Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Eco-moms

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Bidding farewell to graduating high school seniors

    Emma Mitchell, Director of Religious Education: Each year, a few young people from this church end their time in high school. Usually after they are through with high school, they head off to find a job, to join the military, or to attend college or further education. And most often that means that these young people move out of town, or have busy schedules that don’t permit them to come to church as often.

    Our young people enrich the life of this church immeasurably. They bring their own perspective to church life, they bring their own talents and enthusiasms. Sometimes, they can help to challenge the assumptions of older generations, which can inject new energy and life into this church. So when the end of high school requires some young people to move on, it’s a real loss to the church.

    But it’s also a time of excitement. We are so pleased that these young people are entering a new phase of life! They may not be around as much as in the past, but we want them to know that we will always be glad to see them here, that we hope they continue to be a part of this church. We want them to know, too, that we will support them as they make the big transition away from high school and into something new — we will support them in their dreams, and their emerging new lives.

    This is our chance to recognize these people in what has become known as a “Bridging Ceremony,” bridging the gap between youth and adulthood.

    Dan Harper, parish minister: First, I’d like to ask anyone who, like Emma and me, spent part or all of their growing-up years in a Unitarian, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist church, to join us up here at the pulpit. [About a dozen people, or a third of the congregation, joined us at the pulpit.]

    Next, I’d like to ask everyone who is in high school, and those adults who have served as youth advisors, to come stand up here in front of the pulpit.

    Alyzza Callahan will be ending her time in high school and moving on to new things. Alyzza, would you please join us up here in the pulpit?

    Welcome Alyzza! We welcome you into the community of adult Unitarian Universalists.

    Those of us standing here at the pulpit also grew up as Unitarian Universalists, and we have either stayed, or we have come back. Know that you will be welcomed into other Unitarian Universalist churches (and if you aren’t welcomed, you can do what some of us did and demand to be welcomed in!). Know that you will always be welcome here — come back and visit, or remain here as members.

    And I deliver this charge to all the adults in this church: whenever you meet a young adult who grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church, you have the privilege and the responsibility to welcome them here in this church — just as other Unitarian Universalist congregations will have the privilege (and responsibility) to welcome some of our young people into their congregations.

    Readings

    The first reading was a poem by Adrienne Rich, titled “Mother-Right.” (Unfortunately, copyright laws do not permit us to reproduce complete poems that are still protected under copyright.)

    The second reading this morning is from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Proverbs, chapter 4, verses 1-9:

    1 Listen, children, to a father’s instruction,
    and be attentive, that you may gain insight;
    2 for I give you good precepts:
    do not forsake my teaching.
    3 When I was a son with my father,
    tender, and my mother’s favorite,
    4 he taught me, and said to me,
    “Let your heart hold fast my words;
    keep my commandments, and live.
    5 Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away
    from the words of my mouth.
    6 Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
    love her, and she will guard you.
    7 The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
    and whatever else you get, get insight.
    8 Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
    she will honor you if you embrace her.
    9 She will place on your head a fair garland;
    she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.

    SERMON — “Eco-Moms”

    At their best, religious scriptures make us feel uncomfortable; make us realize that we’re not yet the best people we could be; make us long to grow a better world from the compost of our present reality.

    And the religious scriptures of the world have their limits. The religious scriptures I know have a tendency to ignore women: the writings of Confucius mention women maybe once; Buddhist scriptures are either abstractly remote, or focus in on a man’s world; the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindus tell men’s stories. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures are somewhat better: the Hebrew Bible has some powerful women characters in it, and a couple of books are even devoted to telling women’s stories; in the Christian scriptures, women have important roles to play, now and then. But: if we want to talk in newspaper terminology, women get far fewer column inches than men in all religious scriptures; which is hardly balanced reporting; worse yet, there’s a clear bias in the reporting in that women’s viewpoints and concerns are slighted.

    Well, this is an old story by now. Even though a few conservative religious groups continue to insist that the world’s religious scriptures offer a perfectly balanced view of women, the rest of us know better. And over the past few decades, some of our best poets have created poems that rival religious scriptures for beauty, truth, and a capacity to make us feel uncomfortable.

