Dan Harper | Sermons

  • A Unitarian Universalist Easter

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, the last chapter of the Book of Mark, as translated by Hugh Schonfield, a Jewish scholar of the ancient Near East. Later copyists added a more upbeat ending to the Book of Mark; in this reading you will hear the original ending, filled with ambiguity.

    When the sabbath was ended, Mary of Magdala, Mary mother of James, and Salome, brought spices in order to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning of the day after the sabbath they came to the tomb as soon as the sun was up. “Who is going to roll away the boulder for us from the entrance of the tomb?” they asked themselves. But when they came to look they saw that the boulder had been rolled aside.

    On entering the tomb they were startled to see a young man sitting on the far right side clad in a flowing white robe. “Do not be alarmed,” he said to them. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, here is the place where he was laid. Go now and tell his followers, and Peter particularly, he is preceding you to Galilee. You will see him there just as he told you.”

    They fled from the tomb, for they were trembling and unnerved. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

    The second reading is “The Hailstones,” by Ai Qing [aye ching], translated in 1983 by Angela Jung Palandri. This poem was written in 1979, after the poet was released from the prison camp where he had been spent the previous twenty years, because he had fallen out of favor with the Chinese Communist Party. The poem can be found in this online essay (scroll down to page 72).

    The final reading was by Joy Harjo, poet laureate of the United States. The title of the poem is “Singing Everything.” This poem is reproduced at the end of this newspaper article.

    [These two links go to webpages that reproduce the poems with full permission of the poets.]

    Sermon: “A Unitarian Universalist Easter”

    That last reading, the poem by Joy Harjo, tells a truth that is worth considering on Easter Sunday. We used to have songs for everything, “Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,” as the poet tells us, and songs “for sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.” But today we are reduced to a narrow range of songs.

    Admittedly, Joy Harjo exaggerates a little when she tells us, “Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and /Falling apart after falling in love songs.” We do have a few other kinds of songs such as political songs, and songs of interior landscapes by singer-songwriters. But Joy Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muscogee nation, and as a Native American she is aware of a broader range of songs that once existed. Most of those kinds of songs that once existed in indigenous cultures — including indigenous European and African and Asian cultures — have disappeared from today’s mass-produced culture.

    Mind you, I love the music of today’s culture. I love Taylor Swift’s song “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It has to be the best falling-apart-after-falling-in-love song ever. And some of you will remember Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a song at the roots of hip hop; this is a truly great political song. Perhaps you are now hearing in your head the many other great songs of our time. Even so, most of our popular songs today are love songs, or political songs, or songs of interior landscapes. We have very few songs about sunrise, or planting, or harvesting, or giving birth, or (as Harjo says in her poem) “songs of the guardians of silence.” We have many great songs today, but they mostly stick to a relatively narrow range of topics.

    The same is true of much of religion in today’s world. Most of today’s religion occupies a narrow range of feeling and values and being. Popular American culture thinks of religion as having to do with the Bible, except that the Bible is merely supposed to support the assumptions and prejudices of conservative American Christianity. One of my favorite examples of this is that conservative American Christianity assumes that the God of their Bible is entirely male; except that in the Bible, in Genesis 1:28, it very clearly states that God is non-binary gender: “God created humankind in his image… male and female he created them.” God may choose to use he/him pronouns, but God’s actual body is both male and female. Somehow the conservative American Christians manage to ignore that part of the Bible. This shows you what I mean when I say that today’s American religion occupies a too-narrow range of feeling and values and being.

    We might imagine for ourselves a religion with a broader range. Consider with me the story of Easter as we heard it in the first reading, as it was originally told in the book of Mark. Here’s how I would retell this story:

    The Roman Empire executes Jesus of Nazareth, and he dies at sundown on Friday. The friends and followers of Jesus are all observant Jews. Since the Jewish sabbath begins at sundown of Friday, they want to wait until the sabbath is over to prepare the body for burial. So they place the body in a tomb. Promptly on the morning after the sabbath, Jesus’ mother, accompanied by Mary of Magdala and Salome (these three are leaders among the followers of Jesus, and as women would know more about preparing bodies for burial than any of the men), these three women go to the tomb to care for the body. There they encounter a stranger, a man who is strangely dressed, who tells them that Jesus has been raised, and will precede them to Galilee. The stranger tells the women not to tell the men these things. Not surprisingly, the three women find this strange and weird. They are unnerved. Fearing for themselves and for the other followers of Jesus, they quickly leave the tomb. They tell no one.

