Interesting Times

A Sermon by the Rev. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 24, 2004

One of the most difficult tasks any of us can undertake is to bear witness to the time in which we are living as history. It is an exercise in modesty, scope, and spiritual discernment. It demands that we affirm our participation in our own time while we simultaneously step back for a larger view. It is work that doesn’t come easily to us, even we Unitarian Universalists who harbor the high confidence in our capacity for critical candid discernment.

A few years ago, our historical consciousness received a boost from the calendar, reminding us of the arrival of a new millennium. There was high anxiety around what might happen to systems of technology worldwide. There was high anxiety around what some renegade forces might do to disrupt travel and commerce. There was high anxiety amid a time of high celebration. My husband, Dan, and I needed an unconventional New Year’s Eve to diffuse this high-decibel crescendo. On the morning of December 31, we headed to the Berkshires, to the farmland home of some longtime friends from seminary who had invited us to share this temporal turning point with them and an intimate enclave of family and neighbors. The day was clear and the night promised stars. We drove north from our home in New Jersey, aptly attired for this millennial rite of passage—jeans, warm sweaters, and hiking boots. We arrived to the warmest of welcomes.

Seminary alums and spouses are a curious crowd. While the punch flowed and the wine was poured and the appetizers were devoured, conversation grew reflective. Our hosts had planned a millennial litany as a mode for pondering our move through history as mindful spiritual beings. It was a litany of reverence for the life we shared.

Midnight drew near. While most lingered inside, I knew where I needed to be. Together Dan and I stepped outside, away from the banter of conversation and calypso music, away from any notion that humanity was turning a corner. Earlier that evening, the teens and 20-somethings had retreated to a nearby hillside to build a bonfire, a roaring sky-lapping bonfire. We approached and stood silent in its flickering shadows. I needed some star-glimmering assurance that there was more, so much more, than my world, than our world, than me, than us. What better than the accompaniment of starlight and firelight to remind me? Stars to lend perspective. Fire to kindle my understanding that all Creation is dynamic. Within our global confines, we were bidding farewell to a millennium that did not flatter humankind. We were tucking in a century that had been perhaps the most violent of any century in the brief annals of human history. What would the next millennium bring? What would the next century hold? I needed a sense of transcendence to ground me. I needed to remind myself that humanity was not Creation’s last act or its first, and that there was more to the habitat of God than our hurting world spinning so recklessly through it all.

Has it been easy since then? How about right here and now? It’s easy, I believe, to be lulled into benign beneficence in this place of beauty that is Cohasset, but we’re all mindful that we occupy a world and we inhabit an era that is neither benign nor beneficent. Like those of us who lived through earlier times marked by World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the most recent Civil Rights Movement, the most recent Feminist Revolution, the First Gulf War, the genocide in Rwanda, the horror of September 11, 2001, the genocide in the Sudan, the war in Iraq, the elections of 2004, we are all recipients of a dubious blessing, sometimes called a curse. We live in interesting times.

We live in interesting times. The story behind this saying opens a window to our time. It is, by popular attribution, a Chinese dictum. What was the source of this proverb? The issue arose on a Jim Lehrer PBS News Hour. The response came from Torrey Whitman, President of the China Institute in New York City. Steeped in Classical Chinese and the history of Chinese proverbs, Whitman proclaimed:

There is no such expression… in Chinese. It is a non-Chinese creation, most probably American, that has been around for at least 30 or 40 years. … I speculate that whoever it was who first coined it attempted to give the expression a mystique, and so decided to attribute it to the Chinese.

Spin. Ah, yes! It’s a phenomenon that has invaded our systems of information and technology, our practice of politics and yes, our variable attempts to practice democracy. So, we have inherited this expression that is as American as apple pie at a fast-food restaurant, this proverb so easily attributed to an ancient Fortune cookie, this blessing which nonetheless holds a face value credibility: We do indeed live in interesting times.

We’re simply challenged to lift the fog of spin and consider face to face what is—our current reality with its tempestuous ingredients of war and peace, of rampant viruses and medicinal miracles, of global greed and communal compassion, the wondrous and the unimaginable in dubious co-existence. How challenged we are to bear historical witness to the here and now.

Witness: it’s a term commonly used in a religious context. For some among us, it’s comfortably Christian; for others among us, it’s uncomfortably Christian. We regularly use the term in Unitarian Universalist parlance. Our Unitarian Universalist Association includes a Department of Advocacy and Witness, an executive team whose focus is public witness, a commission on which I serve called the Commission on Social Witness. It’s not about proselytizing. It’s about being accountable for what we take in, for what we see and hear and know in our bones to be the realities of our life together, our life within our congregations, within our communities, and within our body politic.

We inhabit times in which we need every spark of energy from ancient bonfires, every ounce of humility from starlight that shines from millions of light-years away, to bear a witness of integrity to these times we inhabit. There are choices to be made in this country that carries perhaps the most promise of any nation for honest and inclusive witness. Like that New Year’s Eve of four years ago, we are at a pivot point. There is the sharpest of divisions in this land that we love. What an interesting time; what a captivating season for promoting “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregations and in society at large.”