    The first reading this morning was by one of those poets, Adrienne Rich. Her poem “Mother-Right” challenges us to think about who mothers are, and what women are; and who men are, and what they are; and who and what children might be.

    In the poem, a woman is running through a field; she has a child with her. In her long, slim hand, she holds the smaller, starlike, hand of a child. Her hair is “cut short for faster travel”; the child’s hair is in long curls that graze his shoulders. Together, they through the field.

    Somewhere on the horizon a man stands, his feet planted on the ground. He is walking the boundaries (the boundaries of what, is not quite clear) and he is measuring. He is motivated by the belief that parts of the earth are his.

    So the man is making boundaries, and the woman is running, running through the air, running through the field, running under the clouds and sky. How can there be boundaries to anything? Well, the man believes the things belong to him: the grass; the water; the air. But the woman is running over and through and under; her eyes are sharpened; she is making for the open.

    She is making for the open.

    Perhaps herein lies the woman’s wisdom: she is making for the open, making for the openness beyond boundaries. She is drawing her son along with her, and the boy is singing.

    In the second reading this morning, from the Hebrew scriptures, Wisdom is personified as a person, as a woman. And “the beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever else you get, get insight.” Or as it is more felicitously rendered in the sonorous words of the King James translation: “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace….” This old religious text, this old collection of folk-wisdom and proverbs, was written down to pass on wisdom to young men; but hidden in these old proverbs is challenging advice to men and to women: don’t just trust in men’s wisdom, trust in the wisdom of women, too. Wisdom, who is a woman, shall give to thine head an ornament of grace, like the child’s curls grazing his shoulders.

    This all, of course, is the mythical poetical religious thinking that we Unitarian Universalists love so well. It’s a little mysterious, and it’s pretty hard to pin down in prose, or in a sermon. Maybe you just can’t measure it and put firm boundaries on it; you have to sort of run through it, looking for an opening. But we can tell there’s wisdom there; we might even be able to get a little closer to the meaning of that wisdom if we keep on going. And my experience with religion would indicate that we’ll know we’re getting closer to the truth, to the openness, when we start to feel a little uncomfortable. So let’s see what we can do to get a little uncomfortable.

    One of the things that makes me uncomfortable is the image of the man on the horizon walking boundaries and measuring things. I love really good boundaries. I love to measure things. That’s just the kind of guy I am. What makes me uncomfortable is the thought that all that measuring and boundary-making might lead me to believe that the grass and the waters and the earth and even the air might be considered mine; or if not mine, someone else’s.

    Whereas I know perfectly well that fields and earth and wind and air really can’t belong to anyone. Yes, yes, I know that in our society we carefully measure off the land, and you can buy a plot of land with a house on it, and call it yours; and pay taxes on it, and pay for the repairs to the house, and then when you move away or die the house and land gets sold to someone else who owns it. Or like me you can rent a home or apartment from someone else. We all know this perfectly well: if you have enough money, you can own land.

    Poet Adrienne Rich gently challenges this notion of ours. She has that lovely cynical little line in her poem: “He believes in what is his.” Silly man: he may believe it is his, but there’s that woman and her son running through it like there are no boundaries. Because, you know, there really aren’t any boundaries except the ones we make up.

    I would like us all to teach our children that sometimes we have to respect man-made boundaries (please note the use of the gender-specific pronoun). But I would also like us to teach our children that there are no boundaries, not really. For there is a great religious truth that all life is a unity. All life is a unity. True, we human beings are different from starfish, and thank God we are different from cockroaches; yet there is a unity which binds us together and makes us one.

    Part of the reason we have gotten into the big ecological mess in which we are now thoroughly immersed is because we have been acting like boundaries are real. If I dump my factory’s PCBs into the Acushnet River, I’m dumping them past the boundaries we humans have created; which means of course that the PCBs just magically disappear. Out of sight, out of mind.