    That’s it. That’s the end of the story.

    Now, the book of Mark is accepted by most scholars as the earliest story we still have that tells about the life and death of Jesus. This means that all those traditional stories about Easter we hear — the stories of resurrection and triumph — that’s not the way the story was first told. The original book of Mark does not end in triumph, and so it sounds like some contemporary poetry — like the poem of Ai Qing we heard as the second reading. Ai Qing lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China; he was exiled to a labor camp for twenty years. His poem “The Hailstones” is a poetic retelling of how the Cultural Revolution brought his poetry to a violent end. Since he’s telling us this in a poem, we know that eventually his poetry was reborn. Yet when he looks back on those twenty lost years, he can only say: “What remains / Are sad memories of the calamity.”

    You notice that I’m using a poem by a disgraced Chinese Communist poet to talk about Easter. I’m not talking about Easter the way we’re “supposed” to talk about Easter; at least, the way the conservative American Christians tell us is the correct, orthodox way to talk about Easter. We Unitarian Universalists have never limited our religion to the narrow confines of conservative American Christianity. For us, religion and spirituality are broad and inclusive. We can look at the Easter story with fresh eyes.

    We don’t feel a need to shoehorn the Easter story into a confining orthodoxy. We don’t need the Easter story to somehow prove that Jesus was a god who could not actually be killed. If you want to interpret the Easter story in that way, that’s fine. Yet for us, the Easter story contains far more complexity. As with any good literature, we find multiple levels of meaning. I’ll give you an example from my own life. This past year has been a year of loss in my household: my father-in-law died just about a year ago, and my spouse’s stepmother died the day after Christmas. So this year when I read the Easter story in the book of Mark, what I feel is the emotional truth of that story: someone you love is alive one day, and then they’re no longer alive, and you know they are gone forever. This can leave you (as the story puts it) trembling and unnerved, and you can find yourself afraid and unwilling to talk about it.

    That is one emotional truth we can find in the story. We can also find another emotional truth carried in that story. After people die, we have not lost them. They live on in our love. If there’s a resurrection story that all Unitarian Universalists agree on, this it it: love transcends death.

    And we can find still more emotional truths in this simple story. For example: Jesus was a brilliant spiritual teacher, who encapsulated spirituality in simple, easy-to-understand stories and formulas. His most famous spiritual teaching is quite simple: love your neighbor as yourself. (Simple in the saying, but far more difficult in actual practice.) When the Roman Empire executed him, his teachings did not die. You cannot kill truth that easily. This another emotional truth of the Easter story that all Unitarian Universalists can agree on: you cannot kill truth so easily.

    With enough time, we can find still more emotional truths in this story. So it is that we can see how religion and spirituality have a much wider range than popular American culture would have us believe. Popular American culture tells us that religion is concerned with beliefs many of us find unbelievable, beliefs to which we are supposed to conform. In truth, however, religion and spirituality exist to help us understand the perplexities of life. From this, we gain comfort and support. Religion and spirituality concern the truth that never dies. From this, we remember that love transcends even death. Religion and spirituality teach a universal love that includes all people, no matter what gender or sexual preference, no matter what race, no matter what, period. And with that knowledge, we can create a world where we truly love our neighbors as ourselves.

    That’s why we keep coming back here to this community. That’s why we keep our religion and spirituality alive in our personal lives. We celebrate the incredible diversity of humankind, the diversity which exists among us here today. And we celebrate that which transcends us all and which unites us all — that which is highest and best, that which keeps us going from day to day.

  • Palm Sunday and the Roman Empire

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Moment for All Ages: “The Story of Palm Sunday”

    (with Kate Sullivan and Dan Harper)

    Dan: Today is the Christian holiday of Palm Sunday. Kate and I are going to tell you the story of Palm Sunday as I learned it as a Unitarian Universalist child.

    Kate: We’re going to ask the children and teens to come forward, because we’d like your help as we tell the story.

