[As usual, the actual sermon was somewhat different than what's posted below, what with ad-libbing and on-the-fly tweaking, but the general gist is here.]


"The Poetry of Inconvenience"
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville
Earth Day sermon

( Today, April 22nd, 2007... )

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Miscellany:

* A voicepost of me reading Mary's poem is here.

* Listened to part of The Splendid Table during the drive home, which included a clip of Jonathan Gold talking about his twelve-year-old daughter's love of Italian squid feasts and about other food writers he admires. He sounds very cool and his "triumph of the proofreader" wisecrack makes me even more inclined to like him.

* However, catching up with Gold's writing is going to have to wait. The immediate plan: cook lunch (something with mushrooms and chicken), bake dog biscuits, and work on essays until my brain is goo.

* It's 78 F and sunny here. Here's the start of the Maura Stanton poem ("God's Ode to Creation") that was the meditation text for this morning's service:

Today's the kind of day when I feel good
about that dazzling stuff I've made down there,
everything so mixed up that even lies
turn out to be the truth...

[11 March 2007, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville]

( tree of life and tree of knowledge... )

This is the sermon I delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville this past Sunday. The assigned theme was "Unitarian Universalist Moral Responsibility in our Local Community." The worship chair read Raising the Roof as the "Story for All Ages," and before I spoke, I put on four long, gaudy strands of beads:

( Seven years ago, I celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans. )

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( ...from deep despair and perished things... )

* All y'all. Thank you.

* A good send-off for Jace this afternoon. Full church (300+ people); choir singing "River in Judea"; Tony Jackson and others singing "You're the First, the Last, My Everything," "Sing a Song," "YMCA," and other standards.

* "Light tea" at the very charming Savannah Tea Room with a friend this morning. For her, a pot of Assam. For me, cups of blueberry rooibos and Provence rooibos. You start out by choosing your teacup from the shelves on the wall; then the server brings by a glass filled with Devon cream and topped with a raspberry, to go with the miniature scones. For the light tea, the second course is the tea tray, which consists of fruit (grapes and slices of pineapple, kiwi, and oranges), savories (cucumber sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, carrot sticks, cheese cubes, and tuna salad in phyllo shells), and sweets (blueberry cream puffs, apple tartlets, and chocolate covered cherries). The final course (i.e., a full-size dessert) was pineapple sorbet.

* Got to chat with Bryce a bit after he and the BYM finished messing around with cars out back.

* Went to Stacy Irvin's opening at The Parthenon. The photographs that linger with me at the moment are the ones of the camels, "Slow Day" (a child in a Chinese shop), and one of a farmer straddling an irrigation ditch.

* Running into more friends while stopping at Savarino's to pick up dinner.

* Finally opening the bottle of red wine ("The Four Graces" pinot noir) given to me when my term on the church board ended last year. I'm sipping it with my plate of eggplant parm as I type.

* I technically took today off, but I did sneak in a stop at the Green Hills branch of the library. One of their current exhibits consists of some of the birdhouses for this year's W.O. Smith/Nashville Community Music School fundraiser. There are always some that are stunningly gorgeous and inventive, and others that are just laugh-out-loud funny (some of you may remember me cooing over "Hawkwarts" last year). The one that made me stop and giggle in my tracks this afternoon was "The Schroederhorn" (with Snoopy on the podium; Nashville's new symphony hall is "The Schermerhorn").

* Also on display at the library -- a number of fun-looking new children's books, including Piratepedia and Adele and Simon (a sister and brother wander around Paris...).

* Maura Stanton's "God's Ode to Creation."

My friend Jace died this morning.

A couple years ago, I was privileged to be a member of the committee that established a new service award at my church, the Virginia Grantham Award. (Virginia is a longtime member of First UU who was very active on the Caring Committee and other service activities until her stroke last year.) There was no question that Jace would be one of the inaugural recipients. One of my tasks was to write up why. My friend Gail added some more to it, and this is what appeared in the newsletter:

If you are a member or friend of this church, chances are you have eaten a meal prepared or organized by Jace Burch, served on a committee with him, and/or handed him a check for one of the many fundraisers he’s coordinated. Jace has contributed countless hours to feeding the collective body, mind and spirit of First UU, both literally and figuratively, often with the collaboration of his longtime partner in life and crime, Bill Latimer, and always with panache and style, whether it’s acting as a host for Stewardship dinners, catering Seders and block parties, or shampooing the carpets.

