Speaking of…

a sermon, delivered at First Unitarian Church, Louisville, KY
on February 7, 2016

Note: This sermon was inspired by a song by Jason Shelton, which I simply could not get out of my head one week. The link to a youtube video teaching the song is at the bottom of the post.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers. We will call them Cain and Abel. Abel, the younger brother, was a shepherd. Cain, the older brother, was a farmer. And they worshipped a deity who was anything but a vegetarian. So their God loved the sheep sacrifices that Abel brought, but was not too fond of the veggies Cain provided. In this story, God sounds a little like a fussy toddler to me, but that is besides the point. I am sure there were some good reasons back in the day that have gotten lost over the ages.

What is the point is that Cain was jealous. His younger brother got all this love and attention from God for his lousy animal sacrifice, while Cain was reprimanded for providing the fruits of his harvest. But rather than take his anger to God, because this God was like an all-powerful toddler after all, Cain took his anger out on Abel, and he killed him. Which was really extreme, and a terrible decision, but that is what he did.

Well, God came looking for his favorite Abel. And asked Cain “Where is your brother?” And Cain got all defensive and he said “I don’t know. Am I my brothers’ keeper?”

Now, God could tell by Cain’s attitude that something bad had happened, and so he cried out “What have you done?” and then God proceeded to curse Cain so that his fields would never yield again.

Ahh, the story of Cain and Abel. The first brothers in the Hebrew Scriptures. The first murder. And so much more.

Now, God doesn’t really answer Cain’s question in the story – Cain’s question about “Am I my brother’s keeper?” But as God matures throughout the Hebrew & Christian scriptures, that question does get answered, again and again.As Kelli Trujillo writes in her article on this topic: “From laws about caring for strangers and aliens…to strident calls for justice for the vulnerable …to Jesus’ challenge to love our neighbors—even our enemies—as we love ourselves…to Paul’s teachings about hospitality…to John’s vision of the just, peaceful kingdom of God come to earth…the answer is yes, yes, yes” we are, indeed, called to be our brother’s keeper.

Trujillo continues: “God invites us to love, stand up for, and kneel down in humility to serve others in our lives. And that call challenges us to step out of tight-knit circles of loved ones and out of our comfortable routines…”

In many ways, this attitude of love is reflected in the golden rule: Treat others the way you would like to be treated yourself. This ethic of reciprocity is a moral maxim or principle of altruism found in many human cultures and in most of the worlds religions. I know Rev. Elwood Sturtevant of Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church talked to you about the Golden Rule a few weeks ago.

What I would like to introduce you to today is the concept of the Platinum rule. This rule goes one step beyond treating others the way you would like to be treated and instead urges you to treat others the way they would like to be treated. George Bernard Shaw humorously wrote in 1903, “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” More recently, business leader Dr. Tony Allesandra, puts it this way: “We need to practice the true intent of the Golden Rule, which is, ‘do unto others the way they want to be done to.’ ”

When we utilize the Platinum Rule, we have to pay attention to what others are feeling, needing and wanting. Allesandra says that we need to shift from at attitude of “this is what I want, so I’ll give everyone the same thing” to an attitude of “let me first understand what they want and then I’ll give it to them.”

Let’s connect this to our moment for all ages, and the exciting news that we will soon be having a New Roots Fresh Stop at First U, serving the people of Old Louisville. And let’s say we are like the deity in the Cain and Abel story in that we prefer meat. Utilizing the golden rule, we might say “Well, we are not fond of fresh fruits and vegetables, so others don’t need access to them, either.” Utilizing the Platinum Rule, however, we would say “Oh, I might not be too fond of fresh fruits and vegetables, but I know they are very healthy and that people in this community don’t have access to them, so even if it is not my preference, I understand this is one way we can fill a need in the community.”

Or let’s take a non-food related example. If a friend of mine experiences the death of a loved one, I might think “Oh, wow, if I were in her place, I don’t think I would want to talk about it.” Utilizing the golden rule, when we get together, I won’t say anything, not wanting to make her feel bad. But what if my friend is the opposite of me, and really does want to talk about it? Utilizing the platinum rule, I would first ask her “Do you like to talk about your loved one?” in order to make space for her to either accept, or decline my invitation based on her preference, not my own. In the long run, practicing the golden rule and distinctly avoiding the topic of her loved one may well stress our relationship beyond what it can handle, whereas if I make space for her to share what her preference is, it allows her to feel how much I love and care about her.

Practicing the platinum rule is one way that we can love one another – not by assuming that others are just like us, but by realizing each person has their own distinct story, and their own distinct needs. And then treating them accordingly, because we are all connected and what benefits our neighbors benefits us as well.

