A Right Way to be Wrong
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 31, 2021
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year?
If so you are partaking in a practice stretching back thousands of years. For history tells us New Year’s resolutions have their origin in ancient Babylon where the new year was observed in March, not January, to coincide with the planting of crops. This was also the time they crowned or pledged loyalty anew to their King and promised to their deities to make good on their debts and return things borrowed. Inspired by scripture and following the lunisolar calendar, Judaism adopted the New Year’s observances of reflection and atonement known as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Under Julius Caesar the Romans moved New Years to January, named after the god Janus, whose two faces were understood to look back into the past and forward into the future. To honor this god, the Romans offered sacrifices and made promises of good behavior in the coming year. Later, the early Christians adopted a New Year’s practice of looking back at past mistakes and resolving to do better going forward.
Although its origin is religious, the New Year’s resolution is largely a secular undertaking today made by individuals. Still, according to an article I recently read in a health publication, researchers found approximately one-half of Americans make a New Year’s resolution annually. That same research shows that less than ten percent of those who make them stick with their resolutions for more than a couple of months.
There are of course a lot of reasons we might not stick to our resolutions. We aimed too high. We hit unexpected, if not insurmountable obstacles. Or we were never really that committed to begin with and so they just kind of fizzle out.
That last reason seems, upon reflection, to be what doomed most of the New Year’s resolutions I’ve made over the years. For me making a New Year’s resolution meant having to come up with something I thought I wanted or needed to do, usually with some vague aim toward self-improvement. And to be honest, I’m not that great at coming up with those kinds of things under pressure so to speak or committing to them when I do.
Yet when I reflect on my life, I see a person who has grown and changed in ways that I couldn’t possibly have planned. Growth and change that has occurred even in the absence or failure of annual resolutions deliberately made. And then it hit me. Maybe the best resolutions are ones I don’t make; but ones I receive. Which is to say the most impactful moments of growth and change in my life have occurred not as a result of a resolution to change or grow that I’ve made, but by accepting those resolutions that have shown up in my life.
There was the time, just around the age of 20 when a stint in the hospital for depression introduced me to people and to lives lived very differently from what I knew. There was an elderly woman without visitors. A young man without a home to go when he got out. Several people on welfare. There were men and women, young and old, with addictions to alcohol and a dizzying array of drugs. A mother who had to give up her child and adults who were themselves given up by their parents long ago or their adult children more recently.
The writer Anais Nin said, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” And indeed, what I saw, at first, were people I had been told or warned about growing up. People I had be taught, largely indirectly, growing up were people to be pitied, scorned or avoided, whose problems were moral failings, or the result of poor or dumb decisions, laziness, which is to say, a fateful, wrong choice, or more bluntly, largely their fault.
But when I listened to and talked with many of these very people during my stay the things I had been taught, learned, and came to assume about people “like” them didn’t really match the lives I heard about, whose circumstances and experiences were far more varied than imaginable from outward appearance. Sure, I could, for some of them, point to something in their story or plans that loosely fit a stereotype or upon which a flimsy case could be made to reinforce some of what I had been taught. It’s not like a light shone down from heaven and I learned they were all angels. Instead, I learned they were quite human, wonderfully and woefully, human. And equally important, I learned so was I. Indeed, more woefully so than I had ever imagined.
Thus began a gradual shift from a certain closed or narrow mindedness that I had not really been very conscious of at all up until that point.
Nowadays, thanks to the perpetuation of some truly awful theology, doctrine and attendant behavior, the last thing people associate religion, and especially Christianity with, is open mindedness. Yet, it is there, albeit disguised. In the Gospel of Mark, prior to the start of Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist appears calling people to, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Even though we’re on Zoom and most of you have your mics muted, I can imagine your groans at hearing the word repent. But here repent is not as bad as it sounds. As the late Jesus scholar Marcus Borg notes, the Greek word translated as repent in the gospel is metanoia, which means to go above or beyond the mind you have. Thus we’re called not to introspective guilt and hand wringing over wrongdoing, but to a more expansive view, beyond our habitual mind, to see and know differently.
It is fair to say the author of Mark’s gospel knew what he was doing. Like the god in our first reading this morning, rejected by the seeker because he didn’t fit the seeker’s notions of who or what God is or could be, the Jesus who shows up later in the gospel as an itinerant peasant preacher who is eventually executed by the state is a far cry from the powerful, triumphant Messiah people expected. Thus he was largely rejected, as he is today, including by some who claim to follow him.
