Gifts For All Occasions

6 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names, and Mystery beyond all naming this morning we speak from within ourselves in hopes of seeing the road ahead. We don’t ask for a glimpse of a future, we simply wish to see without clouded vision that which lies before us.

We all come to this enterprise with our own set of blinders on. It’s time to see without the blinders, time to feel without worrying about hurting, time to process what comes our way. We are held back by our inability to imagine ourselves different. Yet, as anyone will attest simply gazing at old photos has the ability to shame us into laughter, envy, remorse. Let us see now that we are perfect in the manner in which we address the world today, right now, this very instant.

Yes, the past was different, yes, the future will be something unexpected, but from deep within each of us let us sigh and give up any notion that we can control any of this nonsense. As mentioned in the responsive reading today help us through the strength that we gather from one another to be able to say with the poet,

“Forward! After the great Companions! And to belong to them! They too are on the road! Onward! To that which is endless, as it was beginningless, to undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights, To see nothing anywhere but what we may reach it and pass it. To look up and down no road but it stretches and waits for us-To know the universe itself as a road – as many roads-as roads for traveling souls.”

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON

I remember the jack-in-the-box I bought my daughter Isabelle. She couldn’t have been more than 6 months old. It played the usual, “All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel” song, and of course at the appropriate line, “Pop goes the weasel” the latch was triggered and the clown jumped out! I couldn’t wait to see her reaction. When I got home I got down on the floor with Izzy (she wasn’t known by that then, but her peers have since so named her) and proudly displayed the box. She liked it. She touched it, pounded on it, licked it, and tried to eat it. Okay, so far, so good. I started turning the crank on the side of the box and the “weasel song” started playing. Oh, she really liked that; she clapped and smiled her best toothless grin, then the moment of truth. When that clown came outta there everything changed. Her smile and glee went to consternation and wailing. I tried to calm her down, show her it was just a silly clown, I even put the clown back in and made it pop out again. Boy, was that dumb. Her mother had to come rescue her, and I was left on the floor with the jack-in-the-box. So, why am I telling you this? Life’s a lot like a jack-in-the-box gift. And excuse me for sounding like Forest Gump, “Life’s a lot like a box of chocolates.” Every once in a while something jumps out at us that we hadn’t expected. We’re confused, hurt, and astonished! What to do? All I can tell you is by her first birthday that jack-in-the-box was her favorite toy, and she couldn’t wait for it to surprise her.

We at First Church Austin recently finished our canvassing campaign. Members Keith Savage and Sean Parham ran a great campaign and it looks like pledges are up – way up!

So – it’s only appropriate since you’ve gotten through giving, that you now think about receiving.

Hurricane Katrina has offered a lot of us all over the country an opportunity to give, and the response from the people has been tremendous even if the Federal government’s was less than auspicious.

Let’s face it giving opens us up. Our hearts widen dramatically – we are the one as P.T. Barnum suggested that is born every moment – when are hearts are opened we gladly play the fool. Why do you think falling in love and finding someone who wants your gifts feels so good, because all you want to do is give and who cares if you look like an idiot while you’re doing it?

I like that Dr. Pepper commercial where the guy does everything for this young lady but when she tries to drink his pop, or maybe she’s simply trying to take it from him, you know, put it somewhere where it doesn’t seem to be a part of his anatomy? Anyway, he runs from her when it looks like his drink might be taken from him. You can raise that commercial up one notch and that soda becomes a beer. But no beer commercial will ever advertise that way because it’s too close to the truth. The message is clear though, beer or soda, don’t get between a drinker and his drink.

Anyway the first time I saw that ad I thought now there’s relationship that’s going to last. You have to draw the line somewhere, right? You’ve got to have some boundaries. My father told me that relationships are 60/40. Sometimes you’re 60, sometimes you’re 40.

Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give then to receive,” but does anybody really believe that? We all know life is a lot of give and take. It’s just that taking has been tainted. And I don’t think it’s because we’d rather give than receive. I think it’s because we want people to think that everything that we are, everything we stand for, everything we’ve fought so hard for – all these things – we’d like it if people thought that, that is somehow self-generated. We did it the old fashioned way – we did it ourselves.