    Dan: 2,000 years ago there was a Jewish rabbi named Jesus who went from town to town in a land called Judea teaching about religion. Jesus wasn’t an official Jewish leader, as the Pharisees were. But many people listened to his teachings anyway, probably because he treated everyone with respect, even people who were poor or homeless or sick. And because what he preached made so much sense. He said religion was simple: love your God with all your heart and all your mind, and treat other people the way you would like to be treated.

    Kate: Jesus did most of his teaching in the countryside, but at last he and his followers decided to to Jerusalem for Passover. Just as it is now, Jerusalem was the most important city for Jews, and Passover was one of the most important holidays. Since Jesus and his followers were Jewish, celebrating Passover in Jerusalem was especially meaningful. They left the town they were in, a town called Jericho, and began to walk to Jerusalem. They didn’t have much money, so they had to walk the whole way. Jesus had been teaching and traveling for a long time, and he was tired. As they got close to Jerusalem, he asked his followers to see if they could find an animal for him to ride. The followers went to a farm nearby, and borrowed a foal, or a young horse, for Jesus.

    Dan: There were crowds of people on the road in to Jerusalem for Passover. Many them had seen Jesus before, and had heard his teachings about religion. They began to point at Jesus, and call out to him. Someone began to sing a hymn that seemed to fit what they were doing, and others joined in. They sang:

    Enter into his gates with thanksgiving
    And into his courts with praise.

    Kate: People were in a happy, festive mood. They picked leaves from palm trees, and carried them along. That’s why this is called Palm Sunday, by the way. We’d like to ask the children and teens to hand out these palms leaves to anyone who would like one, so we can all better imagine what it was like when Jesus and his followers entered Jerusalem for Passover. [Kate hands palm leaves to kid.]

    Dan: (When I was a Unitarian Universalist child, our UU church gave us palm leaves so we could understand what they were; growing up in New England, we had never seen palm leaves. But to return to the story….) Someone started singing again:

    Serve our God Yahweh with gladness,
    Come before God’s presence with singing.
    Blessed are they that come in the name of God!

    People gave flowers to Jesus, and waved palm leaves over him. Everyone was in a cheerful mood. There was just one big problem. The singing, the people giving Jesus flowers and waving palm leaves over him — those were the kinds of things that people did for new kings of Jerusalem, back in the olden times, hundreds of years before Jesus lived.

    Kate: But in the time of Jesus, the Romans ruled over Jerusalem. The Romans didn’t want anyone to question their authority. Treating Jesus like one of the kings of olden times was a way to question authority. Could some of the people hope that Jesus would lead a rebellion against the Romans? It was dangerous for them to even think about such things. So there’s Jesus riding into Jerusalem, with the people waving palm leaves over him. What will Jesus do in Jerusalem? And what will the Romans do?

    Dan: If you want to know what Jesus did once he got into Jerusalem, if you want to know what the Romans did, you’ll have to wait until next week when we tell the rest of the story.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the Minor Dialogues of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, or Seneca the Elder, as translated by Aubrey Stewart. Seneca the Elder was born in about the same year as Jesus of Nazareth. We’ll hear two excerpts of the first dialogue, called “Of Providence,” from chapters 2 and 3.

    “Why do many things turn out badly for good men? Why, no evil can befall a good man: contraries cannot combine. Just as so many rivers, so many showers of rain from the clouds, such a number of medicinal springs, do not alter the taste of the sea, indeed, do not so much as soften it, so the pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of a brave man; for the mind of a brave man maintains its balance and throws its own complexion over all that takes place, because it is more powerful than any external circumstances. I do not say that he does not feel them, but he conquers them, and on occasion calmly and tranquilly rises superior to their attacks, holding all misfortunes to be trials of his own firmness….

    “Do you consider Socrates to have been badly used, because he took that draught which the state assigned to him as though it were a charm to make him immortal, and argued about death until death itself? Was he ill treated, because his blood froze and the current of his veins gradually stopped as the chill of death crept over them? How much more is this man to be envied than he who is served on precious stones, whose drink a creature trained to every vice, a eunuch or much the same, cools with snow in a golden cup? Such men as these bring up again all that they drink, in misery and disgust at the taste of their own bile, while Socrates cheerfully and willingly drains his poison….”