When our expectations or preconceived notions are challenged we might resolve to repent, to go beyond the mind we have to know and see differently. And isn’t that one of the spiritual tasks implicit in the Unitarian Universalist principle to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part?
Some years later in my first semester at seminary, I found myself discussing a story from the Hebrew Bible with a classmate. It soon became clear something was amiss, at which point I said to my classmate something like, “I understand this story as metaphor. It sounds like you understand it literally.” To which she replied, “Yes, I do.” adding, “If these stories aren’t literally true, then my whole faith would collapse.” I don’t remember what I said after she said that, but I’m not sure I needed to say anything as my face probably said it all. I was shocked. To my knowledge I had never met a religious fundamentalist before.
Over the next several weeks I unconsciously constructed, in my mind a, shall we say, unflattering profile of this person based on that discussion of a biblical story. Whenever she spoke in class, I smugly predicted in my mind what she was going to say about the topic at hand and I was right every time.
And so I was completely unprepared when she stopped me in the hall one day to ask if the red AIDS ribbon I wore on my jacket was for someone in particular. I told her no, explaining that it I wore it in general solidarity with AIDS sufferers. As I began to walk away, she said, in a soft voice, “I’m sorry, by the way.” Not knowing what she meant, I turned and asked, “For what?”
Now this was back in 2006 and in November of that year, voters in the state of Virginia ratified a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage there.
And as it turned out my fundamentalist classmate whose views by now I was sure I knew so well was from Virginia. “I’m sorry for the vote in Virginia”, she told me. “It’s wrong and embarrassing.” I was as shocked hearing this from her as I was the day I heard her affirm her literal belief of the bible story we discussed.
She went on to tell me she had urged her pastor in Virginia not to support the ban but to speak against it and that she herself traveled home to vote against it. Her words left me speechless. I managed to squeak a thank you out from underneath the weight of the shame I felt inside for making a caricature of her.
I did not share her faith, but in that moment she showed me she practiced the spirit of hers more faithfully than I did mine.
Religious stories often feature teachers in disguise. In Buddhism these are usually people who rub you the wrong way or push your buttons, so to speak, or people you might easily dismiss or disregard for any number of reasons, their theology, political views, education level, social class and so on. And it’s not that these potential teachers are secretly all good, all wise, or otherwise perfect. They are, like all of us, human to a fault. In this they are like mirrors, revealing to us something we’re not seeing about ourselves. And like the guru in our second reading these teachers expose our ignorance, offering a chance for us to turn things around.
In our reading the guru tells the distraught monk his community is faltering because they are ignorant of the Messiah’s presence among them, a nod to the teaching in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus instructs, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Unsure of who among them is the Messiah, they resolve to treat everyone as if they were he. Soon, the community is again flourishing.
Unitarian Universalism doesn’t teach that a savior or god incarnate lives among us, but we do covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people. Which, at the very least, asks we resolve not to reduce people to caricatures in our minds or our hearts, nor treat them as such by our speech and actions. Something increasingly difficult in this time of hyper-polarization. Accepted and practiced with relative ease when applied to those who look and assume think like we do, the real challenge and power of Unitarian Universalism’s first principle is revealed when we encounter those whom we find hard to embrace for any number of reasons. Indeed, it reveals itself, at its core, as a call to repent, to go beyond our defensive, default setting of mind that we might see and know the world and each other anew.
We are both wonderful and woeful creatures. Our woefulness, characterized by deeply embedded habits of the mind, guarantees we will be wrong about a lot in our lives including, not infrequently, how we see and relate to others. Part of what makes us wonderful is our capacity to break with the habits of mind which keep us from seeing and living in a better world. A habit we might more readily break not by making annual resolutions to do so, but by receiving them as they come to us throughout our lives, like teachers in disguise instructing us in a right way to be wrong. Namely, to go beyond the mind we have that we might awaken to a new dawn. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 31, 2021
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year?