In his letter to the church in Corinth Paul says, “Who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?”

In Eugene Peterson’s translation of the New Testament entitled “The Message,” this same passage reads, “For who do you know who really knows you, knows your heart? And even if they did, is there anything they would discover in you that you could take credit for? Isn’t everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God?”

When First Church member, Amy Parham, delivered her baby daughter she said in the Austin magazine Parent: Wise that she knew on some level that her child was going to have Down Syndrome. Yet as the article she wrote attests their so-called burden has blossomed and continues to blossom because her daughter, Ava Grace, will never stop giving.

When I worked at Old City Park in Dallas I was the Wagonmaster. My job was to care for two Mammoth Jackstock Donkeys and drive a wagon around that was pulled by them. One day a group of children with Down syndrome visited the park. One boy about ten years old walked right up to me and said, “You look like my granddad.” Then, he threw his arms around me held me close. What I felt at that moment was loved, totally and absolute unconditional love. I was his granddad and he was my grandson.

Dr. Loehr told me after my first sermon that Amy Parham and her husband, Sean, had liked the dog story – where when one dog gets scratched all dogs wag their tails. They told Dr. Loehr that when Ava sees them hugging and kissing her older brother Reid, Ava Grace laughs and claps her hands.

For who do you know who really knows you – knows your heart?

Then there’s “The Gift of the Magi,” the short story about the loving couple who want to give each other something special for Christmas. She cuts off her long hair and sells it to a wig maker so that she can buy him a gold chain for his pocket watch. He sells his gold watch so that he can buy her an ivory comb for her lovely hair. The irony of these gifts and the awkward day they must have had afterwards now occurs to me. . He has a gold watch chain, but no watch. She has a beautiful ivory comb that won’t stay in her short hair.

The point is; sometimes we love so much that we give more than we can afford. And it’s not a matter of money; it’s a matter of realizing that giving up who you are is in a very real sense counterproductive to being in a relationship. I’m thinking now of the woman who perhaps hadn’t cut her hair since she was a child, giving up something so precious, and so much a part of who she was to buy an accoutrement, a gold watch chain for a watch that is no longer owned by her husband. And the husband, the watch could have been an heirloom – his grandfather’s gold watch – something that had been in the family for years. Giving up who you are can come back on us as resentment – we can end up resenting what we have given because what we have given is too much, we’ve stepped over the line, crossed the border between who we are and who the other person is. Boundaries have got to be a part of vital loving relationships.

And even if they did (know you, know your heart) is there anything they would discover in you that you could take credit for?

A sesshin is an intensive period of Zen Buddhist meditation. No speaking for days. I cooked for one such sesshin and my teacher’s wife, Marie, was in charge of reheating what I had precooked and frozen. She was really worried she wasn’t going to repair the meal properly. That’s what my father used to say to my mother when she reheated leftovers, “Darling, you really know how to repair a meal.” During a break I went ahead and took care of what had to be done to the food. As I filed back into the Zendo – the place where we all sit together -Marie was already on her cushion. I slipped her a note. She later told me that, that note should be the motto of the sangha, the community. Without thinking, I had written.

“Don’t worry. It’s all been taken care of.”

Please just for a moment let’s all release the death grip we have on our reality and imagine that everything is fine – everything is free, that there is nothing that needs be done but – yes, there is a “but.”

The reason it’s hard to receive is that gifts are to be used. We must use what we have been given. When we are gifted, when we are talented there remains the question are our talents, our gifts, what matters deeply in our hearts are these things a part of our life, a part of what we do and who we are and if not, then “Who are we?”

Isn’t everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from blank?

You fill in the blank. Doesn’t matter really who or what gave them – it’s not the giving that’s useful, it’s the gifts that work the miracles. And it all goes in a circle. You give and it creates a vacuum. Your heart expands, making you able to receive and your heart is full and it overflows – so, you give again.