    The second reading was a short poem by Everett Hoagland titled “Spirit.” It is not included here due to copyright.

    Sermon: “Palm Sunday and the Roman Empire”

    In the moment for all ages today, Kate and I imagined what it was like for Jesus and his followers when they entered Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. If you’ve heard this story before, there are probably many things about it that you take for granted. But for anyone hearing this story for the first time, it is a deeply strange story. And I think it is far stranger than most of us in the twenty-first century usually assume.

    First of all, we always say that Jesus was a rabbi and his followers were Jewish, and we like to think we know exactly what we mean when we say this. But Judaism in Jesus’s time was very different from Judaism today. Today, we know that Jews belong to a synagogue, and each synagogue has a rabbi, and weekly sabbath services involve reading from the Torah and so on. Back then, however, Judaism was not centered around local synagogues, Judaism was centered around the great Temple of Jerusalem. The worship at the great Temple involved the sacrifice of animals, which included very different rituals from modern-day Jewish sabbath services.

    Secondly, we like to imagine that ancient Rome had religions in the same way we have religions today, but that turns out not to be true. There’s an emerging consensus among scholars that the Latin words usually translated as “religion” do not mean the same thing as our modern English word “religion.” The great Temple of Jerusalem was partly a political power, partly a cult that focused on practices (not on beliefs), and partly a symbol of tribal or national identity. Politics, cultic practices, and national or tribal identity all blended together in ways we can barely imagine today.

    Thirdly, ancient Roman society was utterly completely different from our society today. Most people in the ancient Roman empire were slaves; or if they weren’t slaves, they were freed slaves, who didn’t have much greater status than slaves. Among the people who were not slaves, only a very few were actual Roman citizens. Among the minority of people who were actual Roman citizens, only men were allowed to vote. Even among male Roman citizens, only wealthy males of high birth had any real political power. The one man at the top, the Roman emperor, had pretty much absolute authority over everyone else (at least until someone assassinated him). Ancient Rome was the exact opposite of an egalitarian society. No one in the Roman Empire had much freedom except for the Roman emperor.

    In short, the ancient Roman Empire was nothing like American society today.

    I want to emphasize this last point by referring back to this morning’s second reading, the one by Seneca the Elder. Seneca was an elite male Roman citizen, a person of power and influence, but even so he knew that the Roman emperor could tell him to commit suicide, and he would have to go and kill himself. (Indeed, his son Seneca the Younger suffered that exact fate.) Seneca the Elder’s life depended on the whim of one man.

    You need to know all this in order to understand just how revolutionary Jesus was. Jesus said his teachings were quite simple: love God with all your heart and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. (This is a very Jewish teaching by the way, since the first part of this is a paraphrase of the Shema Israel, and the second part is from the Torah, a paraphrase of Leviticus 19:18.) When asked who we should consider to be our neighbor, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan which showed that everyone is our neighbor, even despised minority groups.

    This is a radically egalitarian teaching that upended the assumptions of ancient Rome. Jesus taught his followers that everyone was worthy of God’s love. Not only did that mean that everyone single person in the world had inherent worthiness, it also meant that we should emulate God and treat everyone with love and kindness. Not only did Jesus teach this, he lived this in his life. He spent time with homeless people, he talked seriously to women and treated them as equals, he answered the questions of both rich people and poor people without regard to their wealth or poverty.

    You can see, then, how the elite people who were the representatives of the Roman Empire in Judea might see Jesus as a bit of a threat. If both rich people and poor people are equally worthy of love, that might imply that someone should do something about poverty and homelessness, to say nothing of ending slavery. And if Jesus treated rich people the same way he treated homeless people, you can understand how the elite people who were in power might feel that he was undermining their social and political position. This is why the story of Palm Sunday, the story of Jesus’s first day in Jerusalem, concludes with this ominous statement: “And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching.”

    Recently, I have come to believe this conflict between Jesus and the ancient Roman Empire was a philosophical conflict over how to value individual people. The ancient Roman Empire as a whole didn’t place a high value on anyone except maybe the emperor. Slaves were disposable property. Free people who were not Roman citizens had little value. Women were little better than property. Even elite Roman males could be forced to die by suicide at the whim of the emperor.

