Now More Than Ever
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
March 22, 2009
This is a story from the Middle East about a wise judge:
FROM TIME TO TIME, whenever the Cadi who governed the village and gave judgments in the court was absent, the role was given to the Hodja (a Holy One). It was under just such circumstances that, one day, an unusual and difficult case was presented to the court. A local innkeeper brought suit against a poor student in these terms:
"He has lingered outside my restaurant, Holy One, and thus has stolen from me."
"And what has he stolen?" inquired the Hodja.
"The good smell of my good food," replied the innkeeper. "Unwilling to pay for the food itself, he has lingered around the door of my kitchen daily and availed himself of what was not his, the aromas of my cooking. Thus, I work and slave, and this scoundrel takes advantage of my labors and will not pay."
"Is this true, young man?" the Hodja demanded.
"It is, Holy One. I am a poor student, scarcely able to pay for my room and my books. I live on scraps, which I beg wherever I can. But the wonderful smells from the inn I could not resist, and so daily I hang about the kitchen and imbibe those odors, and thus imagine that I am eating those very delicacies.”
"And have you any money on you now?" asked the Hodja. "Only a few coppers, Holy One," was the reply.
"Hand them over."
As the poor student passed his last coins to the Hodja, the innkeeper smiled with satisfaction. The Hodja turned to him then and said, "Innkeeper, close your eyes, and listen well to my judgment.”
Puzzled, the innkeeper did so. And then, with his eyes tightly shut, he heard the student's coins being jingled in the Hodja's hand.
"Do you hear, innkeeper?" asked the Hodja.
"I hear, wise one," replied the innkeeper.
"Good! The sound of the coins has paid for the smell of the food," replied the Hodja, as he returned the coins to the student.[1]
Now, we all know that the innkeeper had better have some real customers with hard cash if he’s to be able to stay in business and keep those wonderful smells coming for those who can pay and those who can’t. Like the inn, though, much of what we do here is available to those who pay and those who don’t. We welcome everyone though our doors on a Sunday morning regardless of what or if they pay. We stand ready to provide spiritual sustenance to whoever needs it through ministering, counseling, teaching, training, comforting, mourning together and rejoicing together. Every second Sunday and on Christmas Eve we pass our offering directly on to an organization outside ourselves which directly benefits our neighbors, many of whom we will never meet: Domestic Violence Ended on Christmas Eve, the South County Rhode Island Congregation for their first building, the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry, Wellspring, and our own Interfaith Food Pantry, with whom we also share this building itself. We provide sanctuary for men and women suffering from addiction who need a place to gather and strengthen each other as they battle temptation together. We gladden the community around us with our Art Show, our Christmas Fair, our Organ Recitals. We provide an appetizing smell all around us, but like the innkeeper, we, too, need paying customers to keep the doors open.
We’re not running an inn here, and serving wonderful-smelling food is not at the heart of what we’re about – though you will find some here next Sunday evening at our dinner celebrating the kick-off of our “Now More Than Ever” Covenant Renewal. What we bake here is more about food for souls rather than bodies. What we’re about is caring, creating community, hospitality, hope, teaching and love – and scattering it far and wide. In short, this Beloved Community is a place for us to share as we find our way to living lives of meaning and purpose in a difficult and sometimes hostile world.
We’re living in hard times just now out there in the world, and it inevitably seeps into our lives together here. Some of us are grappling with loss of income, loss of money we need for retirement or in retirement. Some of us are worried about having enough to put our kids through college; perhaps even about having to leave our homes. Listening to bad economic news day after day, week after week, we can easily become anxious; we begin to worry; the worry begets stress, sometimes affecting family life as we deal with reduced expectations and spend more and more time in concern about what the future holds for us. We may find ourselves getting angry at our life circumstances, at those who have brought this catastrophe upon us, even at neighbors or spouses or friends or children. We may feel that we have been betrayed, that we have done everything we should have done, behaved as responsibly as we could possibly have done, only to find hopes shattered and dreams denied. We may begin to spend minutes or hours or days living in a state of outrage, crying out against the rotten hand we have been dealt.
Now more than ever we need each other. Now more than ever we need this Beloved Community of memory and hope to be a place where we can come for peace, for hope, for refuge. We need Second Parish, our spiritual home, to be a sanctuary from the storms that are surging around us. Elie Wiesel offers this meditation on that need:
What then is sanctuary? The sanctuary is often something very small. Not a grandiose gesture, but a small gesture toward alleviating human suffering and preventing humiliation. The sanctuary is a human being. Sanctuary is a dream. And that is why you are here and that is why I am here. We are here because of one another. We are in truth each other's shelter.[2]
A sanctuary. A sacred place, a place of refuge, a place to rebuild spiritual reserves, to transmute anger into commitment, anxiety into hope, stress into strength; a place to embrace each other and to be embraced. Sanctuary: This very room. This gathering of all of us together in faith, in hope, and in love. Now more than ever we need each other to share our burdens and in sharing lighten them, and to share our joys and in sharing heighten them. Now more than ever it’s clear that anxiety, worry, stress and anger shared are borne more easily. And all along, like the innkeeper, we produce as a byproduct this place which shelters so many more than our own number; generosity which goes far beyond these walls; hope which infuses the neighborhood around us. All of those others also depend upon us though some can provide little more than the jingling of coins.
