaps they are much the same statements, for what is selfishness to forgiveness if not the higher urge submitting to the lower one.

I read somewhere I cannot recall, in relation to this thing we call willpower, that what is really at play in any human being is greater versus lesser urges. The primary urge, the strongest or most important urge, within a person is the one that always is at work in the human mind or spirit. The force that drives us forward, this writer was saying, is the urge that in any given situation which is strongest in us. If, as in the case of many people who have been wronged, the greatest urge is revenge, or vengeance, or justice, or punishment, or restitution—however we term it—then that is the urge that has the greatest hold of the person’s soul or mind.

The issue of punishment was one of the problems I had with the Bible I read daily when I was growing up (an expectation of our household). The singular problem I had that lead me away from the Christianity of my youth was that God was often less about grace and forgiveness and more about punishment. God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is a God we are said to be made in the image of, and if being vengeful and forgiving are two of God’s qualities, they are certainly qualities we humans exhibit in high form.

Robert Frost wrote in a poem:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me

Perhaps that is what confounds so many about traditional religion, especially when it talks of forgiveness, for life as defined by western religion seems, if not ironic, at least a cruel joke on us. We are people who are quick to love, but equally quick to hate and desire punishment. Further, often that hate is inwardly focused, so that we can have a hard time forgiving ourselves for things we regret having done. In either case, before any kind of healing can happen, we first have to be aware of what that primary urge is that drives us in our feelings. Yet again, the teaching of Socrates to Know Thyself, remains, for me, the single greatest spiritual lesson.

Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish teacher, helped establish the now mantra-like refrain for many Jews like himself who were victims of the Nazi holocaust, and those who now see it as their heritage: Never forget. To forget would be for the survivors and the later generations to be an act of betrayal to those who suffered and died in the ghettos and concentrations camps. Never forget.

Never forget is the ideal of all the teachings of history; yet, we know that people do forget, that they continue to perpetrate the same atrocities. Just different by virtue of time and place. But in the refrain Never Forget, is the heart of what makes forgiving such a big problem for most people. How, after all, are we to protect ourselves from future pain and suffering if we forget, and for most people the idea of forgiving implies to both forgive and to forget. After all, we are afraid we will fall victim again to whatever caused us the pain in the first place, so for many people the only way to insult themselves from that possibility is to keep the hate and vengeful feelings alive and well, to nurture those feelings at the expense of all others, even love.

For me there is little doubt that personality type plays a role in the ability to forgive. When Susan gave me this topic, I thought to myself, the non-specific deities are at work. For this is my own spiritual growing edge, the thing I have to work on all the time. The reason I say that I think personality is part of picture, and why the teaching to Know Thyself, is so important, is that when it comes to hurt, anger, forgiveness, we are not all alike. Many people are what I call the flash-and-burn kind, emotionally. They quickly get angry, lash out, but just as quickly get over it; the issue is a dead letter, a thing of the past, forgotten. Then, on the other side of the spectrum, are the slow-fuse kind, which is where I place myself. People like me take quite a lot to get angry, we are slow to push over the edge to displays of anger, but once there, we are slow to cool off. We tend to harbor grudges.

Unfortunately, if the flash-and-burn and slow-fuse live together, that can be a problem. One person is still remembering what was said in an argument in 1989, while the other can’t remember what the fuss was about an hour ago.

Often we do not really understand what is working in us, and how those things are either helping or hindering us. For me this is the real issue of forgiving. Are the feelings we are holding onto or harboring within our spirits helping us or hurting us. More often than not, hate, vengeful feelings, guilt and remorse, are not helping us to the degree we think. Further, it is very hard to allow good feelings to rise up within us if all the room in the inn of our emotions is filled with negativism.

Just as often, we are doing the things or thinking the thoughts that harm us without really being connected to them. We become habituated to the negative. Habits, of course, of any kind can help us and get in our way. There is a story about a minister, who was an enthusiastic preacher, who liked to wave his arms around to emphasize important points in his sermons. As a result, he had trouble keeping his shirttails in his trousers and had developed the habit of stuffing them in surreptitiously whenever he had chance. One Easter Sunday, while admonishing the faithful, he was tucking in his shirt around behind his back in the usual way, and had quite a bit of difficulty getting himself neat. He persisted doggedly, however, tucking and tucking away at that shirttail. At the close of his sermon, as he stepped down to walk to the back of the church for the benediction, he discovered to his chagrin, and the joy of the congregation, that he had about half of the American flag stuffed into his pants.