    By contrast, Jesus said every person has value. Women, slaves, widows, orphans, immigrants, homeless people, people with incurable diseases, poor people — Jesus treated every individual as important and worthy of love. Or, in his succinct and memorable summation of this philosophical principle, you should love your neighbor as you love yourself.

    Today, we live in a much more egalitarian society than ancient Rome. We have extended legal rights (in theory, at least) to all persons more or less equally. We have mostly gotten rid of slavery, and certainly slavery is no longer legal in this country. We have developed an egalitarian form of government that makes it possible to offer any needed support to widows, orphans, homeless people, people with incurable diseases, and so on (in theory, if not quite yet in practice).

    Our society has come a bit closer to the ideal outlined by Jesus two thousand years ago — the ideal that Jesus got from Judaism, and an ideal which is present in most of the great world’s religions. Our society values each individual in a way that was pretty much foreign to the ancient Roman Empire.

    At the same time, we have not fully realized a truly egalitarian world. A new philosophy has gotten in the way. Instead of repeating the words of the Torah (Lev. 19:18) and saying, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” we tend to leave out the phrase “your neighbor as,” leaving us with the selfish injunction “you shall love yourself.” That is, instead of valuing each individual person as being worthy of universal love, our society is slowly moving towards a philosophy of selfish individualism.

    Communities like First Parish exist in part to counter this creeping philosophy of selfish individualism. We can serve as a living example of a philosophy based on loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Maybe we don’t always live up to our philosophical ideals, but we keep the ideal alive through our efforts. And, because of our non-creedal nature, Unitarian Universalist congregations can also show how this ideal exists in most of the great religions of the world. Gotama Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, and many other great religious leaders passed on similar teachings. This is an important message in an increasingly multicultural society.

    Our second reading, the short poem by Everett Hoagland, is one effort by a Unitarian Universalist to universalize this philosophical ideal. Everett begins the poem by naming “The ethereal entity / that sings itself in music” — this poetic formulation could point towards the Jewish or Christian God, it could point towards the goddess of Neo-Paganism, it could point towards the Buddhist Dharma, it could point to natural law or human ethics — you can read into it a hundred different spiritual interpretations. But all these spiritual approaches teach there is something larger than our individual selves.

    Everett continues his poem by telling us this mysterious entity “can be seen in a kindness.” And this poetic formulation hints at a the common ethical standards that can be found nearly all of the world’s religions: to treat each other with kindness, to see ourselves as connected to all person and all beings. (The Vietnamese Buddhist philospher Thich Nhat Hanh calls this concept “interbeing.”) Everett goes on to tell us that our inherent kindness and our sense of connectedness to all persons and all beings is going to prompt us to work for justice; and when we resist injustice, we will be supported by that “ethereal entity” that is something larger than ourselves.

    The poem ends by saying that that “ethereal entity” is a physically manifested in something as simple and commonplace as a hug: it “embodies itself / in the felt way / of a hug.” The point here is not that you should walk down the street hugging everyone you meet — that would be kind of creepy. The point is that something as simple as a parent hugging a child embodies everything named in the poem — something which is larger than ourselves; kindness; fighting for justice in the world. The poem also shows us how all these things exist in the power of human connection. Where do we find God, goddess, the highest and best in humanity, or whatever you call it? — we find it in human connection, we find it in the interconnected web of all existence. Where do we find justice? — in the interconnectedness of all life. Where do we find kindness and compassion and universal love? — in human connection, in the interconnected web of all being.

    Now let us return to the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem. There he was, part of the crowd of people flooding into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Based on what we know about the philosophy of Jesus, it’s clear he doesn’t see the crowd as a faceless entity of mass humanity. Nor does he see the crowd as a collection of isolated individuals. He sees the crowd as individuals who are all connected through what he called God, or what some of us today might call universal love.

    Contrast this with the way the Romans who ruled Jerusalem perceived the crowd coming in to the city. For those in power, the ordinary people were merely a faceless mass to be manipulated and controlled. This is why they would have seen Jesus as a threat: he taught people how to see themselves as being both individually worthy and as being connected to others. Seeing themselves in this way gave them the collective power to resist the injustices inherent in the Roman Empire, while maintaining the dignity of their individuality.

