Homily given by Sophia Lyons, December 15, 2019
To Apprehend God Obliquely
Three weeks ago I was fly fishing in the Bahamas, and it was a wonderful respite from the dark and cold of these days. That kind of fishing is mostly done from a boat that’s poled along in shallow water by a guide who stands on a platform above the stern. You spend a lot of time watching and waiting, interrupted by moments of excitement, if not panic, when all of a sudden fish are coming and you get one chance to get a good cast off. No pressure! It’s kind of like Advent: waiting and watching and hoping, and then, a moment when you glimpse something moving beneath the surface, and if you’re lucky, you get to have an encounter with that mysterious and elusive presence!
Dwellers on the Threshold
Here we are, now that Thanksgiving is past, we’re officially in what’s called “the holiday season,” this time of of shopping and parties, of standing in line at the Post Office, of holiday concerts at school and pageants at church. This time of heightened expectations. Even if you’re not a list-maker, this is a time of year when you may feel compelled to make a list so you can keep track of all the things you have to do between now and December 25.
And it is right here, at the beginning of this time when you can sense a growing frenzy and edginess among people, that I want to ask you: how are you going to spend these holy days? How are you going to order your time? Are you going to get caught up in all the craziness, or are you going to try a different way? It won’t surprise you that I’m going to suggest that we stay in Advent for now, that we put into practice what we just sang, that we try to making a daily practice of putting our hearts in a holy place. That’s the invitation of these days, and if you do, you will find that they are “blessed with love and amazing grace.”
When Are You Coming Home?
We just sang some newer words, set to a traditional thanksgiving tune. They were written by two UU ministers in 1963, just days after President Kennedy was killed. These two ministers, Dorothy and Bob Senghas, wrote those words for a Thanksgiving hymn in those sad November days to help their people hold both their grief and their gratitude:
Both sorrow and gladness be find now in our living,
We sing a hymn of praise to the life that we bear.
My first year here, around the time of Thanksgiving, several different people came in to see me. They came to talk about their families and share their stories of sadness, disappointment, and betrayal. I wondered if the upcoming holiday had brought back those memories. This season we’re about to enter, of holy days and holidays, can be hard because it heightens our expectations for how things ought to be, and accentuates our disappointment when our lives are less than what we hope for. We are painfully aware of difference between how things are and how we wish they would be. The invitation is to live in this tension between between disappointment and hope—even when we are sad and in grief, to sing our hymns of praise and thanksgiving.
Your Soul's Address
Homily given by Sophia Lyons, November 17, 2019.
Building on Our Ruins
The letter fails, the systems fall, and every symbol wanes;
the Spirit overseeing all, Eternal Love, remains.
I love those words we just sang by Whittier, who lived just up the road from here; how they remind us that things do change and end, things fall apart or fade away. But in the midst of the change and loss, there is a Love that is eternal, that abides with us always. And we are here to bask in the presence of that Love, to share it and be assured that it abides forever. To be renewed in hope and faith so we can go back out there, stronger and more joyful; “ever singing, march we onward.”
The Journey Home
For years, without really thinking about it, I imagined the spiritual life as a journey. And I embraced this image, of heading out, like on an adventure, for parts unknown. Journey or pilgrimage has been the dominant metaphor for the spiritual life, and for human growth, for a long time. From the start, our nation has encouraged this spirit of exploration: The rallying cry of westward expansion in the mid-1800s was “Go West, young man.” Deep in our bones we have this impulse toward leave-taking, getting on a path heading somewhere. “Way over yonder,” Carole King sang. And this is the image that informs Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Journey”:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
Lost and Found
When I was a boy, there were times that I would lose something, and this felt awful—it could make me feel sick to my stomach even. It could have been something inconsequential, but losing something could give me a kind of sick at heart feeling. Like I was lost too.
Do you know what I mean? Have you ever been lost? Can you remember how disorienting and scary that can be? Can you remember losing something that was important to you? How did that feel?
In a few minutes we are going to lift up the names of people and pets that we have lost to death. And this is such a big kind of loss, probably the biggest kind, because it feels like we have lost them for ever, it can seem that there is no hope of finding them, or ever getting them back. Death is such a final thing, and there’s no getting around that. The person that we loved is gone from us in real and tangible ways. But are they lost to us? In some way, yes. And in some ways, no.
What Kind of Church is This?
The other day I was having a conversation with two of you who are leaders here, and one of you said she didn’t really think of herself as a church person. She didn’t grow up going to church, and started coming because one of her children was curious about church. So sometimes she wonders, “How did I end up here?” And I understood what she was saying, and confessed that sometimes I wonder the same thing!
Then the other person said, “I definitely am a church person. I grew up Presbyterian, and I’ve been a UU for decades now. I can’t imagine my life without the church.” And that resonated with me too, because I grew up in the church too; it was what we did, every Sunday, and I’m grateful for how that shaped and formed me.
A Center That Can Hold
A few years ago I had to go in for a minor surgical procedure that required anesthesia. I had never been put under before and I was, understandably, nervous. The nurses were doing an excellent job of keeping conversation light and helping to distract me and things were now getting ready to roll. The anesthesiologist entered the room. She was a nice woman, mostly all business. Said very little. Got straight to her work. When she asked if I had any concerns or questions just before she was going to administer the drugs, I expressed that I was nervous and had never been through this before. She attempted to quell some of this concern, as the nurses had done, by asking me some more innocuous questions…”So, what do you do for work?” Now, many ministers will tell you that this question often feels like a tough one and never seems to come at the right moment. You see, one can never gauge with any kind of accuracy what the response is going to be here. And then there’s the Athenian task of trying to explain what Unitarian Universalism is…sometimes while on the move, or over the din of dinner party noise.