Connected to this is the desire to serve one another. To be of use. One of my favorite lines in our hymnal is from a Marge Piercy poem: “Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.”

There is a debate over whether the golden rule, or altruism, is something that is learned behavior, or if it is something that is genetically hardwired into us. Recent studies indicate the answer is both. Let that sit for a moment – we are genetically hardwired, biologically, to want to be helpful to others, to want to be of use, to serve one another. No wonder it is found across the worlds religions!

Indeed, there is a parable about this – one that has been attributed to a variety of different sources, and is perhaps an ancient Chinese story. Now, though this story compares heaven and hell, I don’t think this parable has anything to do with the afterlife. I think it has to do with this life, here on earth, right now. So I invite you to listen to it with that in mind. It goes somewhat like this:

One day a curious person said to God, “God, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like.”

God showed the curious person two doors. Inside the first one, in the middle of the room, was a large round table with a large pot of stew. It smelled delicious and made the person’s mouth water, but the people sitting around the table were thin and sickly. They appeared to be famished.

Stuart McMillen

Everyone was holding a spoon with a very long handle. And though each found it possible to reach into the pot of stew and take a spoonful, because the handles were longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths.
The curious person shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering. God said, “This is what hell is like.”

Behind the second door, the room appeared exactly the same. There was the large round table with the large pot of wonderful stew that made the curious person’s mouth water. The people had the same long-handled spoons, but they were well nourished and plump, laughing and talking.The curious person saw that, rather than each trying to feed themselves, they were feeding one another.

Stuart Mcmillen

God smiled and said “This is what heaven is like. These people have learned to share and feed one another.”

Heaven and hell – exactly the same. What makes it different is our attitude – it depends on whether or not we decide to serve one another.

Of course, this version of heaven never would have worked if each person were not only serving one another, but receiving that which was given to them. I think this aspect of the story gets left out too often: sometimes we need help.

Our society tells us it is better to give than to receive. As William Sloane Coffin pointed out, “Many of us overvalue autonomy, the strength to stand alone, the capacity to act independently. Far too few of us pay attention to the virtues of dependence and interdependence, and especially the capacity to be vulnerable.”

Being vulnerable, and allowing someone else to meet our needs, can be difficult. We may not like what is being offered. We may be afraid we don’t deserve their help. We may feel embarrassed, that somehow we have failed to be self-sufficient; that we are not good enough; that we didn’t try hard enough.

But think for a moment how good it feels when we are able to meet someone else’s need. Isn’t it its own form of blessing to give someone else the experience of being useful? What we miss when we focus on serving one another is that giving and receiving are two sides to the same coin. When we receive with gratitude and grace, we allow someone else to experience the joy of being of use. We honor their need to serve.

And this is how we love the hell out of the world: by loving, serving, and honoring one another.

We love, serve, and honor one another by taking care of each other’s needs, making sure they are fed, and knowing that in the process, we will be fed as well.

We love, serve, and honor one another by practicing the platinum rule to treat others they way they want to be treated, and by giving others the opportunity to serve us in return.

And we love, serve and honor one another by knowing that we are called – by God or by the Interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, to care for one another and to be each others’ keeper.

May we find the strength, curiosity, courage, and wisdom to practice this in our own lives, by learning to give generously and to graciously receive that which is lovingly given to us by others.

And so that you can have this earworm, too 🙂

Tags: Pastoral

Spirituality & Grief
Delivered at First Unitarian Church, Louisville, KY on November 8, 2015

Listen here:

When I received an academic scholarship in my second year of seminary, I was pleasantly surprised. Though I had done well the first two semesters, those more recent grades stood in stark contrast to my undergraduate career. Reviewing my college transcript recently, I saw how I had started my freshman and sophomore years with a few As, but mostly Bs and Cs. And by my senior year, I had pulled my grades up to almost entirely As. But my junior year? That stood out as pretty dismal – a few Cs, mostly Ds and a couple of Fs.

Ahh yes, my junior year of college. It started off with the death of my grandmother. And then a dear friend who was like a sister to me was diagnosed with colon cancer. Someone quite close to me attempted suicide. The long-term relationship I was in crashed and burned magnificently. A friend of my younger brother killed himself accidentally. And someone else quite close to me ended up hospitalized. That was the fall semester.

I remember going to my professors, crying in their offices, begging for extensions (to this day, I remember the ones that were kind to me – kindness matters.)  I couldn’t focus, couldn’t concentrate. I could barely do anything without breaking into tears – much more than I even do now. I coped by staying up late with a close group of friends, going through cheap bottles of wine much too quickly. Not exactly the healthiest of coping techniques.