    It is tempting to us today to draw an analogy between our current political situation, and the political situation in the Roman Empire in the first century. It’s tempting to believe that Jesus entering Jerusalem has something to teach us about our relationship with Washington, D.C. Maybe there is analogy to be made, but I think you’d have to be a fairly knowledgeable historian to sort through the huge differences between the Roman Empire and the United States. Since I’m not especially knowledgeable about ancient Rome, I’m not going to turn this into a political sermon.

    But I do believe something in the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem can influence the way we lead our personal lives. It is all too easy to reduce humanity to conveniently inaccurate labels. We do this very often in the United States today. In one obvious example, American society tends to reduce people to convenient racial categories: you’re Black or you’re White, or what-have-you; our society still has difficulty knowing what to do with biracial or multiracial people. In another obvious example, American society tends to reduce people to Democrat or Republican, to liberal or conservative; and we are likely to make judgements of other Americans based on political caricatures.

    Instead of passing judgement on people based on convenient categories, what Jesus and other great religious and philosophical leaders are trying to tell us is that we should see people as both individuals, and as an integral part of an interconnected web of humanity.

    This is a unique contribution that we Unitarian Universalists can bring to the wider conversation conversation about the upcoming Christian celebration of Holy Week and Easter. Jesus is often reduced to s religious figure who performed miracles. But we Unitarian Universalists also see him as a philosopher in the Jewish tradition of Rabbi Hillel who was his older contemporary. As a philosopher, Jesus emphasized both the radical importance of each individual, and the radical importance of the connection between individuals. This was a philosophy quite different form that which underlay the ancient Roman Empire. While it was not an entirely new philosophy, Jesus managed to state this philosophy in a particularly memorable way.

    Today, this ancient philosophy sometimes gets obscured by the religious aspects of Jesus; but we Unitarian Universalists continue to highlight his philosophical ideals. Jesus took the ancient teaching from the Torah, to love your neighbor as you love yourself, and made it memorable both through his words and his actions. And we carry on this philosophical tradition. We continue to highlight the importance of the individual. We continue to highlight the importance of connection between individuals. And we do this both through our words and through our actions.

  • Springtime Poetry

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. I did not have time to correct typos and other errors in the text.

    Opening words

    The opening words were the poem “Spring and All [By the toad to the contagious hospital]” by William Carlos Williams.

    Readings

    The first reading was “Winter Poem” by Nikki Giovanni.

    The second reading was “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón.

    The final reading was “Thank You” by Ross Gay.

    Sermon: “Springtime poetry”

    There’s an old Christian spiritual practice called “lectio divina.” That Latin phrase, which I’m probably mispronouncing, means “divine reading.” Supposedly, lectio divina dates back to the early sixth century when the monk Benedict, founder of the Christian Benedictine monastic order, instructed the monks under him to use it as a spiritual practice. It worked something like this: A monk would read one passage from the Bible to himself slowly, over and over again, trying to hear the voice of God in that passage. Then the monk would meditate on the passage as it related to his own life, waiting for an image or a feeling or a perception about God to arise in his mind. The third step in lectio divina would be for the monk to talk back to God about what had arisen for him, maybe even hearing some feedback back from God. In the final step, the monk is supposed to contemplate what he has felt and heard, and feel peaceful and contented, with new energy for living his monastic life. At least, that’s how I understand it. Some of you may use lectio divina as a spiritual practice yourselves, and if so please tell me about my errors after the service.

    I first became aware of lectio divina in the nineties and the aughts. At that time there was a movement called the “emergent church” among both mainline Protestants and evangelical Christians. The emergent church folks saw that churches were losing the younger generation — Generation X, in those days — because the typical American church service had become too formulaic, too intellectual and lacking in spiritual depth. The emergent church movement had some real successes in attracting young people to return to churches, and some Unitarian Universalists started paying attention. (I myself started using some of the emergent church techniques when I led worship.) Lectio divina was one of the spiritual practices that gained currency among us, as both a personal and communal spiritual practice. And we Unitarian Universalists applied the lectio divina technique, not just to the Bible, but to poetry.