Most of the violence in the world is the product of habit. In this way, generations of people take up the call to avenge the nation, and/or the generations before, to keep fighting even when fighting keeps people from ever moving forward towards in meaningful kind of existence.

I believe that the whole scope of what we call civilization is fundamentally about being able to change our habits from ones that are focused on the negative or self-centered, to ones that enlarge all our lives.

Perhaps the greatest act of national progress towards this ideal of civilization to date can be credited to Nelson Mandela and the country of South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime. Mandela spent twenty-five years in a South African prison in the struggle for human rights for the majority black population of that country. Yet, when he was elected the first black president of a democratic South Africa, his first call, his continued plea, has been for reconciliation. Not for justice, revenge, or punishment. Mandela said that unless the people could put the past behind them, they could never move forward. They would be stuck in a time warp of vengeful acts that would never allow the nation to become something greater that it had been.

Mandela was not saying to forget all that had happened under apartheid, but that what mattered at this point was to live out the dreams that had for so long been impossible, and now could only be possible if the people could be reconciled to the past.

The Universalists of our UU heritage, were the first Christians to reject the doctrine of eternal damnation. They said that it was not possible for God, who was the God of grace, not to also be a God of forgiveness. The Universalists taught that there would be a time of punishment, according to one’s sins, but eventually, all people would in the scope of eternity, repent of their evil, pay for their sins accordingly, and finally be reunited with God. So the idea of universal salvation which lifted up the glory and grace of God, came to be accepted by not just the Universalists and Unitarians, but by many other religions as well.

To be reconciled is something we all know how to do. We are reconciled, in fact, to many things to which we ought not to be reconciled. I have heard devout religious people say such things as, “It makes no sense to send a lot of money to starving nations; it only prolongs their agony; and, after all, Jesus said the poor will always be with you.” Jesus may have been reconciled to the poor always being with his time and people, but I do not think we should be reconciled to any kind of suffering. That is, if being reconciled means ignoring it. Certainly, though, we can do what we can, and be reconciled that we will not fix the problem by ourselves.

When it comes to most of us and our difficulty with forgiveness, part of the solution is to develop a fuller understanding of the spiritually potent act of reconciliation. To be able to put the thing/act/person behind us and move on.

The growing of the spirit to bigger and better things is nearly always an intentional act. We decide we want to be better, stronger, happier, more considerate, kind, or loving. So, if we are challenged to forgive, be it forgive someone else or to forgive ourselves, we must look inside, in our heart of hearts and be honest about what urge, or overriding emotion or need, is number one. What takes pride of place in our souls? What is the most important in your deepest being?

I have got to track down that source, for I believe he hit the mark when he said that the primary urge is what drives us. So whether we want power, money, revenge, or love, we will act accordingly.

My friends, I am all too well aware that every person has been hurt, and some far greater than others. Few people realize the scope of human suffering that lies within their own families, much less their friends and neighbors. Feelings of anger and revenge, the need for justice that outweighs all others, the inability to move out of the closed loop of suffering constitutes life for many people.

People often talk about forgiving as an act you do for yourself, and it is true to this extent: that whatever negative stuff you or I are harboring that is getting front and center stage time, is that which impairs our lives; and we will not have a good life until we move the ill will, pain, or suffering off the stage. We cannot enjoy the beautiful possibilities in life unless we let the beautiful have a place. For all too many people, their lives are like a vase of lilies once beautiful, now rotting, festering, and foul smelling, as the poet Yeats described. There is no room for the fresh flowers of life until we throw out the old, rotted ones, wash the vase, and fill it with clean water and a new bouquet.

This metaphor applies to far more than the need to learn to forgive, but applies equally to appreciating what it means to say that there are in fact redeeming possibilities in each new day. Whatever primary urge we are feeding in our selves, we can begin to feed others that will soon grow stronger and become the ones we know we were meant to nurture. As Ziggy said: There is no future, spending the present, worrying about the past.

This is the lesson of forgiveness. To not forget, but to be reconciled, to give yourself the gift of better days and years to come, living out of love, focused on the people around us that need our kindness and caring. This is the power of forgiveness, that the more you live focused on higher things, the better your life will be. The more you and I can learn of love, to know the power of love, the better all our lives will be.

This is the heart of our faith. To ever, each new day, try to live and love better, and more fully. To live and love as radically as Jesus, Gandhi, Mandela, and the dozens I could name in this congregation.

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