Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning

An Easter Homily by the Rev. Molly Housh Gordon

Delivered at the First Parish in Milton

April 8, 2012

He is not here, said the angel, for he is risen.

Can you imagine?! It is shocking! It is blasphemous! It is unbelievable!

It is resurrection. The radical claim that we believe, or doubt, or reject, but nonetheless ponder every year. Resurrection, the incredible declaration that life and love, hope and joy are stronger than fear and hatred, stronger than violent injustice, stronger, even, than death.

This morning, as I watched the sun rise, I imagined Jesus’ women friends, in the depth of their sorrow, gathering oils and perfumes in order to tend to his body. I imagined them walking slowly to his tomb, too weary and heartbroken to speak.

And in that moment between dark and light, as the sun rose and the sky changed, I could feel the depth of the miracle, the way the world would turn on end, to encounter one so loved, thought dead, returned in the flesh. I could imagine the hope and fear of seeing the stone rolled away. The utter joy and terror of seeing his beloved face once more, of meeting his injured hands with their own.

The story of Jesus was always an embodied one. One of body and blood, hunger and thirst, a kiss of peace and a healing touch. It seems right that the story should end in a bodily victory.

But in the end, the claim of bodily resurrection is less essential to our understanding than the social, political, and spiritual messages that undergird that claim, and which we can embody in our lives and faith community.

The man who loved his neighbor, who fed the hungry and healed the sick, who ministered to the least of these, is not here in his tomb, says the angel. That kind of love does not die so easily.

The man who brought hope to the oppressed, who drove the merchants from the temple, who proclaimed a radical, just Kingdom of God? That man is not here in his tomb, says the angel. That kind of hope does not die so easily.

And what about the man who placed his faith in a God of grace and love, who laughed and cried, who told stories and sang songs. The man who knew life to be a precious gift? That man is not here in his tomb, says the angel. That kind of joy does not die so easily.

These life-sustaining powers have risen, says the angel.

If the resurrection is unbelievable to us, it should not be because of literal interpretation, but because of the awesomeness of its claim. Because the power of the love that binds us together is beyond belief. The power of hope that guides our steps toward justice is beyond belief. The buoyant joy we find in gratitude for the gifts of life is beyond belief.

The word resurrection comes from the latin meaning to rise again. And the radical claim of the Easter story is that love will always rise again.

Hope will always rise again.

Joy will always rise again.

You may pronounce them dead, roll a stone across their tomb, but they will rise up. Because they are irresistible and powerful in ways that can only be explained by incredible stories and unbelievable truths.

These are not just claims of long ago, but rather statements of faith about the human condition, our connection and agency, our capacity for joy.

The events of holy week mirror on a grand scale the patterns of our lives.

We each find reason for hope, like the shouting crowds of Palm Sunday.

We put our faith in people and things, and many times they fail us or are defeated. Good Friday comes, and we suffer loss. Always we suffer loss.We keep vigil by many tombs, in the Holy Saturday spirit, and we despair and grieve and weep.

And then something happens to bring the Eastertide of joy back to us: something small, or large; something normal or totally unbelievable.

Always joy comes back. It may not return to stay, but rise again it does.

The psalmist says: “Weeping may endure for a night, but Joy comes in the morning.” No matter how long is the night... and it can be long. It is not the final word.

The Jesus story takes pain, disappointment and grief seriously. For forty days of Lent, Christians fast and contemplate mortality. The week before Easter, we tell the story once more, start to finish. We linger, Friday night, on the horrible suffering of crucifixion.

But then, Easter comes. Joy returns, love lives on, and hope rises up.

Joy comes in the morning.

We see it every spring as the light gets longer and the flowers burst forth and the cold long winter ends.

We see it eventually every time we grieve. Sorrow stays; God knows that sorrow stays. But then there is a moment, and who knows what it is, and a flash of joy breaks through, and something shifts, and there is room for joy too.

We see it every Easter as we celebrate a man whose teachings of peace and love have lived on for thousands of years beyond that day he was hung upon the cross.

Every year, his message of love is resurrected, lifted up above every argument for fear and hate.

God knows, we need that Resurrection claim. In a world with so much mixed up beauty and horror, in a society that teaches us fear before love, in a time that fills our hands with plastic possessions while trying to empty our hearts, we need the resurrection claim. We need to know that love is powerful beyond belief, and that it is in us and among us, ready to rise up.