Jace is about to begin his third year as chair of the Fundraising Committee, for which we are immensely grateful; as one admirer put it, he knows how to "turn making money into an opportunity to have fun," whether it’s a campaign for paint or an evening of jazz or a holiday bake sale. As a stalwart of the Caring Committee, Jace is the linchpin of the Senior Breakfasts and has frequently served as Caring Coordinator for the entire church. He’s also contributed his time and talents to the Fellowship Committee, the Nominating Committee, the Finance Committee, Dinners for Nine, Chalice Circles, GLBT and Friends, the Oversight Committee, the Capital Campaign Committee, Wednesday Night Dinners, the Green Team, the Accessibility and Safety Task Force, Solidarity Sunday, holiday parties and brunches, and countless other events and initiatives.

In his professional life, Jace works for the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, and his devotion to the Tennessee Titans almost rivals that of his attachment to First UU.

On game days, Jace and Bill would show up to early service in Titans jerseys, and Jace would wear a Titans earring as well. I first learned about the rule "plant your seeds after Good Friday" from him quoting one of his elders during a Canvass speech. His memorial service will be this weekend, and it is to be a "70s disco party." (Which will be completely in character and appropriate, but oh, lordy... if only there were time to stop home and raid my dad's closet...) And the choir will be singing "The Fire of Commitment" and "Standing on the Side of Love."

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The subject line of this post is from the closing lines of a UU hymn (quoting from memory):

Eternity is hard to ken, but harder still is this:
A human life when truly seen is briefer than a kiss.

A highlight of coffee hour this morning, between services: chatting with a retired minister and a retired professor about turtles, sheep, goats and dogs.

For the benediction, Rev. Jason read from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Where Do We Go From Here:

All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir to the vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally "in the red." We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women.

For the meditation, I read John Betjeman's Advent 1955. The title of the homily (and some of the allusions within) is from Eleanor Farjeon's People, Look East, which was also the text of this morning's closing hymn.

( assignment: Advent )

Prayer for Perspective

When I last checked, the votes for the "marriage = 1 man + 1 woman" amendment to my state constitution totaled:

YES 1,407,717
NO 322,575

I've been reminding myself that some of my Unitarian abolitionist forebears must have felt like this: the percentages will be reversed someday -- possibly even within my lifetime, give or take a few generations -- but it's painful how so many people don't get how grossly unfair they're being to their neighbors and kin on this matter.

On the determinedly positive side, at least 19% of the vote was against the amendment. That's more than some people would expect ("1 in 5 Tennesseans favor marriage equality!" It's tempting to go make some heads spin, as it were...). My own precinct voted 3 to 1 against it on Election Day (816 voters), which was not a surprise but cheering nonetheless (and the totals may be even higher, since that ratio doesn't factor in ballots cast during the "early voting" period).

So. Much work to do. There will always be more work to do.

This country's growing pluralism is a blessing - one that the founders of this country could never have imagined but for which they prepared fertile ground by writing their egalitarian ideals into our foundational documents. What we should be doing in this country is continuing to expand the circle of those we include in the promises made in our Constitution. And I believe that despite the backlash we see every time the circle is widened, it never really shrinks back to where it was before.

- Bill Sinkford

And also:

We are a gentle and generous people. But let us not forget our anger. May it fuel not only our commitment to compassion but also our commitment to make fundamental changes. Our vision of the Beloved Community must stand against a vision that would allow the privilege of the few to be accepted as just and even holy. Our religious vision must again and again ask the Gospel question "Who is my neighbor" and strive always to include more and more of us as we intone the words that gave birth to this nation, "We the people..."

We are, and we should be, both a gentle, and an angry people.

- Bill Sinkford -- from a pastoral letter on Katrina, but it applies to many other things as well