Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, August 25, 2024.

I’m loving this late-August weather we’re having—the sunny days, the cool nights, the drier air.  I’m trying to eat as many tomato sandwiches and as much corn on the cob as I can these days—to enjoy these gifts of summer while they are here.

Summer offers so many sensory pleasures, doesn’t it? Jumping into a pool or pond on a sticky, sweaty day. The cold sand squeezing through your toes at the edge of the ocean, and the tingle of salt water drying on your skin. The scent of a flower, the buzz of a bumblebee, the magic of fireflies and shooting stars. Even sunburn and mosquito bites are a small price to pay for this season’s gifts, aren’t they?

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my spiritual director, and I found myself telling him how good it felt to have these physical experiences of summer, how they made me feel alive. I told him that I tended to think of religion and faith as something we mostly do with our heads and with our hearts. Our thoughts and our feelings. But what about our bodies?

He said that given our our spiritual forebears, the Greeks, St. Augustine, and the Puritans, we come by this tendency toward disembodiment honestly. Many of us have been taught to trust the mind, and perhaps the heart, more than our bodies. He said something about seeing these summer experiences as “creative acts of engaging the body.” 

Which, a day later, made me think of this book by Barbara Brown Taylor: An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. It’s a book about embodied practices, ways of engaging our bodies to deepen our spirituality. She says, 

“In a world of too much information about almost everything, bodily practices can provide great relief. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet they are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

In recent years I’ve realized that I love to do physical things. Because sometimes life can feel intangible and ephemeral. You know, things like meetings and email. Like feelings and relationships. I’ve found that doing physical, tangible things is a balm to my soul, a helpful complement to some of the less physical aspects of my daily life. Do you know what I mean? 

Think about the little things you do that bring you pleasure. A patch of garden weeded and watered, the children bathed and in bed, a walk or a run in the soft rain, time out under the sky, a cup of coffee or tea with a friend or loved one. The dishes, clean and drying in the rack. These simple things which, in our hurried lives, when our minds are often so full, can go unnoticed. It easy to move through the day without noticing what gifts they really are, isn’t it? It’s easy take these simple acts for granted.

But before I romanticize physical work too much, let me say that it’s a privilege to be able to do chores and such for fun. Especially in hot weather, and in cold, I think of those who labor with their bodies, out under the blazing sun, and in the winter wind. It’s hard work, and needed work, that these folks provide, and we should value it more than we do.

Our culture seems to value products of the mind more than of the hands. And our religious forebears were pretty uptight about the body. So belief is understood as what you think, rather than what you love or give your heart to. And religion becomes a mostly above the neck exercise, and churches get squeamish about the fact that we have these bodies, that not only do work and come to church, but bodies that sweat and like to be touched, bodies that make love and make babies, bodies that get old and get sick and die.

I’m so thankful that in our UU tradition we have a human sexuality program for our youth, called Our Whole Lives. To my mind, if we didn’t give our young people anything else, what they learn and experience in Our Whole Lives will make a real difference in helping them to live healthier and happier adult lives. If you wonder, yes, there’s also an adult version of this program. 

Some of us have complicated relationships with our bodies. Some of us grew up in families and a culture that didn’t honor the particular way we wanted to live in our bodies, and in the world. Thankfully, it seems like these limited and often oppressive ways our society has thought about bodies are loosening up; we’re starting to understand and celebrate that there are so many ways to be human, and that that our differences and diversity is beautiful, and truly a blessing. 

I wonder if you heard this invitation in our reading from Mary Oliver: 

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Mary Oliver made a vocation, and, I’d say, a spiritual practice, out of noticing things. As she writes,

…standing still and learning to be
astonished.

This practice of attentiveness is a kind of self-love, isn’t it? And a love of this earthy life and its creatures. A love of this present moment. Isn’t this work of loving the world work that we are made for too?

The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy…

In these waning days of summer, would you do yourself a favor? Would you make a point of doing something simply for pleasure? Doing something that you enjoy. Something that reminds you that you have this body, and that it is a gift and a blessing. Something that takes you into a deeper relationship with yourself, and with this earthy, watery, beautiful blue green planet earth. It could be anything; anything that calls to you in these days.

Because, you know, these summer days are numbered. And there’s a sweetness in that, isn’t there? A year or two ago I saw words by Paul Monette that resonated with me: “Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.” His words became more poignant when I saw that they come from his book called Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. 

We may try not to think too much about it, but these bodies we have—that allow us so live in the world, to love and be loved, to hear and touch and tase, to feel warmth and cold and sadness and joy—these bodies of ours will, in time, wear out, or be invaded by illness. Many of you know this already. These bodies that once offered so much possibility will, one way or another, slow down and break down, will be stilled and eventually, silenced.

There is a sadness in this, of course, in considering our own mortality, and that of those we love and care for and depend on. We are feeling that sadness and loss right now, with the loss of two of our beloved elders: Terry Koukias, who died several weeks ago at 93, and Barbara Gove, who’s 98, and in her last days in hospice care. 

These two have been such wonderful and faithful companions for us here in this church, and it’s hard to imagine our life without them. But death is a part of life. What do you think they would tell us, from their perspectives of living more than 90 years on this earth? I think they would say something like: “Live your life now, while you can. The end will come sooner than you think, even if you get to live as long as we have. Love one another and love life as much as you can, because it is such a beautiful and precious gift.”

The truth is, any spiritual experience, any revelation, comes to us through our senses; through and because of these bodies we have been given. An embodied faith is really just an embodied life. This is the invitation of this season, and of every day we have been given: to love and appreciate these lives we have been given, to embrace one another and the life that surrounds us on every side. As much as we can, for as long as we can, until we can no longer.

Amen.