    While I’ve never used the specific technique of lectio divina myself, I have found that reading a good poem can be a spiritual practice. To use a metaphor from electronics, I’ve found that a really good poem can rewire your brain. Back in the aughts, when I was experimenting with emergent church techniques, I was at the New Bedford Unitarian church. There were three or four published poets in that small congregation, one of whom was Everett Hoagland, the award-winning poet who came here last September to read his poetry. Not only was Everett an exceptionally good poet himself, he mentored other poets and organized events where they could read their poetry aloud. I discovered that listening to poetry being read aloud to a group of people made the poetry especially powerful for me. It did something to me. Just as listening to live music is more powerful than listening to music on your earbuds, I find that listening to live poetry is more powerful than reading it to myself.

    With that overly long preface, I’d like to read some poems about springtime, and say a few words about each poem. To begin, I’ll remind you of the poem by William Carlos Williams which started our service this morning, “Spring and All [By the toad to the contagious hospital]” by William Carlos Williams. [During the sermon, I quoted the first 8 lines of this poem.]

    A couple of facts about William Carlos Williams that are not well known, but may be of interest to us: he was Latino, and he was a Unitarian Universalist. Both those things place him a bit outside the mainstream of U.S. culture. Perhaps that gave him a broader insight into human nature. He was also a physician, and was the chief of pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital in New Jersey. This last fact helps us understand why he began a poem about spring with the phrase, “By the road to the contagious hospital….” In popular culture, spring is a season that all about pretty flowers and unicorns and rainbows. William Carlos Williams understands that the real-life season spring is much messier than the pop culture version. As he says in this poem: “…They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter. All about them
    the cold, familiar wind — …”

    No unicorns and rainbows here. Cold and warmth, winter and spring, joy and sorrow are mixed together in human experience.

    The first reading, “Winter Poem” by Nikki Giovanni, also mixes seemingly discreet things together. Nikki Giovanni is another person who doesn’t quite fit the stereotype of a “typical” American poet: she’s been called the Poet of the Black Revolution, she writes children’s books, she’s a feminist, she likes hip hop, and she’s proud of her down-home Appalachian roots.

    “Winter Poem” by Nikki Giovanni

    While this is in fact a springtime poem about flowers, it’s a little bit weird. The “I” of the poem, whoever it is that’s narrating the poem, starts out as a human, then becomes a snowflake, then becomes a spring rain, then becomes a flower. Winter turns into spring without sharp boundaries, and there don’t seem to be sharp boundaries between humans, snow, rain, and flowers either. It’s all an interconnected web. Or maybe more precisely, it could be an interconnected web, if we let it. Back in 2019, Nikki Giovanni told this story about growing up in Appalachia:

    “…if you had a flat tire in the old days when people had flat tires, the best place to be was in Appalachia…it’s always going to be a woman [saying], ‘Pa! Somebody’s car broke down!’ And he would say, ‘Be right there!’ and they would come down and help you. They’d help fix the tire. And you’d be sitting on the porch with the woman while Pa did that. And of course you didn’t have any money and they didn’t either. So, you’d be saying thank you. But it was a safe place.”

    And it was a safe place whether you were White or Black. In Nikki Giovanni’s opinion, the people in American politics who are fostering hate and divisiveness tend to be people driving expensive cars who can hire other people to fix their flat tires, and they’re using poor people for their own ends. According to the poet Asha French, “Nikki Giovanni’s deep sight sidesteps easy stereotypes to get to the heart of the matter: economic justice for all Americans.” (1) Or as we Unitarian Universalists might put it, the heart of the matter is that we are all interconnected in the web of existence.

    Ada Limón, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote another atypical springtime poem, which she has titled “Instructions on Not Giving Up.”

    While Ada Limón grew up in Sonoma, California, and still lives there part of every year, to me this sounds more like a New England poem. When she says that the new green leaves that come out in springtime are “Patient, plodding, a green skin / growing over whatever winter did to us, a return / to the strange idea of continuous living despite / the mess of us, the hurt, the empty” — that sounds more like winter and spring in New England than in Sonoma, California. However, having spent 13 years living just south of Sonoma, California, it is true that northern California winters can can be hard in their own way. Northern California has had an especially hard winter this year: storms with hurricane force winds, intense rainstorms, flooding, landslides. A hard winter can take it out of you. All the difficult parts of life can take it out of you. Life is messy, it hurts us, it can make us feel empty. Yet like the trees in springtime, we too can put out new life. We can take all of life — the meanness of hurts and emptiness, and also the sublime glory of springtime.