Easter is a reminder that the message of love and justice is already here to be lived. The things that we do to show our love for the world can be small or large. They can be normal or unbelievable. But let us be reminded to do them.

Let us roll aside every stone, cast away every fear and doubt that stands in our way. Let love rise again.


Ritual – Letting Our Joys Rise Up

So that we may name our joys and watch them rise up, I have some help… Balloons! There’s one for every two pews, and I invite you to gather around the balloons and collectively bless them by naming some of the things that bring hope and joy and new life into your lives, even in the darkest times.

Then, the First Parish Singers are going to come forward and sing, and I invite each group, when you feel so moved, to let your balloons, blessed with your hopes and joys, rise up to the ceiling as you listen. May our hope and joy rise up, always.

The Universe in You

The Universe in You

A sermon given at the First Parish in Milton

March 25, 2012

By the Rev. Molly Housh Gordon

This has been a spectacular month for night-sky gazing. Venus and Jupiter have been dancing with the moon, and in fact, tonight, if the clouds move away, you should be able to step out right around dusk, and encounter a duet between our moon and the king of the planets, Jupiter. The pair will be separated by only 1.5 degrees- about the width of your little finger held at arm’s length.

Then, tomorrow evening, the moon will enter into a tango with the goddess of love, Venus. While Venus is actually 250 times farther away than our moon, the two will appear to the naked eye to be only as far apart as the width of your three middle fingers held at arm’s length.

And perhaps you have seen images of the violent storms wracking the surface of the sun earlier this month, sending out solar flares as big balls of magnetic energy into our galaxy.

Cosmically, It’s been quite the month.

I’ve enjoyed reflecting upon the convergence of these galactic events with the forty days of Lent, when we ponder our limited earthliness, beginning with the reminder on Ash Wednesday that ‘dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.’

Perhaps this Lent, we are meant to remember that we are stardust, as well. Dust to dust reminds us of our mortality. Stardust to stardust reminds us of our part in the larger universal story. It reminds us of our connectedness to all of creation from the very beginning. Stardust to stardust reminds us of our birth into mystery.

I remember as a child, lying on my back in the yard staring up at the night sky. It was so beautiful and amazing, so vast and unknowable.

Mystery and spiritual humility join hands the moment we realize all we cannot know. And every now and then, as I admired the cosmic beauty and wondered at the mystery of it all, I would begin to feel as though I was shrinking, smaller and smaller, until suddenly I was smaller than a flea, smaller than you could see.

We all undergo this Galilean shift at some point in childhood, where we suddenly recognize that our place in the big picture is not at the center, but somewhere small at the edge of that great web of stars. It is disconcerting, to say the least.

I remember a clear moment of this from my own childhood, spurred on by a scene in the movie Apollo 13.

It’s early in the movie, and we’ve just watched the astronauts practicing a maneuver in a test simulator, when suddenly we cut to a shot of them in the real spacecraft. Something has just gone terribly wrong. We see a bolt pop off of some necessary piece of equipment, and the gauges in the cockpit begin to go crazy.

All three astronauts are working frantically to get things under control when suddenly the hatch blows open and there it is… Outer Space, right outside the open door. Some vacuum-like force is at work, sucking machinery out of the door and into space.

The astronauts are tethered to the ship by several cables, but then we see a cable break, and another, and then suddenly one of the men is sucked out the hatch, as he tries desperately to grab on to something, anything. We see him float away into space, helpless.

And then the character wakes up. Cut to a sunny day on the good green earth, and we realize that it’s all been a dream.

But it’s too late for me, because the image is burned in my brain. A man in space, with nothing to hold onto, floating away into the nothingness beyond.

For a while after that, an evening of stargazing was no longer full of wonder for me, but rather of fear. I would dizzily clutch the grass, unable to trust in gravity, as though I was afraid that I would somehow fall off the earth as it turned upon its axis.

It was the floating away that scared me, into the infinite emptiness. It was these two layers- first of being un-tethered, and then of nothingness.

This fear was a step in my spiritual development, though thankfully not the endpoint. It awakened in me a set of metaphysical and theological questions. Who are we, in this wide universe, and how do we stay connected? What does it mean to think about ourselves as these tiny dots of ‘something’ floating in a great sea of nothing?

These questions about meaning and belonging in the universe set me on a path toward spiritual growth, and I brought them with me to church.