I hope and pray that that fall of 1991 will always hold the record for the number of losses I experience in a short amount of time. Even that spring, I struggled to keep up. When my parents threatened to remove me from college, that was one more loss I just could not allow, and I managed to pull myself together just enough to eek by.

Fast forward just six months later, and you wouldn’t recognize me. Acing the computer science courses I had failed just a year earlier, and then falling in love with the first anthropology course I took and lamenting that senior year was too late to change my major. By my senior year, I aced all my classes except that one darn racquetball course. So close!

What caused such a turn around? I couldn’t have expressed it at the time, but in retrospect, I see that a large part of the change was due to processing my grief. Grieving all these losses brought me into relationship with my core self. It stripped away all the layers of strength and protection I had carefully built up. And it brought me into relationship with the world – it made me feel a part of something larger. That was one reasons why I became so drawn to anthropology that last year: I became acutely aware of my place in the world, and the lives and suffering not just of myself but of those around me. This same awareness, which was just germinating in that horrible year, would eventually lead me to seminary, and ministry. Though I never would have labeled it as such at the time, I can look back and see that that fall of 1991 was, at it’s core, a spiritual experience for me.

In order to understand the connection between grief and spirituality, let’s do a bit of “grieving 101”. Whether we are grieving the loss of a loved one, the loss of a future we had come to look forward to, the loss of a job, the loss of health, the loss of prestige or influence – when we lose something or someone we care about, we grieve its loss.

When I do memorial services, I do a brief primer on grief in the service. I find it’s helpful to remind us of three things about grief: first, I say that there is no one right way to grieve. Each of us finds our own way. The work of grief is to honor what we’ve lost.

And grief doesn’t really go away. This is the second thing I share. Grief isn’t something people get over. Instead, time teaches us to weave each loss into the fabric of our lives. And as we do, we can become stronger, more compassionate and more loving as a result of the loss. In time we hopefully will come to some new sense of peace.

And finally, I tell people that when we lose some thing or someone that we love, it also brings back every other loss we’ve ever suffered. Our grief becomes compounded.

Applying this to my semester of hell, I can see the growth in myself – in time, I did come to a new sense of peace. But it never went away, as evidenced by my tears these 20+ years later.  And I was never the same person again. I had suffered, and I grew a deeper compassion, and sense of gravitas, as a result. I can feel that younger me, confused and confounded, even when I experience grief today – I feel her less as the number of losses I grieve becomes larger each year, but I feel her there.

Notice how I don’t address Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief in what I say in memorial services. In her book On Death and Dying, originally published in 1969, Kübler-Ross found that there was not much research into the emotional experience of dying, and so she took the stories of terminally ill patients and brought them to the public in her best selling book. Kübler-Ross posits 5 stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Though she never intended these to be understood as a linear progression, the public co-opted them as such, and so people would ask questions like “What stage in the grieving process are you? Are you at Acceptance yet? I’m still stuck in Bargaining…” Additionally, the book was neither a scientific study, nor was it a study of grief in general. It was simply a discussion of some of the major emotional reactions people have to the experience of dying. Yes, grief can be a part of that experience, but death is not the totality of grief. So while Kübler-Ross gave us some language to begin to discuss grief, she is neither the final, nor the only word.

Another model for understanding grief is proposed by psychotherapist David Richo, in his 2008 book When the Past Is Present. He posits that grief is composed of three feelings: sadness that something was lost, anger that it was taken away, and fear that it will never be replaced. While he has much that is useful to say, I feel these three feelings are an oversimplification of grief, and don’t explain the wild and crazy emotional roller-coaster that grief can be.

My current favorite reading about grief is by my friend and colleague the Rev. Mark Belletini. Mark just completed his thirty-seventh and final year in parish ministry. He retired from First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio, where he served for seventeen years. He previously served two congregations in California, and was chair of the commission that produced our grey hymnal. Rev. Belletini was one of the first openly gay Unitarian Universalist ministers, and he served congregations in the San Francisco area, during the 80s and 90s – the height of the AIDS epidemic. He recounts going to multiple funerals for friends each week, and what that loss did to him. In his book Nothing Gold Can Stay, he uses his own expediences as a lens through which to look the many varied forms of grief.

Mark writes, that grief, he has come to see, “is not a single feeling in and of itself but a whole symphony of feelings, some seemingly deeply dissonant from each other.” For example, grief can include sorrow, and it can also include joy. We may feel sad at the loss of a loved one, and joy when we remember the love we shared with them.