    And so it is that we conclude with final springtime poem by Ross Gay titled “Thank You.”

    Parts of this poem remind me of another poem, one written twenty-five hundred years ago. When Ross Gay says, “All will one day turn to dust” I can hear echoes of the ancient poet who wrote the book Ecclesiastes: “dust returns to the earth as it was.” Yet the poet of Ecclesiastes ends by repeating the opening lines of their poem — “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” — while Ross Gay ends his poem quite differently: “Say only thank you. Thank you.”

    I sometimes feel that most religion today does not give thanks often enough. The first thing the conservative Christians tell us is that we are sinners. The first thing that Unitarian Universalists and other religious progressives tell us is that the world is full of injustice that needs to be corrected, which isn’t so very different from saying that we are all sinners. And what does Ross Gay do? He tells us to say thank you. This to me is something that’s missing from too much of today’s religion. Watch your breath steam out from your mouth on a cold spring morning, walk through your still-dormant garden, and say thank you. We need to give thanks more often.

    It would be easy to dismiss Ross Gay as hopelessly idealistic. After all, he’s just another privileged college professor. Yet he’s also a Black man living in the United States, who said in a 2021 interview that he’s always aware of racial justice when he writes poetry. (2) Or as he put it in an NPR interview: “Joy is the evidence of our reaching across to one another in the midst of — or as a way even of — caring for one another’s sorrows.” (3) Ross Gay sees joy and sorrow as being connected. He also believes that joy does not happen in isolation; joy only happens through your connection to others. You can’t have joy unless you’re connected to other people, and to the whole universe; joy arises because we pare part of the interconnected web of all existence.

    And this is why we say thank you. Yes, we know that we’re all going to die sooner or later, and there’s a great deal of sorrow in that knowledge. Yes, we know that there is much that is horribly wrong with this world, and there’s a great deal of sorrow in that knowledge. But when we reach out to others in the midst of our many sorrows, when we care for one another in the midst of sorrow, joy can arise.

    I began by telling you how reading poetry can be a sort of spiritual practice. To reuse that overused electronics metaphor, a good poem can rewire your brain. And I don’t mean that it changes the way you think so much as I mean a good poem can change the way you are in the world. Poetry can change your very being.

    Lately, I’ve been finding that I need to have my being changed. Between COVID and climate change and race relations and Gaza and presidential politics — all this on top of the individual sorrows and griefs that we all face in our personal lives — the past few years have been difficult for me, and I think for most of us. There’s a lot of sorrow floating around in the world.

    In these times, it is all too easy to say, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” — and stop there. But I hope these poems about springtime prompt you to go beyond the vanity of vanities. With William Carlos Williams, may we see that even outside the contagious hospital, new life is emerging with spring. With Nikki Giovanni, may we understand that we are connected with snow and rain and flowers, and with all of humanity as well. With Ada Limón, may we realize that like the trees in springtime, we too can put out new life. And with Ross Gay, may we remember to say thank you. Over and over again, may we remember to say thank you.

    Notes

    (1) Asha French, “Deeper Than Double: Nikki Giovanniand her Appalachian Elders,” Pluck: Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture (University of Kentucky, June, 2020) https://pluckjournal.uky.edu/welcome/2020/06/03/deeper-than-double-nikki-giovanni-and-her-appalachian-elders/

    (2) “Poet Ross Gay explores a joy informed by deep sorrow,” interview with Leah Rumack, 11 Jan. 2021, Broadview magazine website, https://broadview.org/ross-gay-interview/

    (3) “How Ross Gay Finds Joy In The Smallest of ‘Delights’,” interview with Christina Cala, 19 August 2021, transcript of NPR “CodeSwitch” radio program, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/08/19/1029287927/how-ross-gay-finds-joy-in-the-smallest-of-delights