Resilience, Courage, and Love: Three Sparks to Set the World on Fire
Sunday, January 19, 2024
Here was the blurb for this service, which was delayed two weeks due to weather and was intended to be on the first Sunday of the month. Instead it was on the third Sunday. “As we ring in the New Year, we begin again in love the work of justice and of being the progressive religious community the world needs us to be. The Fire Communion service will help mark the beginning of our next chapter of shared ministry, where we will live into our strategic plan we call Imagine 2030. Come one and all as we rekindle a fire of commitment for the resilience, courage, and love we will need for whatever lies ahead.”
Opening Words — “Bold and Courageous Together” by Rev. Erika Hewitt
Lin:
The word courage comes from the Latin cor, which means heart. According to poet Mark Nepo, the original use of the word courage meant to stand by one’s core: a “striking concept that reinforces the belief found in almost all traditions that living from the Center is what enables us to face whatever life has to offer.”
Nic:
To “encourage” means to hearten; to impart strength and confidence. This is our work, as a religious community: to encourage one another; to be bold in engaging the world around us, as well as what scares us internally; to give one another the confidence and heart to live as fully as possible.
Lin:
With full hearts,
we affirm our relationships with one another;
we recognize our agency and our connective power;
and we accept our responsibility to be bold and courageous.
Reading — “Love Demands Courage” by Rev. Patty Willis
When you fell in love
Did the Earth move beneath you?
Or did love surround you
Slowly like gentle waves
You hardly noticed until
They reached your heart?
In others’ stories,
We listen for our own
Of love that lasted
Sixty years
Or five months
Or three days.
Have you waited
As I have
For someone to call?
Or did you
Wait by the phone,
Picking it up
Putting it down
And picking it up again?
Have you stood next
To your beloved,
Angry and tired
And thinking,
If you say, “I am sorry,” first,
I will say it, too?
Have you wondered
If your heart could
Bear the grief of
Your beloved’s passing?
Love demands courage
Loving sometimes takes
All that we have.
Whether you are single
Or part of a pair.
Newly in love
Or in love for so long
You cannot remember
Love demands courage
Loving sometimes takes
All that we have.
Reading — “A Recipe for Resilience” by Rev. Margaret Weis
This recipe has been tweaked over time, so adjust as necessary.
Sometimes it yields more servings than anticipated.
Sometimes it needs a bit more of this ingredient or that.
It comes from generations who have gone before me, and I’ve added my own flavor along the way.
A Recipe for Resilience
One part courage
Two parts tears of failure and doubt
One part deep listening
One part each of both silence and laughter
A dash of trust
A pinch of wonder
A heaping scoop of naps and snacks
In a separate bowl, mix together family, friends, and those who challenge you to be your best self, those with whom you disagree.
Add slowly to the larger pot, add a bay leaf for… well, whatever it is bay leaves do, and let simmer for as long as you need (which is often longer than you realize or anticipate).
Keep the heat at an even temperature—hot enough to cook throughout, but not so hot it burns the bottom.
Can be served at room temperature, warm, or even cold if necessary.
Serve alongside your favorite soft blanket, dog, cat, or other soft item.
Make often,
Share with others,
Hold onto the leftovers—you’ll need them after a long day that challenges your soul.
Sermon — Resilience, Courage, and Love: Three Sparks to Set the World on Fire
In a couple weeks, I will begin my second semester of the Doctor of Ministry program at Meadville Lombard Theological School. Over the next few months, I'll be taking two classes. So if you're seeing me with a book, it might be from one of those two classes.
The first is Global Religions and Pursuing the Reading List, Perusing the Reading List and Assignments. I'm very much looking forward to the challenge and learning. It will invite within me and my classmates.
I hope to share my learning with all of you. Maybe we could do a periodic class and discussion group to help us as we continue to foster our interfaith partnerships. The knowledge and vision we have for the future.
The second class is called Social Change Leadership. Social Change Leadership. And this course feels exceptionally timely with all of the change and uncertainty we face in society today.