There is a wonderful story from the book entitled Kitchen Table Wisdom by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. It tells of a young man who was a football star in high school and college until he developed a condition that required his right leg above the knee to be removed. The operation saved his life, but in another sense ended the life he had known. No more girls, and no more stardom. He took to what young men take to when confronted with seemingly impassable situations in life, drink, drugs, depression and fast cars. After his second wreck in one of those fast cars he was referred to Dr. Remen.

He was angry with everyone who was whole, and angry with the doctors who had taken his leg. He didn’t want to talk about his anger and so she encouraged him to draw for her. He took the box of crayons and drew the outline of a vase. Then, down the middle of the vase he drew a huge crack. He emphasized the crack by going over and over it until he had ripped the paper.

On subsequent visits to her office the young man began bringing in newspaper articles about young people who had lost limbs, vision and mobility in tragic accidents. His emphasis was on the fact that no one really knew what these people needed. Finally, after collecting a lot of these articles she asked him if he would like to do something about these people. At first he said no, but before he left the office he had recanted and said yes, he would like to do something. It was no trouble at all getting the teaching hospital she worked at to find people with injuries as life limiting as his, and he began visiting people like himself. He would return from those visits amazed – amazed that he had been able to reach out – reach people that the doctors hadn’t been able to help.

Finally, it became a sort of ministry for him. Then, one day he was sent to the room of a young woman – 21 years of age – who had had a radical mastectomy. She laid on her bed with her eyes closed and refused to either open her eyes or talk to him. He tried just about every way he knew to get to her, even becoming angry at one point and saying things that only someone in his condition could have said to someone in hers. He had worn shorts that day to make it obvious that he had a false leg. Finally, he unstrapped the leg and let it fall to the floor with a loud thud. Her eyes popped open and she saw him for the first time. There was rock and roll music playing in the background, so he began snapping his fingers to the beat, laughing and hopping around the room. She watched in amazement, then burst into laughter herself. Through her laughter she said, “Fella, if you can dance maybe I can sing.”

She began visiting people in the hospital with him, and eventually became his bride. We can’t pick out those that we love; quite unexpectedly they are presented to us.

This is how Dr. Remen ended the story, “Suffering is intimately connected to wholeness. The power in suffering to promote integrity is not only a Christian belief, it has been a part of almost every religious tradition – Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the freedom of loving and serving life.”

The last time Dr. Remen saw this young man in her office, she pulled out his file and showed him the drawing he had done of the broken vase. “It’s not finished,” he said. She handed him the drawing and the box of crayons. He took the yellow crayon and made heavy lines of gold streaming and radiating from the blackened and torn crack in the vase, then he added, “This is where the light comes through.”

There are times in life when we offer gifts to people, and we don’t even know that we are doing so. I attended the 9th grade in Japan. Years later I ran into a young woman who was in my 9th grade class. She was glad to see me, and wanted to thank me for encouraging her in her present vocation. She was a veterinarian. She went into great detail about what I had said to her one afternoon that had convinced her that she should work with animals the rest of her life. Honestly, I did not remember that conversation and still don’t remember it.

The Buddhists say that sometimes a single word can be a bridge for someone.

I have after preaching been astonished when people come up to me and tell me what they heard me say. There are times when what they have heard is what they needed to hear, but in no way did it resemble anything I’d said.

The upshot of all this is that knowingly and unknowingly we can be agents of change for people. We can say something that means very little to us, but those words can be the very thing that person needs to hear at that particular moment in time. I think a lot more of this goes on than we realize. It’s not spooky. It’s not supernatural; it simply points to the randomness with which the human mind works.

Conclusion: “You can’t always get what you want – you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might – you just might get what you need.” (Rolling Stones)

Life is a lot like sailing. My apologies for this sounding like, Forest Gump again. My stepfather, a Marine Major, Bob Bonham-Dittmar, a good Unitarian Agnostic, taught me how to sail.