    We really believe that, you know. And it really is a kind of primitive religious belief. By primitive religious belief I mean that a belief that takes religion far too literally, ignoring religion’s poetical mythical qualities. A primitive religious belief relies on superstition and suspension of reason to believe in it. I also know it’s a primitive religious belief, because when you challenge someone’s primitive beliefs, that person tends to get all cranky and dismissive. As when you tell the people running the factory that you can’t just dump the PCBs into the Acushnet River, those people get all cranky and dismissive, calling you an environmental crank. They suspend reason and rely on superstitious beliefs: no no no, there’s an invisible boundary line there, once we dump the PCBs into the Achusnet River, they can’t hurt us any more.

    It’s sort of like when you’re a little kid, and someone says they’re going to give you cooties, and you create this invisible shield so you don’t get cooties. So we create invisible boundaries so we don’t get ecological cooties. Forget the fact that those PCBs are going to get into the fish and the quahogs, and that the terns and the seagulls are going to eat the fish and the quahogs full of PCBs, and so the PCBs will spread around the ecosystem until we find PCBs in human beings, too. Nope. No PCBs in human beings, ’cause we’ve got our invisible shields up. That sounds like a primitive religious superstition to me.

    What we need today are moms who run through the mythical, magical, invisible-but-real boundaries, and show children the poetical mythical religious truth that all is one. We need Eco-Moms; that’s with a capital “E” and a capital “M,” superhero-style. Not that Eco-Moms wear the typical superhero costume of tights and cape: I’m thinking more along the lines of something designed by Coco Chanel, classic, simple, and suitable for every occasion. Eco-Moms have a variety of super-abilities: they have X-ray vision which allows them to see through the surface of things to an underlying unity; they can leap tall boundaries with a single bound, carrying a child safely with them; more powerful than anti-environmental rhetoric, they can stand up to silly superstitious beliefs; and they can teach their children to be whole human beings aware of their connection to the earth.

    Not that every mom is going to have time to be an Eco-Mom. Lord knows moms have enough to do as it is. Yet perhaps there would be a few moms out there who could be Eco-Moms. The world could also use a few good Eco-Dads, to say nothing of Eco-Grandmas and Eco-Grandpas. Not only that, we need child-free people like my partner and me to teach children the same things. We adults need to teach children a way of Wisdom that leads us to unity and wholeness.

    We’re facing an environmental crisis right now; we all know it at some level. We know this crisis is going to affect our children’s lives; we can be pretty sure that it will affect every aspect of our children’s lives. It’s equally obvious that we’re facing lots of other problems, too: war, poverty, violence, the plague of AIDS, population growth; but it feels like the environmental crisis is looming even larger all the time. And we know there’s a religious dimension to our situation: when we human beings are faced with seemingly unmanageable problems, we often try to make sense out of those problems through our religious beliefs.

    Our Unitarian Universalist religion doesn’t give us any easy answers or quick fixes: no invisible shields for us; no denial of reality for us. In that sense, we have an uncomfortable religion. But ours is a ultimately a comforting religion, because one of our core beliefs is that we human beings can change the world for the better, if we choose to. I sometimes think we don’t believe that strongly enough. We can change the world, if we would just put our minds to it. When New Bedford harbor gets filled with PCBs, ordinary human beings have the power to get together, and declare the harbor to be a Superfund site, and start cleaning up that harbor. When a rich powerful real estate developer is trying to destroy sixty acres of wetlands and forest in the town of Fairhaven, ordinary human beings have the power to get together and stop that real estate developer. We can change the world.

    When global environmental problems feel overwhelming, when you feel like nothing is ever going to change, remember that we can change things. We can change things in order to preserve this good earth for our children, and their children, and so on down to seven times seven generations.

    When the going gets tough, leave behind your meek and mild-mannered day-to-day persona, slip into a nearby church, don your Chanel-designed superhero costume, and leap into action. Eco-Moms to the rescue! We all have it in us to be superheros, even if it’s only for a day.