The books and essays assigned are rigorous and diverse in scope and viewpoint. For example, one book, I've decided to just get a jumpstart on is titled, Liberating Spiritualities. And the subtitle is Reimagining Faith in the Americas by Dr. Christopher Tires.
Interestingly, the name of the author sounded so familiar that it took me a while to realize that I did know him. Fifteen years ago, he was on faculty in the Religious Studies Department at DePaul University, and I was the student representative to the department. Anyway, I started reading the book, which while only being a few pages in, has already offered wisdom and guidance for our present situation.
In the introduction toward a liberating spirituality, he tackles the term, and often too limited an interpretation that we have of spirituality. I know many of us struggle with the term spirituality, and that's okay. He offers some great insight I found appealing, and maybe you will too. He writes that instead of approaching the concept from a dogmatic perspective, he encourages us to think about it more anthropologically, and more plainly, really, as a quality of experience, spirituality. From a more humanistic, that resonates with many of you, perspective, he says, spirituality is about our lived experience.
And by that, he means our actions, and our experiences of those actions and reactions, and all these experiences in life. One of the authors, he lifts up to articulate this as Ronald Rolheiser, who uses a helpful image on our Fire Communion Sunday. He writes this, quote, “long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about that fire that burns within us. What do we do with the fire? How do we channel it? Is our spirituality. Thus we all have a spirituality, whether we want one or not, whether we are religious or not, irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by an explicit religious idea. We act in ways that leave us healthy and unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality.”
I lift up this quote because if we are to face the challenges that are to come, if we are to be the beacon of hope, the world needs us to be, then we must face the fire within each of us. Honor its presence, feel its heat, consider what we will do to feed it, and ensure it does not go out. That unique spirituality within you, like our individual physicality, mentality, emotionality, etc. is a part of what makes you, pun, most certainly, intended. For each week we kindle the chalice, we light candles of joy and sorrow, and collectively, hopefully, reignite the light within our sacred selves, this special community, and our shared world of which we are all stewards. When we kindle it, or when we sing Spirit of Life, or when we extinguish the chalice, we are indeed tending to the existential and essential beauty of all life, within, among, and beyond us.
And thus, while we rest for a moment on this threshold of uncertainty, perhaps dread, we would do well to pause to consider our flames, individually, and our shared light. I alluded earlier to our children, I think besides oxygen, our beacon of hope as Unitarian Universalist shines brightly with the addition of three essential elements, resilience, courage, and love. Now, it may seem like I just am obsessed with circle imagery, this is a part of an acronym I'm exploring, CIRCLE, C-I-R-C-L-E, cultivating interfaith, resilience, courage, and love for everyone.
I may just be obsessed with circles, but you know, there's something that's helpful about the circles in our lives, including this one. In this case, I really think there is something to each of those, courage, or resilience, courage, and love for us to explore. So let me try in our brief time remaining to talk about each.
Keeping with the metaphor of fire, resilience to me is our work of keeping the fire within, among, and beyond us lit by any means necessary. Whether it is a flickering flame of hope, the fire of commitment or a beacon of love and justice, we seek to keep alive, we must tend to the adverse conditions in which we live.
Fascism, misogyny, white Christian nationalism, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, unregulated capitalism, and the list goes on, are all like wet blankets, covering the sticks and logs we hope to use to keep alive the spirit of life we all share. You ever tried getting the fire going with wet materials? It isn't easy, and it leads to both frustration and worse hopelessness that warmth will ever come again. What's the point? Let's pack up camp. Let's head back home. But resilience is essential for us to find resourceful ways to foster warmth and tend the fire in our hearts and community, despite the many forces of oppression that surround us.
