Sermon given by intern minister Tori Rosati on December 5, 2021
Years ago, we joined a local group of friends and invested in a CSA farm share – CSAs are food co-operatives where each individual person or family pays an annual fee and then receives weekly allotments of fresh produce. We would all go and pick up our shares on the same day and then gather at someone’s house to make dinner. Over time, this event evolved into what would affectionately be known as chaos co-op. The chaos – referred to the invitation for us each to bring some random ingredients from our kitchen cupboards – cans of beans, salsa, curry sauce, pasta – whatever we had lying around. No one knew what the others were bringing and we’d put our all our offerings on the counter, along with that week’s harvest, and figure out how to put it together into a meal.
Our feast would include interesting food parings, and individual cooking tricks that each of us brought from our own kitchen expertise, cultural traditions, and family recipe books. It took creativity, intention, and most of all the good will of a community of people that set out each Thursday, drawing together their individual stores of food and spirits of community to gather, laugh and love.
As I reflect on this month’s worship theme of wholeness, I am reminded of chaos co-op. How we would gather after the flurry of cooking preparations, after the cans had been emptied into the pot, and the food had been plated around a table – a deep and felt sense of fullness and wholeness in our midst. A wholeness born from our individual and unique offerings - what each one of us brought, who each one of us were, and how each one of us showed up.
In this time we are living through, our world surly feels more fractured than ever. Gathering together around a shared table, as many of us may have experienced over this past holiday – is complicated if not impossible. So much less whole, it seems. I know for myself, I feel these holidays calling us to navigate difference in ways that are deeply painful and fragile. Spaces that used to feel whole – spaces of love and community now feel uncertain and precarious. They are missing things. Missing full faces, missing closeness, missing people. In this climate what then does wholeness mean? And more importantly, how and where do we find it?
In my life, I have often considered wholeness in the context of one-ness – how fractures can be mended into one, complete container or source. Wholeness as unity when we come together around a shared value or center. Certainly, my understanding of God and spirituality has always included a sense of return to some kind of source, divine wholeness from which we come. But like hope (that we touched on in worship a few times last month), this notion of wholeness, oneness, or unity can feel like it leaves out the realities of this moment – leaves out a place for difference and the variety of, and often conflicting ways we are experiencing our lives in this time.
We experience this challenge in our UU faith where we are always negotiating difference in pursuit of a felt sense of wholeness and unity. How do we hold our cultural, religious, theological differences in one space? How do we encounter wholeness when we can’t be sure that everyone is having the same experience in our churches? This can feel uncomfortable and at times chaotic. I can certainly find myself drawn into the comfort and familiarity that is found in sameness and can understand the impulse to assume that to become whole we must assimilate, agree, or bring the other, what is different, over to our side. But, is this wholeness? And if it isn’t – then how do we negotiate this fraught landscape?
Theologian Mayra Rivera in her book, Touch of Transcendence explores human relationship across difference as the seat of our spiritual lives and connection to the Divine. Rivera notes that human beings, and all creatures, were designed for relationality – it’s what she calls our orginary gift. This orientation to relationship depends deeply on our ability to see each other, as distinct separate beings – to witness to each other’s uniqueness and through this witness, touch each other. As we encounter difference, as we encounter each other, it is in the intimate and sometimes insurmountable space between us where the spirit resides and flows. In this way, wholeness is leaning into that originary gift – the gift of moving toward each other, infinitely practicing what it means to be our own selves… together.
I have so loved our worship themes this year preceding with the way of…the way of home, the way of vulnerability, the way of imagination and now the way of wholeness. What I love about it is that these concepts, these themes of how we live and be in the world. They are on the move. The way. So in this way, maybe wholeness then isn’t a static thing, a destination or place we get to once we’ve all arrived or agreed – but rather it is a movement – a drawing near of difference and uniqueness or as Jan Richardson put is, “toward what you have perceived only in pieces, “toward a center embedded into the horizon and also traced upon you, since before you were born. That orinary time of relational gifting.