  • Flower celebration, 2006

    This flower celebration was led by Rev. Dan Harper and Emma Mitchell, Director of Religious Education. As usual, the material below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Homily and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Story for all ages — The Story of the Flower Service

    83 years ago, Norbert and Maja Capek were ministers of a Unitarian congregation far away from here in Europe, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most members of their congregation had left other religions to become Unitarians, and many of these people did not want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind. So Norbert and Maja Capek decided to create a new ritual for their congregation — a Flower Ceremony.

    One Sunday in June, they asked everyone in the congregation to bring a flower to the worship service. When people arrived on Sunday morning, all the flowers were gathered together in vases, and Norbert Capek said a short blessing over the flowers. It seems to me that the flowers became symbols of what it means to be a human being: every flower was different, every flower was beautiful in its own way. And at the end of the worship service, everyone went up and took a flower, a different flower from the one that they had brought, took that flower home with them as a symbol of their connection to everyone else in the congregation.

    We are going to have our own Flower Celebration, or Flower Communion, right here in our own congregation. In just a moment, we will all have a chance to come forward and place a flower in the vases on the table here. If you forgot to bring a flower with you this morning, or if you didn’t know that you were supposed to bring a flower, you will find extra flowers on the table over there, and you can come up, pick a flower you like, and place it in the central vase.

    Because we value our children highly — for our children represent new beginnings and new possibilities — I am going to let the children be the first ones to place their flowers in the vase here. I invite the children to come forward now, and you may bring an adult along if you wish….

    [Children come forward]

    And now I invite everyone to come forward and place a flower in the vase here.

    [All come forward]

    This short blessing was written by Norbert Capek:

    Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask your blessing on these, your messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and in devotion to your will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of your most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do your work in this world.

    [All come forward during this.]

    Now that we have gathered all the flowers together, I will read a short prayer written by Norbert Capek:

    In the name of Providence, which implants in the seed the future of the tree and in the hearts of men [and women] the longing for people living in [human] love; in the name of the highest, in whom we move and who makes the mother [and father], the brother and sister what they are; in the name of sages and great religious leaders, who sacrificed their lives to hasten the coming of [peace and justice];– let us renew our resolution sincerely to be real brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges [one from another]. In this holy resolution may we be strengthened, knowing that we are [one] family, that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us, [that we] endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life. Amen.

    Readings

    The first reading is from a short biography of Norbert Capek, written by Richard Henry for the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

    “On the 28th of March, 1941, [Norbert] Capek and his daughter, Zora, aged 29, were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pankrac Prison. Zora was accused of listening to foreign broadcasts and distributing the content of some BBC transmissions; Capek himself of listening to foreign broadcasts and of “high treason.” Several of his sermons were cited as “evidence” of the latter charge. Listening to foreign broadcasts was a capital offense under the Protectorate. Two separate trials were held, the first at Pankrac Prison soon after their arrest; the second, an appeal of the original decision, at Dresden in April 1942. The appeals court found Capek innocent of the treason charge, recommending that, given his age, the year between his arrest and the appeals trial be counted toward his jail time. The Gestapo, ignoring the court’s recommendation, nonetheless sent Capek to Dachau, Zora to forced labor in Germany. Capek’s name appears among prisoners sent on an invalid transport on October 12, 1942 to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, where he died of poison gas.”

    Not long before he was put to death by the Nazis, Dr. Capek wrote this prayer:

    It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals.
    Oh blow ye evil winds into my body’s fire; my soul you’ll never unravel.
    Even though disappointed a thousand times or fallen in the fight and everything would worthless seem,
    I have lived amidst eternity.
    Be grateful, my soul,
    My life was worth living.
    He who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes.
    He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.

    HOMILY — “Maja Capek, Flowers, and Totalitarianism”

    You all probably know that our congregation dates back to 1708. It started out as one of the established Puritan congregations of the Massachusetts theocracy, but eventually the congregation gradually moved towards a more liberal Unitarian theology. So it is we often think of our congregational history as a single long chain of existence from those early beginnings nearly three hundred years ago; and so it is that we post bronze plaques at the front and the rear of this room listing all the ministers who have served this congregation.