As I grew further into our liberal religious faith, which believes life to be precious, suffused with meaning, and interconnected, I found resources to meet my desire for meaning and connection; assurance that my tether to the world is strong, because it is woven into the web of all life that upholds and connects us.

And, recently, in this Lenten season, I have been thinking about stardust and doing some reading that links this part of my spiritual growth back up to its celestial beginnings.

For it turns out that in the world of astrophysics, there is no such thing as nothing and disconnection is impossible.

Because of a shadowy force called dark energy, what looks like emptiness in Outer Space is actually full of movement, connection, and possibility. National Public Radio’s science correspondent Robert Krulwich explains it like this:

“If you showed [a] patch of empty space to a physicist, he or she would tell you, "It isn't empty." No matter how remote, every inch of our universe carries a mysterious "dark" energy that is pressing out in all directions. We're not sure how it works, but across this same patch you will also find threads of gravitational force stretching to every part of the universe, while deep down, in impossibly small subatomic nooks and crannies, there's a riot of coming and going, a quantum flux, with little clouds of matter popping in, then out of existence, like summer storms.
A patch of "empty" space may look empty, but in fact, its nothingness contains all kinds of invisible somethings.”[1]

Nothing always contains something. Even in the farthest reaches of our universe, “Nothingness” is enmeshed in a web of gravitational force. The same gravitational force that holds us to the earth, whether we are clutching the grass or not.

And amid that web is an atomic and subatomic riot of coming and going, an unfathomable realm of possibility… An unfathomable realm of possibility in which we, too, have our being… In which we are participants in the continuing unfolding of the universe.

There is no such thing as nothing.

And we are connected to it all, which brings me to a recent interview with TIME magazine, in which astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked the following question.

What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the universe?

This is his answer.

The Most Astounding Fact from Max Schlickenmeyer on Vimeo.

Just by being alive.

The universe is big and we are small, but the universe is in us. Every single one of us. And for me, this is the crux of the matter.

The point of spiritual maturity comes at that meeting point of humility and commitment, when we realize that we are stardust, tied up in the vast and mysterious universal story -- when we can synthesize the truth of our smallness and unknowing with the equal truth of our agency and connectivity.

I am no scientist but it seems to me that astrophysics and liberal religious faith converge upon the claims that all are connected and every life matters, that the universe is always unfolding and so are we.

This is our good news. Now we must live into it.

We are not living into it.

This week I re-watched that clip from Apollo 13, and as I clicked off DVD mode, my television was on a news channel, which was covering the response to the murder of black teen Trayvon Martin, as his killer walks free. The unjust law and institutional racism undergirding the situation deserve their own sermon, but I must say that in that moment as the television clicked over from Hollywood to Sanford, Florida it was so clear that my childish fear from a space movie had been misplaced. For one thing, why give energy to fearing outer space, when there’s plenty of heartbreak and horror right here?

What’s more, what we have to fear is not dis-connection itself, but rather all the forces in our society that train us to ignore and deny our inborn connection. What we have to fear are the institutionalized fears, themselves, which condition us to see a human being as suspicious other, rather than precious sibling, covered in stardust.

It’s so easy to live in denial of the web that ties us all together in our shared fate. Often that web is just as unseen and mysterious as the vast universal beginnings that gave it birth. And the media age has made it easy for us to live at a distance, a step removed from the real human connections that are the building blocks of our very existence.

For me this is where a church community comes in. This is why our membership here together is essential. This is a place for us to proclaim our shared fate and to live it.

Because here we experience connectivity on a level that we can understand. In the face of deep cosmic mystery, we practice belonging to the universe by belonging to one another. We live into the truth of our interwoven-ness. We remind one another of each’s inborn potential, each’s essential role in the unfolding of the universe.

Here, we teach our children - all of our children - that they are in the universe and the universe is in them, every single one of them. We teach them to treat one another accordingly.

I end with an excerpt from the story The Everything Seed, by Carole Martignacco, which our 3rd through 6th graders are reflecting on in their Sunday School classes today. It is contemporary creation myth, a piece of poetry about our mysterious, connected, entangled story.

After telling about the origins of the universe and its blossoming forth in a blaze of light from that one tiny seed which gave all of creation brith, she ends like this.


“Now, if this were an ordinary story, it would end right here.
But this story of the Universe keeps unfolding.