Lawyer, mediator, and peacemaker, Tom Porter, in his book, The Spirit and Art of Conflict Transformation tells this story that I so love and which has become a real touchstone for how I think about wholeness. As I tell it, I am going to bring up a photo for us to look at to accompany it. This is the Justpeace Wheel - an image from the Justpeace Center for Mediation and Conflict Transformation. So Dorotheos of Gaza was a sixth-century monk and abbot. One day the monks of his monastery came to him saying that they had had enough of each other. “We have had it,” they said, “ We can't worship God in the company of our fellow monks.” they cried. Their problem? Each others, “ordinary, irritating presence.” Porter writes, “Dorotheos responded by asking them to visualize the world as a great circle whose center is God, and upon whose circumference lie human lives. ‘Imagine now,’ he asked them, ‘that there are straight lines connecting from the outside of the circle all human lives to God at the center. Can’t you see that there is no way to move toward God without drawing closer to other people, and no way to approach other people without coming near to God?”
Knowing that we all have a difference understanding of the Divine, if we look at this wheel as whole – we can see our need each other. Each line reflects who we are as individuals – what we offer, bring and share at the table. The pursuit of wholeness is a pursuit that gathers us in toward each other and the holy in our midst, however we understand it. Even in these times of separation and distance, we have found ways to do this. We are practicing it in this very moment. So in this way, our approach, our advent toward wholeness is a journeying alongside each other, requiring difference, the unique gifts we bring to the alter of our collective meals. As Bishop Tutu said in our invocation – God has made up different so we can realize our need for one another.
And…maybe wholeness isn’t the arrival her, isn’t in the center - but in the approach to it. With the complex and chaotic ways we are experiencing spaces and gatherings that used to feel like we had arrived somewhere complete and whole, maybe the invitation is to understand wholeness, not as a destination, but rather an interplay, a sacred relationality – that orginary gift incarnate - the movement toward each other - as ourselves - together. A place that holds the chaos alongside the co-operative.
And, like the angels came down to share the good news in the Christmas story, it calls us out of our familiar, comfortable places. And this calling is no idol pursuit, no passive presence. It is fierce, relentless, and unwavering; traversing hills and deserts, evading armies both real and figurative. Just as Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, wise men, animals, all gathered in toward one another from their disparate places in the story - against the cold and dark of the season to nurture, honor, and sit together amidst the hope of what this world could be - so too are we…
Our church building gathers in the community, those without homes and resources - offering a place of warmth, respite, and companionship in the cold days ahead. We gather in the fierce and persistence ways we have stayed connected to each other in these unimaginable times, the ways this community continues to reach out to each other – the cards, emails, calls, and prayers – our unique and essential ingredients of love and companioning we offer each other
And this morning…the result of this community that gathered - behind the scenes - for the last few days offering the unique gifts of creativity, adaptability, and caring to offer us all this moment where we can safely rest together in wholeness.
In fact, any time we draw in another soul into our hearts – we are one our way – setting off with our gifts of attention and care in a practice of wholeness.
As our part of the earth draws away from the sun, in what ways are we drawing near? What is our offering – our gold, frankincense and myrrh? And who is beside us to receive it…who rests with us in our stables at night who needs our warmth, left alone out there in the cold and straw? Let us follow the light that illumines our need for one another, that calls us to prepare the way to the manger of love, hope and companionship.
For this journey toward wholeness, this crossing of the spaces between us in our endless human quest back to each other – this is our originary gift - the calling that was traced upon us since before we born.
May this practice be our star - as we accompany each other even in our ordinary and irritating ways - as we bring our individual bounties from our separate kitchens to a common table – lean into the sometimes chaotic, sometimes co-operative motions of relationship and community - gather together as shepherds, refugees, kings, and creatures of all kinds around the light of hope and promise of love incarnate in the world.
May every card, every call, every zoom login, every open door, every prayer, offer us a chance to arrive with our gifts – knowing that the meal, the moment, the world depends on it to be whole.