You may be asking, from where doth our resilience come? Well, let's turn to our reading. A recipe for resilience, which is homework. Now, some of this is a little playful, but a lot of it has some deeper truths underneath it. So it says, here we go. One part courage. So here's the second word. We've already got an allusion to the need for courage. Two parts, tears of failure and doubt. Now, this is essential. You don't understand resilience if you don't know that there's a possibility of failure. You have failed before. We have all failed before, and we honor that in knowing that much more is at stake. So we look for resilience in the face of those tears of failure and doubt.
And then it goes in to deep listening. How many of you have been in a chalice circle here? Or how many of you have felt in other groups you've been in that you or outside of this community that this idea of deep listening has been something that I better practice that. If I'm going to be in a relationship or have a child or have a family member or a co-worker, deep listening, without that, the wet blanket is wetter and heavier than ever. Trust requires trust. You've heard the phrase, move at the speed of trust. That is essential and critical within this community and with our interfaith partners and our partners off the campus. Wonder, which we cultivate every month or every week. And lots of naps and snacks. Now, some people might say, there's the humor, naps and snacks, but we tricked you. That's actually one of the most profound ingredients in this whole thing. We read that book or I read that book and some of us talked about this book called Rest as Resistance.
But the nap ministry, this African American woman started in Atlanta, I believe, that really encouraged the care that is necessary for activists and social justice and leaders in our community to really have an agenda of rest and renewal, as not if we get to it, but as essential. And snacks, when we gather around snacks, oh boy, that's where that bonding and that sharing of warmth can come from most. And the last thing I wanted to name about this recipe for resilience is that it says that it has been tweaked over time.
You've all been through resilient, challenging times in the past, and you bring with you your recipe for resilience that will be needed to be shared and compared and we need to find new ways of considering what a bay leaf does, or how much we need to add of this or that. And that's okay, that challenges when we want to think of black and white binary, right and wrong, but there's more complexity here. And I think that's critical.
So we have resilience. Courage is our second piece. And we know that it is required in resilience, but it is also something that has to do with love. Love demands courage was our second reading. And when I talk about love and courage, and we're going to be diving way more deeply into love, in February, you might have seen, I think I posted it somewhere that we're going to do a four-part series starting February 9th on love, but in a much less light and fluffy, but going deeper into what it means for us to center love in our community and in Unitarian Universalism. But courage for me, which Mark Nepo talks about, is really where I think we go from having love to knowing how to use it in the face of those oppositions.
It's finding that strength, that capacity to stand in the face of those adversities. I taught you a song, gosh, I don't know when it was, in October or November that goes, “Courage, my friends, you do not walk alone. We will walk with you and sing your spirit home.” Do you remember this? It was like call and response. I want to teach it again because I think it'll help my point.
So it's very simple. I say the line, you just say the exact same thing. Okay?
“Courage, courage
my friends, my friends
you do not walk alone.
We will we will
walk with you walk with you
and sing your spirit home.”
So I think we're resilience is in the face of challenge or adversity. Courage comes in the face of uncertainty. It comes in the face of uncertainty, of not knowing. And the fear we might face of not knowing not only what to do or how to do it, but what will happen once we do it. And that requires us to come together and build these fires of warmth and love and programs and spaces for our children and youth. All of us, all of us together, creating these spaces where we can walk together and know that we are not alone.
That even in our uncertainty, we will walk with you and sing our spirits home. So love, love is the spirit of this church. Someone once wrote William Blake, love is the spirit of this church and the search for truth is its sacrament.
All of our work here is about love. This community is about love, and yet so much of our love in this world feels unreceived by the world beyond these walls. Even here sometimes, sometimes it might feel, I got too much love to give and I don't know how much to share. Maybe I'm more extroverted or introverted, or I'm introverted, but I also am very emotionally sensitive. And how much space is there for me to be that full loving present self. But regardless of all of our personality traits, there is so much love holding us here in this community.
Holding not only us in this community, our flame in this community, our Unitarian Universalist tradition of hundreds of years, of loving, courageous, and resilient people, but also our nation, and then other nations in this nation, and all of the work beyond these walls, to Palestine, to Israel, to all the spaces where love is so needed in these times. A love is present and holds us there, and it doesn't require you to analyze beyond allowing that holding to be present. It could be in the songs we sing, the lights we kindle, the friendship we're cultivating, the person sitting beside us, to feel a presence beside you, regardless of any transcendent sense of what might be more.