What once began in a blazing blossom of light continues every day.
New stars sprout open in the deep soil of space.
New plants and animals appear on the Earth.
Seeds of many kinds... are scattered everywhere... to help us remember.

And new people are born every day
with the spark of that first light still alive and burning deep inside...
Waiting... like the Everything Seed, to shine in ways that are yet to be known.”[2]

The story of the Universe and the story of our lives are still unfolding, but that Eternal Light has been alive and burning in our hearts from the very start. Let us proclaim that good news, and live it... until all people shine bright with the glow of stardust.

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[1] From “Krulwich Wonders,” an NPR blog. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/03/12/148456099/two-ways-to-think-about-nothing

[2] From the UUA’s Tapestry of Faith http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/loveguide/session1/sessionplan/stories/168158.shtml

People of the Bubble

People of the Bubble

By Rev. Molly Housh Gordon

Once upon a time, in a land that was neither here nor there, there lived a people, who were neither like us nor unlike. These people did all the things we do. They were born and they died, and between they lived lives of differing lengths. They learned things, they played, they danced and sang, they had ideas, they yelled and picked fights, they meditated and prayed, they ate and drank.

But these people were different in one big way. They each had a stretchy, shiny bubble around them.

Living in bubbles meant that they bounced, and that they were always safe.

And so it was that these people, in this land, were happy, and bouncy, and safe.

Then one day, among these people, a little girl named Ava was born, and she had no bubble.

The people felt sorry for Ava and watched her with great fear. "What would happen to her without

her bubble to protect her?" they whispered to one another.

There was no way to know but to wait and see, and so they looked on as poor little bubble-less Ava grew up.

They watched as Ava learned to walk, flinching each time she teetered and tottered. They watched as Ava picked dandelions and blew on their fluffy heads, sending them blowing out across the wind. They sighed as they watched her stroke a fluffy cat.

Maybe their safe and bouncy bubbles also meant they couldn't do a few things that looked rather nice, they realized.

Then one day when little Ava was learning to roller skate, she fell down, and since she had no bubble, she didn't bounce. She hit the ground hard.

The people gasped. Ava cried. But she wasn't too badly hurt, so she stood back up again, and it was then that the people of the bubble saw blood for the first time, for little Ava had scraped her knee.

Some of the people looked on in fascination, others fainted in horror. Ava just wiped her knee on her sleeve and went inside to get some ice cream.

The next day she roller skated down a big hill, laughing as the wind tickled her face and blew her hair into a streamer flying out behind her.

It was then that the people realized, inside their bubbles, that they had never felt the wind tickle their faces or blow their hair.

That night, the first bubble-breaker climbed out of her bubble, and left it behind in the garage. It was a girl named Penny just about Ava's age. And that night, she felt for the first time how soft her favorite blanket was as she fell asleep.

The next morning Penny grabbed her roller skates and raced to the top of the big hill. And she raced down it with the wind in her hair. And she laughed and laughed and the wind blew tears of joy off her face.

Yay! Said Ava, waiting at the bottom of the hill, and she threw her arms out wide. Penny skated right into her arms.

And that was when everything changed.

That was when the people of the bubble first saw a hug.

And it looked so cozy and it looked so happy and comfy. And the people of the bubbles realized that they had never touched one another, had never felt that connection.

That night there were a dozen more bubble-breakers who climbed out of their bubbles and left them behind in the garage. And then the next night a dozen more. And on and on.

Because of Ava, the people realized that they needed to feel fluffy cat fur and the wind in their faces and the embrace of loved ones.

Of course, many of them scraped their knees and pricked their fingers and sometimes worse, for they were no longer very bouncy or completely safe.

But when they hurt they held each other tight, and no one dreamed of going back to their bubble.

Flying

I am not an infrequent flier. Many, many times now, I have leaned back in my seat and felt gravity push against my chest as we climb. Still, at every take-off, I feel my heart thumping fiercely in protest as it rises and drops.

To ease my mind, I imagine different sources of help, and I pray.

I picture God's hand (the God that is a child, seriously playful) zooooooooming us down the runway in our toy plane and woooooshing us up in the air, lips buzzing with all the proper sound effects.

I envision us being lifted into the air by waves of love and well-wishes, waves carried with each passenger from loved ones near and far. Pooled together, what power they must have! Certainly enough to lift a plane up safely.