In sailing when you want to get from point A to point B you can’t just point your boat toward point B and push “go.” No, there’s a little thing called the wind, which “blows where it chooses.” You can make all the plans in the world, ask all the questions you want, be seen with all the right people, be where it’s happening whenever it’s happening, chart all the courses you want, but if you ain’t got wind in your sails, you ain’t got nothing.

In sailing using the wind is called tacking. You zigzag against the wind, back and forth, your goal always in mind, but your direction often seemingly away from your destination. To learn to tack in life you have to become mindful of your surroundings – aware of what you have been given and what has been taken away. As the existential philosopher and novelist, Albert Camus once said, “That which blocks my way makes me travel along it.”

Who among us can command the wind, who make happen what they want to happen when they want it to happen, who can change the past, or shape the future? Not a one. But as humans filled with the spirit of being human we have an affinity with the wind. “The wind blows where it chooses,” I said that earlier and here’s the rest of that quote from the Gospel of John, “The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit,” and that, my friends, is each and every one of us. (John 3:8 NRSV)

And for those humanists in the congregation this Spirit is akin to the soul as defined by the theologian Paul Tillich. Remember I preached on this in October. Tillich says the spirit/soul is a principle of movement – it is the principle of movement which moves the stars, which moves the animals, which moves the world so all these have spirit/soul. There’s nothing otherworldly about this Spirit, it’s as empirically real as the good earth we stand on.

When thinking of the curves that the world can throw us I couldn’t help but think of the psychotherapist, Viktor Frankl.

On September the 3rd 1997 Viktor E. Frankl, author of the landmark book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and one of the last great psychotherapists died at the age of 92.

Frankl survived the Holocaust, even though he was in four Nazi death camps including Auschwitz from 1942-45, but his parents and other members of his family died in the concentration camps – wiped out. During — and partly because of — his suffering, Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy.

At the core of this therapy is the belief that humanity’s primary motivational force is the search for meaning

I’m going to read four quotes from Man’s Search for Meaning. Think not only about the words, but also about the fact that the man who wrote these words had suffered such agony – the loss of his family, the daily threat of death, living in a place that stunk to high heaven and surely must have resembled hell.

“What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”

“The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.”

And here’s the last one: “Everything can be taken from a person but the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Speaking of choosing one’s own attitude and way, that reminds me of the Jewish story of a man who was always down on his luck, always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, and in times past this man would have been called the village idiot. One morning he got up and fixed himself some buttered bread for breakfast. On his way to the table he dropped the bread, and it landed butter side up! He ran to see the Rabbi and told him that he was sure his luck was about to change. The Rabbi said he would consult with the elders of the synagogue. The next morning the man got up and buttered himself another piece of bread and dropped that one on the way to the breakfast table. It also landed butter side up! He ran to the Rabbi’s house and told him of this second auspicious occurrence. The Rabbi called the elders together and they met. The man paced outside the synagogue waiting for word from the elders. Finally, the Rabbi came out. “We’ve decided that you buttered your bread on the wrong side.”

There will always be those in authority who are willing to tell you that you are buttering your bread on the wrong side. Don’t you believe it! For the Jews of the 30’s and 40’s the overall dominant cultural position in Germany was that they were vermin and should be removed from the society. Survivors like Frankl help us remember that no matter what the dominant culture says, no matter what the dominant culture believes, no matter what the dominant culture does – there is a haven known as the right to choose one’s own attitude toward one’s own life.

More recently, in our own culture on December the 1st 1955 Sister Rosa Parks decided that she knew which side of the bread the butter was on when she refused to get up and give her seat on the bus to a white person. As the Neville Brothers sang in their 1989 release entitled, “Yellow Moon,” “Thank you Miss Rosa, you were the spark, That started our freedom movement, Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.” Rosa Parks died this past Monday evening. She was 92.

You and I have the Spirit to move with just about anything that moves, we can go with the flow. We can also go against the flow for we have learned to tack in this life. There are no roadblocks, just scenic detours, and who knows, a detour may take you where you were ultimately headed all along. We’re being taught lessons every day and that which once frightened us may, by and by, when we’ve gotten past the shock of the initial experience, lift our hearts to a place of new meaning.