We know that that love is within us, among us, and beyond us. And so, for where we are going to how we hope to set the world on fire with our love and our courage and our resilience, love will surely be a part of that. Now, this song, I don't think I've taught you before, but I got into a song kick when I was working for this week and decided, well, I'm going to do that. Now, it's called “There is a Love.” Maybe I did sing this. I don't know. But it's a good one, and I think we should continue to expand our wonderful songs that we sing, because we're all a part of the choir. Just some sing on Sundays and some come on Wednesdays, but more the merrier. It's called There is a Love.
I'm going to sing it first, and then I'll teach it to you. It goes like this.
There is a love holding me.
There is a love holding all that I love.
There is a love holding all.
We rest in this love.
You want to try that?
If we are to rest in this love, there are things we must let down, put down, get out of our pockets, take out of our hearts, that have been keeping us damp and unkindly. And I believe we all know that. Maybe it started in November, maybe it started much earlier. There's been things that have just been making it hard to get this flame lit, get our flame restarted, rekindled. The weather doesn't help, but you can't blame it all on the weather. I'm so glad.
I mean, I'm glad everyone's safe. I hope everyone's safe. But the weather is not the only thing that would keep us from coming today. There are other things deep within us that we need to put down so that our hearts can come up. And so that's why we're on the Fire Communion Service, and we do this every year, well, for the second year. So hopefully, I'll be able to say that its tradition with more courage next year.
Every year. The first Sunday of the year, third Sunday this year, we come together to burn away that which is needed so that we can be a beacon of hope or a light of life and love to others, spirit of life and love to our wider community. Today, in your order of service, you should have gotten a little piece of paper.
And maybe there's a pencil in a seat near you, and if not, there might be some extra pencils in the back that you can raise your hand for. Burning away something, whether that's in a Sunday service or at your campground, there's something very cathartic about it. But it's so necessary to not just throw it in, but to watch it burn.
And so after the service today, those who wish, five minutes or so afterwards, I'm going to gather right outside by the tree, that's not right under the tree, and we're going to have a chance to set a blaze, what will be written down in a moment. And because we've been talking about resilience, courage, and love, what might be burning away today could relate to any of those three.
But ultimately, I think it is, whether it is the adverse reality you want to burn away—fascism, misogyny, transphobia—whether it's the thing that's preventing you from finding courage in your life, perhaps it's a fear you're experiencing, or perhaps it's something else. And again, the burning away is not a... If you write a person's name on this, this is not like an effigy or something. This is a relationship or something you're wanting to tend. You're wanting to liberate. Remember Liberating Spirituality is the name of that book. Dealing with that flame is about liberating us to be able to deal with that flame in a healthier way.
So whatever is blocking you from having the resilience, courage, and love in your life here, the day before Martin Luther King Day, the day before the inauguration, as we move into this year of uncertainty, I invite you to write that down. And if you like writing a word and just summing up in a word, great. If you like writing a longer story, great.
This is for you. After the service, as I said, I'll collect them on your way out, if that's probably an organized way to do this. And then if you want to join me, grab a coat or not, and come out and we'll have our fire communion outside afterwards.
But know that whether this is a very top of mind thing that you're writing down or you're still struggling a little bit to it, this is an ongoing ceremony, your life. And there are moments that you can burn away things and pick up new things and find a new friend to help tend the fire. All of you can collectively do this work of resilience, courage and love day in and day out.
And I hope that this is a place that makes that work a little easier.
You make it easier for me, I know that. I'm grateful for all of you on this Fire Communion Sunday for the warmth that we will kindle, have kindled and will continue to kindle in the days to come.
May it be so. Amen.
Benediction — “Take Courage Friends” by Rev. Wayne Arnason
Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.