All this, I realize, to avoid the truth that when I stepped onto the plan I gathered my life up in my arms, like my coat or some more precious bundle, and handed it over to pilots and mechanics and countless others. I am, coatless and shivering, at their mercy.

And it is only rarely, as we reach cruising altitude, that I allow myself the deeper truth. It was never my bundle to give away, not really. Walking or flying, we are always tethered or held aloft, always, by the web of life that threatens and sustains us, that makes us vulnerable, makes us human. We are at... and in... its mercy.

No promises. Only the reality of our naked connectedness.

And just as I realize that we are not only coatless but may as well be flying in the nude, for all the control we (n)ever have... we arrive. We collect our coats and shrug them on, and we step out into the sun, blinking and grateful.

Ash Wednesday

Making a Fist

By Naomi Shihab Nye b. 1952

We forget that we are all dead men conversing wtih dead men.

—Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist” from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry. Copyright © 1988 by University of Utah Press. Reprinted at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241028

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We clutch so hard at life, attempting some sense of control in the face of our own finitude. We clench our fists. We numb our senses. We deny our mortality in a million different ways.

But today - Ash Wednesday - we let go. We stop clenching and clutching. We acknowledge that we will die.

We fall back against the earth and realize that we are still held. That we can rely upon gravity and the embrace of love.

The ashes smeared across our foreheads mark our mortal limits, which are exactly the places we are open to Love.

During this Lenten time, these 40 days of fasting and contemplation, I invite you simply to unclench your fist.

Not to give something up in an ascetic exercise of rigid control, but rather to let go.

What are you holding that is preventing your hands from cupping the gifts of love and beauty?

Let it go.

Pick up a handful of soft earth and let it slip through your fingers. Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

Let it go.

Hold your hands open, fragile, soft - ready to receive.

Let go.

What New Land?

I'm using the following text for this Sunday's sermon...

Beyond the Hills
by Rev. Samuel H. Miller

What lies beyond the hills?

Restless hearts, pilgrim feet -- these cannot be restrained from finding out.

Whatever is beyond the hills tingles in the air, and, like a far off trumpet call, hangs in the bright silence of the sky, easily heard despite the noise of trade and the shouts of busy men.

Once heard, the ear cannot forget, the eyes will look beyond the things they see, and the soul will stand and wait on tireless tip-toe for the first word of faith.

For such [people], the ruts and routines of what has already been established cannot be home. Their spirits are marked with the sign of Him who created the earth out of nothing, and the power of that image will give them strength to forfeit everything for the new life.

Beyond the hills -- beyond this rim of habit, this solid circle of established repetition, this rampart that hems us in and makes us safe, is there a land waiting to be “opened up”?

Or is the bulwark so high or so mighty that we shall not hear the silver spears of trumpets shattering the sky, or that hearing we shall not have the courage to go despite uncertainty and peril?

Unless a man loses his life, shall he find it?

from What Child is This: Reading and Prayers for Advent/Christmas by Samuel H. Miller

If this is not a call to transformative ministry, I don't know what is. What land waits for us beyond the hills, tingling in the air? And do we have the courage to go?

Sometimes I am afraid I do not. Sometimes I am entirely sure I do not. But every time I read this, it calls me more strongly to task.

This is not about roads diverging in a yellow wood. The way to life abundant does not lay neatly paved before us, if we would only choose correctly. This is about forging a new path altogether. There is risk here, and hard work. But think what kind of land we could reach!

My friends, what new land do you think lays beyond the hills? And what resources have we for forging the path there?

Psalm 85: 10-13

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.
The Lord will give what is good,
and our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness will go before him,
and will make a path for his steps.

Rest for your souls

Recently I've been hearing from friends and congregants and colleagues that they are feeling exhausted. And I'm right there with them. We've begun the sprint to January that seems to begin right after Halloween. And it's exhausting... but who has time to be tired?

The holidays are coming! This is no time to be tired!

There is injustice abounding! This is no time to be tired!

There is a movement happening! This is no time to be tired!

Alright then... we must rest. The world needs our light; which means we must not burn out.

Mother Teresa tells us "Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. If the drops of oil run out, the light of the lamp will cease, and the bridegroom will say, I do not know you. (Matthew 25:12) My daughters, what are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, punctuality, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. These are the true drops of love...
Be faithful to small things because it is in them that your strength lies."

What are the small things that fuel your love? Let us remember those things, and find rest.