    Of course, life is rarely that simple; and the history of our congregation is more complex than the list of ministers would have it seem. For in fact, our congregation today is the carrier of the institutional existences of two other New Bedford area congregations: First Universalist Church, which had its start in the 1820’s, became a part of our church in 1930; and North Unitarian Church, founded by First Unitarian as a settlement house in the North End in 1894, affiliated with the American Unitarian Association as separate congregation in 1941, but when their building burned down in 1974, they essentially merged back into First Unitarian. Therefore, our single list of ministers should really be three lists of ministers: the ministers of First Unitarian, the ministers of First Universalist, and the ministers of North Unitarian.

    I wish we had those other two lists of ministers posted on bronze plaques here in this room, because if we did I could point to the name of the minister whom I consider to be the most remarkable minister who ever served one of the three root congregations of our present congregation. That minister’s name is Maja Capek, who was minister of North Unitarian Church for the first three years of its existence as a congregation.

    Maja Oktavek was born in Bohemia on April 8, 1888. She came to the United States in 1907 when she was 19 years old, obtained a degree in library science from Columbia University, and went to work for the New York Public Library. There in the library she met Norbert Capek, a liberal minister affiliated with the Union of Baptist Churches of Moravia and Slovakia. (In 1910, he had tried to get the American Unitarian Association to support his efforts to promote liberal religion, but to no avail.) Capek had escaped the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of his writings which promoted Czech nationalism, and were critical of the state-supported Roman Catholic church. Norbert and Maja were married on June 23, 1917.

    Norbert tried to continue working as a Baptist minister in this country, but he and Maja were becoming increasingly liberal in their religious views. Then in 1920, they decided to send their children to the Sunday school of the First Unitarian Church of Essex County, New Jersey. The children loved it so much, Maja and Norbert attended the church; and Norbert and Maja liked it so much they became members of the congregation in 1921.

    By this time, the Capeks had decided to return to their homeland. After the end of the first world war, Czechoslovakia had achieved independence, and once the Roman Catholic church was no longer supported by the state, many people left Catholicism, searching for a new and more liberal alternative. Maja and Norbert Capek founded the Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship; I say that Maja and Norbert founded the congregation together, even though the standard histories give all the credit to Norbert; because we all know perfectly well that in those days, the wives of male ministers did as much work as their husbands while receiving none of the credit. And the Prague congregation, and Norbert, recognized Maja’s contributions, for Maja was ordained in 1926.

    The Prague congregation searched for alternatives to the Roman Catholic worship that had dominated them before national independence. It was in response to that search that Norbert — probably with help from Maja — developed the Flower Celebration. The very first Flower Celebration was celebrated on June 23, 1923. The celebration was seen in part as a replacement of the Roman Catholic communion service:– stripped of all the weighty Catholic theological baggage, stripped of the Biblical references to bread and wine, the Flower Celebration became instead a way to celebrate the essential connection of all persons to one another.

    During the next decade and a half, the Prague Unitarian congregation became the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with over 3,200 members. That is more than twice as large as today’s largest Unitarian Universalist congregation. I believe liberal religion in Czechoslovakia in those years between the two world wars represented a new sense of freedom for Czechs; it represented the end of domination by the outside forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by the Roman Catholic church. But soon a new spectre of domination would rise over Europe.

    In 1939, Maja Capek came to the United States to raise money to assist refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany. Not long after she left, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, ending that small nation’s brief history as an independent country. It was not safe for her to return to occupied Czechoslovakia, and in 1940 she wound up settling in the North End of New Bedford, where she found a vibrant community of people from central and eastern Europe. Of course she immediately became involved in the Unity Chapel affiliated with First Unitarian’s settlement house, and soon she had arranged for North Unitarian Church to have separate institutional existence; and she became the first minister of North Unitarian Church.

