Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, February 16, 2024.
I’m always grateful when people come here for the first time, I often tell them that I think it takes some courage to enter a church for the first time; you don’t know what you’re going to find. Are people going to be welcoming and kind, or indifferent and inattentive? If you take a further risk and venture into coffee hour, will you be standing there all alone? Is anyone going to come up and talk to you? It’s like that saying, that some of the bravest words you can say are, “May I have this dance?”
This month our worship theme is “Interdependence,” one of the six values we share as Unitarian Universalists. These values will be our worship themes between January and June, starting last month with “Justice.” See—sometimes even I do some planning!
When some churches these days are promoting independence and individualism—I just read an article about how in some fundamentalist churches empathy is now seen as a negative, saying you are supposed to look out for yourself. We are lifting up the fact that we need one another, the virtue that we are here to care for one another. You know, love your neighbor.
This makes sense to me, that we need and depend on others, but tell the truth, how many among us like to admit that we are dependent? Don’t we like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient and in control of things? We live in a country that has celebrated heroic individualism from the start. The frontiersman Daniel Boone said it was time to pick up and move when he could see the smoke from someone else’s chimney. The allure of the cowboy, the lone ranger, and the Marlboro Man, are embedded in the American psyche.
Don’t get me wrong—there is something good and necessary in each of us doing our own work, what Carl Jung called the process of individuation; knowing who you are, what you love, and what brings you peace and joy and purpose. Self-reliance and self-awareness are good things, and I would say are necessary, in order to enter into deeper relationships with others. A healthy spiritual life does involve solitude and soul searching. Especially for those of us who are introverts, the quiet and interior life is almost as necessary as food and water; it’s the soul food that makes it possible for us to show up in the world.
But as good and important as the inner life is, we are not islands entire to ourselves. In my experience, doing one’s own spiritual work inevitably leads into deeper connections with others. I love how life and the spirit invite us into its ebb and flow, and the beautiful balance that is possible when we learn how to ride these waves. There’s a beautiful Hebrew expression for this wholeness of life, this yin and yang, which translates as “going out and coming in.” Kind of like breathing, in and out. Like the balance of solitude and community. You hear it in this line from the 121st Psalm:
The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in,
From this time forth, and forever more.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu liked to talk about the African concept of “ubuntu,” which in English could be translated as “as person is a person through other persons.” Listen to how he describes this way of seeing ourselves in relation to others:
“We need other human beings for us to learn how to be human, for none of us comes fully formed into the world. We would not know how to talk, to walk, to think, to eat as human beings unless we learned how to do these things from other human beings. For us, the solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.
“Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks of how my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours. It says, not as Descartes did, ‘I think, therefore I am’ but rather, ‘I am because I belong.’ I need other human beings in order to be human. The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I can be me only if you are fully you. I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family. We are made for complementarity. We are created for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.
I have gifts that you don’t have, and you have gifts that I don’t have. We are different in order to know our need of each other. To be human is to be dependent” (from God is Not a Christian).
A couple of days ago Clare and I were talking about the need to be grounded in these days. She reminded me that during her sabbatical last year she took a multi-day silent retreat, and this changed her relationship with technology and social media. It helped to loosen their grip on her, Clare said. She says it takes discipline and practice to resist turning to her phone, but that it’s gotten easier.
I may not be as far along as Clare, but I know what she’s talking about. These days, when someone starts to tell me about the latest outrageous thing they just saw on the news or Facebook, I can feel my stress level rising. Don’t get me wrong. I’m paying attention to what’s going on, I have to—but I’m not going to let things I can’t control take over my life. I just can’t. The stakes are too high these days.
And what I’m finding is that being with people, and being alone, going out and coming in; these two aspects of human relationship, are what’s keeping me grounded and sane and even joyful in these days. Especially things like being at the warming center for an early morning shift, or having coffee with one of you, or hearing the story of someone who’s new to the church.
Earlier this week I was talking with my spiritual director about how experiences of death and loss have cracked open my heart, drawn me into deeper connections with others, both strangers and friends, and have brought me into a place of surprising gratitude.
This is the hidden gift of interdependence. When you take the risk of entering into a relationship deep enough to move you, change you, crack your heart open, then it’s like you’ve come into a different country, where you see others in a deeper way, and they can see into you. The shallow politeness falls away and things get real. You can speak from the heart knowing you’ll be heard. And you can sit and listen to a painful story without trying to fix it, or running away. Because you know you are bearing witness to something sacred. And so you can cry and laugh and feel so much more alive that when you are holding back from life, trying to play it safe.
I love how Rev. Gretchen Haley gets to this in her beautiful invocation. I can picture her where she serves out in Colorado, on a normal Sunday morning, inviting folks to cross the threshold into worship, and into life:
We have already missed too much beauty.
Our minds so mixed up with multi-tasking,
Toggling back and forth
between hope and fear,
worry and wonder.
The sun rises with an insistent light
and the morning breaks
with the promise of the holy
disguised as babies gurgling,
and dogs groaning,
snow covering up the just-shoveled walk
and the flame that is kindled week upon week
with promises to love, and to serve,
and to dwell together
in peace.
All that this day asks
is that we risk showing up
with our eyes open
that we might bear witness to the whole of life
the stories we ourselves carry
the things we have tried to forget
the times we have been wrong,
or, we have been wronged.
To let in this much love, this much grace,
to know ourselves a part of this possibility
to remember and to forgive,
to heal and to be better.
Come let us worship, together.
This is my prayer for us and for our world in these days. Come, let us risk really opening ourselves up to one another, to the pain and discomfort and messiness as well as the beauty and the joy. Come let us see that it is still a beautiful world, and we have work to do, goodness to cultivate, love and care to share, and blessings to bestow. Come, let us worship and celebrate the holiness in this moment, the only one we really have, not afraid to risk needing one another, or depending on each other. Let us remember and trust that we are, always, in this together. How we are meant to be. All we kindred, pilgrim souls.
Now and forever,
Amen.