We are not, as I said, in the retail business. We don’t charge for what we do. We don’t have hourly fees, or membership dues, or a cash register (except at Christmas and Art Show). We are in the soul business, we are not innkeepers or merchants here. Indeed, there are times when we might feel as though money is – well, dirty, as though we shouldn’t talk about it at all. It is a commonplace that we find it easier to talk about the most intimate aspects of our family lives than about money. We don’t want to boast or be outdone, we don’t want to admit that we might care, passionately, about money. We all know, after all, that money is the root of all evil, right? Well, no, that’s not actually what the Apostle Paul said at all. What he said was that the love of money is the root of all evil. I suppose a case could be made that he over generalized just a bit; after all, the quest for power or security or other kinds of satisfaction are also powerful; but it could be argued that because money can buy so much else – security, power, respect, service, care, the appearance of affection – money can be seen as a symbol of all for which we strive. A little dirty, money is; awfully powerful, mesmerizing sometimes, capable of leading honest folk astray and somehow, as we have been seeing in the financial wreckage strewn around the public landscape of late, somehow capable of leading people like Bernie Madoff into extraordinary acts of theft even though they already had far more money than most people in our society. What strange and fearsome power this money has. We’d best stop talking about it altogether and just hope enough comes in, don’t you think? It’s positively embarrassing!
One of my colleagues thought he’d confront this mystery of iniquity directly, so he pulled a dollar bill out of his pocket and proceeded to interview it; it was a fascinating conversation in which the minister ended up accusing the almighty dollar of making us base, and greedy, and grasping. Yes, indeed, money is powerful. But as the dollar bill wisely rebuts, money itself has no power but for what we give it. Money has meaning only in our own hands and in our own minds, and money has power over us only when we believe that it is only money that has the power to satisfy our needs, only when we come to believe that we must have as much money as possible to meet any possible needs that may arise, only when we forget that money comes and goes but love remains. We all imagine that money can buy something it can’t buy. If you’ve been to our house or in my office here, you know that books are one of my temptations. I’m in love with books, and I love being surrounded by books; but books don’t ultimately give me the satisfaction they promise when I think about buying another one; they satisfy when shared, as in our classes at Linden Ponds. You may have other favorite expenditures to which you turn for satisfaction – clothes or a fine car, perhaps; and when they have a purpose in your life, they satisfy, but when your try to find meaning in possession alone, you undoubtedly find yourself wondering what came over you, what it was your were really trying to buy.
Money takes on meaning in our lives as we let it flow through us, as we use it not only for our own needs but to spread a pleasing smell around us, like the innkeeper inevitably throwing off delightful smells from his cooking to feed even those who have nothing but a few coins to jingle.
This place, this sanctuary, this Beloved Community is one of the most important places you can make a difference in this world, as Bob Thayer put it in our reading this morning. John Wolf, minister emeritus at All Souls Unitarian in Tulsa, once catalogued for his congregation some reasons for supporting a Unitarian Universalist church:
You want to support it because it stands against superstition and fear. Because it points to what is noblest and best in human life. Because it is open to men and women of whatever race, creed, color, or place of origin.
You want to support it because it has a free pulpit. Because you can hear ideas expressed there which could cost any other minister his or her job. You want to support it because it is a place where children can come without being saddled with guilt or terrified of some celestial Peeping Tom, where they can learn that religion is for joy, for comfort, for gratitude and love.
You want to support it because it is a place where walls between people are torn down rather than built up. Because it is a place for the religious, displaced persons of our time, the refugees from mixed marriages, the unwanted free thinkers, and those who insist against orthodoxy that they must work out their own beliefs.
You want to support a Unitarian Universalist church because it is more concerned with human beings than with dogmas. Because it searches for the holy, rather than dwelling upon the depraved. Because it calls no one a sinner, yet knows how deep is the struggle in each person's breast and how great is the hunger for what is good.
You want to support a Unitarian Universalist church because it can laugh. . . . You want to support it because it insults neither your intelligence nor your conscience, and because it calls you to worship what is truly worthy of your sacrifice.[3]
We’re going through some hard times now. None of us know what lies ahead for our economy or our world. That’s one reason why now more than ever is the time to invest in what really matters in this life. Some of us have already been hit by these hard times and will need to reduce our commitment to the congregation. It that’s your situation, let me say that this is just the time when we as a congregation have the most to offer. Don’t let any sense of being unable to pull the weight you might once have been able to pull keep you away from this place. This is the place for you especially when times are hard. Pledge at a level you can sustain even so, because doing your part will feel good to you, especially now.
Maybe you could have given more in the past and find yourself able to devote a little more to this little bakery of soul-goodness. Now more than ever it’s important that some of us step forward and match what feels just right to us.
Maybe you haven’t been affected as much as others have; maybe you’ve always been generous and done more than your fair share but find that you can stretch still farther this year to help fill the gap that will be left by those who must cut back their giving. It seems to me that Deedee & I are in that category – especially when I reflect on the fact that I don’t have to be working on Wall Street now (not that I would even still have a job!) – and that this would be a good year for us to increase the percentage of my salary that we give back to the congregation as our share toward tending this Beloved Community. Now more than ever we need those of us who can to increase the level of our giving to see the need and commit ourselves to whatever more we are called to offer.
It’s true, as Mark Belletini put it in our reading this morning, that “When our ancestors spoke of heaven, they were speaking of this moment.” They were speaking of a time when we could gather in peace, gather strength, put aside fear and anxiety and anger and create a place and a time very like this. It’s true; we bake good food for the soul. Let us commit ourselves yet again to support this sacred and necessary and infinitely rewarding task.
Amen.