    But Norbert and their youngest daughter Zora remained trapped in Nazi Germany. Norbert and Zora were arrested on March 28, 1941; and Norbert was executed by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp on October 12, 1942.

    I cannot help but think that the Capeks’ Unitarianism represented a threat to the tyranny and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. Any religion that preaches the essential connection of all human beings must be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants maintain their power by driving people apart. Any minister who preaches that one spirit of love unites us all must also be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants push hatred on us, and love is always a threat to manipulative hatred.

    I cannot help but believe that even today the Flower Celebration developed by the Capeks remains a threat to totalitarianism. When we celebrate flowers, we celebrate a spirit of beauty that feeds our souls, a spirit of beauty that encourages us to be better human beings, a spirit of beauty that encourages us towards new life. But the would-be tyrants try to seduce us with a lesser beauty:– an empty beauty that cuts us off from other people, a selfish beauty that tries to get us to consume selfishly, a hateful beauty that divides us along the lines of race and gender and class.

    In this spirit we celebrate our own Flower Celebration this morning. We celebrate the true beauty of the world, as symbolized by flowers. We celebrate a beauty that seems fragile; but it is a beauty which is vibrantly alive, and like the grass that grows through concrete, it is a beauty that can quietly resist tyranny. We celebrate beauty, and we celebrate the freedom inherent in liberal religion: not just a freedom of mind, but the freedom of our hearts, the freedom of our spirits, the freedom of our bodies; we celebrate freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from violence.

    The symbolism of this Flower Celebration is simple: we commit ourselves to spreading beauty in the world; a wild, free, raging beauty that will brook no tyranny, that will not allow domination of body or spirit or mind. May it be so.

  • Music service

    On May 7, instead of a sermon, our music director, Randy Fayan, played an extended piece on the organ — J. S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 582). Unfortunately, we are not able to present a recording of this worship service. However, here is Rev. Dan Harper’s introduction to the music:

    Today, instead of hearing a sermon, Randy Fayan, our music director, will play an extended piece of music. I shouldn’t say he will play the music instead of a sermon: it will be the sermon. And instead of a reading this morning, I’d like to say a few words about music in churches.

    As I was talking with Randy about this worship service, I asked him what his thoughts w ere about music in churches. Randy pointed out that In Unitarian Universalist churches, people brings many of their own ideas to church; as a non-creedal religion, we Unitarian Universalists have a great openness to a variety of religious ideas. And nowhere is that more obvious than when music — because when you’re listening to music, you have to bring yourself into contact with the music; you have t o bring your own ideas, your spirit, to the music; for only then can it make sense.

    Randy put it this way: “The more you invest in listening to the music, the more you get out of it.”

    At this point, I said to Randy that this sounds a lot like religion. Not only that, I said that more and more these days I believe that both listening to music and doing religion are more meaningful when they are done in community.

    To which Randy responded that he listens to recorded music less these days; there’s something about listening to live music, with all its imperfections, that is superior to even the best recorded music. I believe t he same is true of religion: you need to be there in the room with other people.

    This helps explain why we come to church to listen to Randy’s music. We could just as easily stay home and listen to a CD of the exact same music: but something would be missing. We could even drive to Boston or Providence or New York and hear some famous performer play the same piece of music: but while this would be better, it would still be different. Part of the difference is that when you listen to music in a church, you are listening to music in the way it’s really meant to be played: for listening to and playing music is always a sacred act. And music is meant to be heard, not in some big anonymous group, but in a crowd with people you know and care for.

    Here in a worship setting is where music is meant to be heard. Here, you can invest yourself into the music, let it move you, knowing that you are surrounded by people who care. Here you don’t have to applaud — in fact Randy has asked that you completely refrain from applause until after the postlude is over — you don’t have to applaud, because in a community like this, everyone knows that we appreciate Randy’s music, and we don’t have to show him that by applauding — and that way, too, we’ll hear the music as it is meant to be heard: as a prelude to meditation, as an accompaniment to your own soul-work. So during the sermon, when Randy is playing, you can sit and let the music move you and take your spirit places you may not have known existed.