Some of you may shake your heads about your minister preaching on politics. That’s okay. If all of you agree with me, I’ll simply assume that I’ve said absolutely nothing worth remembering. On politics and the pulpit, I ascribe to that notion that politics without any trace of religion lacks soul, and that religion that ignores politics is irrelevant. I believe we are called by our faith to pay close attention to our larger community and to realize our faith on the larger Common.

A year or so ago, I had the pleasure of presiding at a Sunday morning service with Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, President of The Interfaith Alliance. Rev. Gaddy is a Baptist minister from Monroe, Louisiana, who speaks with a broad Southern flavor and who deeply understands the cogence of convening an interfaith alliance that is, by definition, pluralistic. Rev. Gaddy contends that

“Preaching on politics is a religious task that, like all other religious tasks, must be performed by people who are not perfect.”

Me, for example. Gaddy continues:

“….this work must be done with the same assurances that we recognize in other realms of ministry—mistakes can be excused; wrongs can be forgiven. What is not excusable is failing to speak to political issues at all.”

Interesting times produce choices. With relative freedom to know and to act, to discover and to debate, we exercise the tenets of our liberal faith--speaking out for the inherent worth and dignity of every person, committing ourselves to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, promoting but not imposing the use of the democratic process. These are not easy principles by which to live.

In 1947 after our world was shattered by war and humanity’s capacity for evil was undeniable, James Luther Adams, Unitarian theologian and professor, observed that:

....The prophetic liberal church is the church in which persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in the light of their faith, to make explicit through discussion the epochal thinking that the times demand. The prophetic liberal church is the church in which all members share the common responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional), with the intention of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it.

How--in our lives as individuals and as creatures of community--might we make history rather than being pushed around by it? We rebel at the notion that we are predestined for whatever. The alternative is to be proactive, to give vent to the fullness of our liberal religious imagination. We can carve out choices and act upon them across the spectrum of listening and learning to leveraging the power that is ours to act and advocate, motivate and mobilize.

With the President of our Unitarian Universalist Association, Bill Sinkford, I believe “….that the greatest service our faith community can perform right now is to help Americans reclaim our democracy.” Here at First Parish, we are doing this through worship and education and advocacy. We are doing this right now in this Meeting House on Cohasset Common. We are doing this as we gather later for the first of two adult ed sessions on “Democracy: The Promise and the Practice.” We are doing this as many of us respond to the invitation of our Outreach Committee to gather in the Parish House on Election Eve and make phone calls to recently registered voters, reminding them to exercise that precious right the very next day. We are doing it by exercising that right ourselves.

We live amid interesting times. We have lived through other interesting times. In the faith that we share we will live, with hope and mindfulness, through this one.

All the lives this place
Has had, I have,

wrote Wendell Berry,

I eat
my history day by day.
Bird, butterfly, and flower
pass through the seasons of
my flesh. I dine and thrive
on offal and old stone,
and am combined within
the story of the ground.
By this earth’s life, I have
its greed and innocence,
its violence, its peace.

It is our choice to discover day by day what is happening within and beyond us, interpreting it all through the lens of our experience, our understanding of history, our aesthetics, our realities of heart, mind, and spirit. This very moment as it is lived by all our fellow travelers embraces all that has ever happened. It carries the sounds of harmony and dissonance as they have reverberated throughout history.

We witness miracles of joy and miracles of destruction, acts of love and acts of terror. We participate in decisions of wisdom and prudence and decisions of folly. We are challenged to accept our “common responsibility [for at least attempting] to foresee the consequences of [our] human behavior.” We are challenged to lift the fog of political spin and promote clear thinking, clear seeing, and clear compassion. We are challenged in these early hours of the third millennium of the Common Era to make history. We receive the gift of perspective as we step outside, stand on the hillside, and take it all in. We affirm the gift of participation as we return, ready and willing to make our difference. “By this earth’s life, I have its greed and innocence, its violence, its peace.”. Amen.

Sources:

James Luther Adams, “The Prophethood of All Believers,” originally published as an essay in 1947, in The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses, Edited by George Kimmich Beach, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998, 112.

Wendell Berry, from “History” (for Wallace Stegner), Collected Poems: 1957-1982, North Point Press; Farar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1998, 175.

C. Welton Gaddy, Introductory Letter, “Call to a Faithful Decision Weekend: An Inspirational Guide for Religious leaders on Civic Participation,” 2004.
http://www.interfaithalliance.org/Files/getFile.cfm?id=5467

Rev. William G. Sinkford, The Soul of Our Democracy: A Pastoral Letter, http://www.uua.org/president/030918.html

Unitarian Universalist Association
25 Beacon St. | Boston, MA 02108 | 617-742-2100