Grief can include guilt, and it can also include gratitude. We may feel like we should have spent more time with someone who we have lost, and at the same time feel gratitude for what they brought to our lives.

Grief can include anger, and also relief. We may be angry that something we cared about was taken from us, or angry at ourselves for not acting the way we wish we would have. And at the same time we may feel relief that a difficult relationship or job has been terminated, or that a loved one’s suffering has ended.

And so much more.

Grief is a complicated set of emotions, not just one, or two, or even five. When someone grieving comes to Rev. Belletini, he tells them “everything is grief for a while: tears and laughter both, depression and joy, relief and crankiness, desolation and fresh openings into life.”

This doesn’t make it easy, though. In fact, grieving is very difficult work. “The whole effort to focus on the ordinary needs of life—food, laundry, and so forth—in the midst of grief can feel as though you had just spent three hours running…or lifting weights in the gym.” But this effort, and the way it is often hard for us to focus and concentrate when we are grieving, Mark says, also helps to serve a healing function. Mark writes that the way the grieving heart forms a cocoon around itself:

It isn’t anything to fear, although it certainly can be confusing and disruptive…This cocoon creates a delicate but real spaciousness separated from the demands and duties and worries and relentless schedules of modern-day life. It takes room to grieve, room that our frantic, confusing, and narcissistic modern world refuses to notice or offer.

Another colleague of mine the Rev. Gary James, writes about the importance of this kind of cocooning as “the winter of the heart.” He says, “In the winter of the heart one is invited to discover a faith that grapples with pain and uncertainty; grapples with evil, loss, and the mystery of death, and in so doing, discovers hope and a deep joy on the winter-fallow landscape.” Though it is not always possible, and though we often don’t realize it at the time, grieving can give us entry into this winter of the heart and allow us to emerge with a deeper faith. Our grieving, as painful as it can be, can teach us about who we are, and about our connection to one another. As Francis Weller writes, “The gift of grief is an affirmation of life, and of our intimacy with the world.” In this way, grief is something that, well lived, can help us discover our purpose, our reason for being, as Daniel the Leaf put it in our moment for all ages this morning.

In this way, grieving can be a spiritual experience. Henri Nowen defines a spiritual experience as something that doesn’t “remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.” Grieving can do this – lead us deeper into the world.  Grieving isn’t easy, but then most spiritual experiences aren’t – they exact some price from us. Experiencing a loss can force us to confront the spiritual questions we may have been avoiding or haven’t taken time to address, the questions that get at the very heart and meaning of life: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live or How can I go on? The answers aren’t always what we were expecting, and sometimes can be quite painful themselves. That was definitely my expereince in college, as I struggled to answer these questions as wave after wave of loss hit me. Singer songwriter Mary Gauthier captures this experience in her song Mercy Now. “We hang in the balance between hell and hallowed ground.” At minimum, we will experience the loss of who we were before, which is something that gets mixed into the grieving process. This can sometimes make us want to shy away from grieving, or deny it. But as Rev. Belletini writes, “Refusing to embrace grief in all its richness is like deciding to hold our breath to live more fully, or pretending we are not thirsty when we are.”

When we are able to embrace our grief, to make room for it in our lives, grief can connect us to the larger world. Because all of us have grieved, have suffered loss. The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism says that all of life is suffering. That everyone hurts.

Helen Keller recognized the universality of grief. She wrote:

We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world- the company of those who have known suffering. When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.

Moving through the grieving process can force us to find meaning, or at least, make peace. Belletini writes that “Reflecting on our grief can help us understand who we are, why we are the way we are, and in some ways it offers us glimpses of hope by outlining what we are becoming. Thus, grief can be seen finally as a gift that blesses and illumines our mortality and our very existence in this world.”

Would I have understood any of this when I was in the midst of that deep, heavy grief my junior year of college? No. Do I think about it when I experience loss now? Sometimes. Not always. But sometimes, when I am grieving and feel more vulnerable than usual, when I seem to laugh for no reason or cry whenever someone says or does something kind, I do reflect on those words of Helen Keller, and on the wisdom of my friend Mark Belletini. When it seems that my sorrow is too great to be borne, I sometimes feel my connection to the world, and to that great family of the heavy-hearted into which my grief has given me entrance. And I do, inevitably, feel about me their arms, their sympathy, their understanding. And what a gift this is. What a blessing.

When you find yourself in the midst of grief, and I can say with assurance that you will one day if you haven’t already, may you find such comfort and may it give you a glimpse of hope and bring you peace. For to grieve is to love and to love is to give praise and thanksgiving for the life which has blessed us all. May it be so. Blessed be.

Tags: Pastoral