If so you are partaking in a practice stretching back thousands of years. For history tells us New Year’s resolutions have their origin in ancient Babylon where the new year was observed in March, not January, to coincide with the planting of crops. This was also the time they crowned or pledged loyalty anew to their King and promised to their deities to make good on their debts and return things borrowed. Inspired by scripture and following the lunisolar calendar, Judaism adopted the New Year’s observances of reflection and atonement known as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Under Julius Caesar the Romans moved New Years to January, named after the god Janus, whose two faces were understood to look back into the past and forward into the future. To honor this god, the Romans offered sacrifices and made promises of good behavior in the coming year. Later, the early Christians adopted a New Year’s practice of looking back at past mistakes and resolving to do better going forward.
Although its origin is religious, the New Year’s resolution is largely a secular undertaking today made by individuals. Still, according to an article I recently read in a health publication, researchers found approximately one-half of Americans make a New Year’s resolution annually. That same research shows that less than ten percent of those who make them stick with their resolutions for more than a couple of months.
There are of course a lot of reasons we might not stick to our resolutions. We aimed too high. We hit unexpected, if not insurmountable obstacles. Or we were never really that committed to begin with and so they just kind of fizzle out.
That last reason seems, upon reflection, to be what doomed most of the New Year’s resolutions I’ve made over the years. For me making a New Year’s resolution meant having to come up with something I thought I wanted or needed to do, usually with some vague aim toward self-improvement. And to be honest, I’m not that great at coming up with those kinds of things under pressure so to speak or committing to them when I do.
Yet when I reflect on my life, I see a person who has grown and changed in ways that I couldn’t possibly have planned. Growth and change that has occurred even in the absence or failure of annual resolutions deliberately made. And then it hit me. Maybe the best resolutions are ones I don’t make; but ones I receive. Which is to say the most impactful moments of growth and change in my life have occurred not as a result of a resolution to change or grow that I’ve made, but by accepting those resolutions that have shown up in my life.
There was the time, just around the age of 20 when a stint in the hospital for depression introduced me to people and to lives lived very differently from what I knew. There was an elderly woman without visitors. A young man without a home to go when he got out. Several people on welfare. There were men and women, young and old, with addictions to alcohol and a dizzying array of drugs. A mother who had to give up her child and adults who were themselves given up by their parents long ago or their adult children more recently.
The writer Anais Nin said, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” And indeed, what I saw, at first, were people I had been told or warned about growing up. People I had be taught, largely indirectly, growing up were people to be pitied, scorned or avoided, whose problems were moral failings, or the result of poor or dumb decisions, laziness, which is to say, a fateful, wrong choice, or more bluntly, largely their fault.
But when I listened to and talked with many of these very people during my stay the things I had been taught, learned, and came to assume about people “like” them didn’t really match the lives I heard about, whose circumstances and experiences were far more varied than imaginable from outward appearance. Sure, I could, for some of them, point to something in their story or plans that loosely fit a stereotype or upon which a flimsy case could be made to reinforce some of what I had been taught. It’s not like a light shone down from heaven and I learned they were all angels. Instead, I learned they were quite human, wonderfully and woefully, human. And equally important, I learned so was I. Indeed, more woefully so than I had ever imagined.
Thus began a gradual shift from a certain closed or narrow mindedness that I had not really been very conscious of at all up until that point.
Nowadays, thanks to the perpetuation of some truly awful theology, doctrine and attendant behavior, the last thing people associate religion, and especially Christianity with, is open mindedness. Yet, it is there, albeit disguised. In the Gospel of Mark, prior to the start of Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist appears calling people to, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Even though we’re on Zoom and most of you have your mics muted, I can imagine your groans at hearing the word repent. But here repent is not as bad as it sounds. As the late Jesus scholar Marcus Borg notes, the Greek word translated as repent in the gospel is metanoia, which means to go above or beyond the mind you have. Thus we’re called not to introspective guilt and hand wringing over wrongdoing, but to a more expansive view, beyond our habitual mind, to see and know differently.
It is fair to say the author of Mark’s gospel knew what he was doing. Like the god in our first reading this morning, rejected by the seeker because he didn’t fit the seeker’s notions of who or what God is or could be, the Jesus who shows up later in the gospel as an itinerant peasant preacher who is eventually executed by the state is a far cry from the powerful, triumphant Messiah people expected. Thus he was largely rejected, as he is today, including by some who claim to follow him.
When our expectations or preconceived notions are challenged we might resolve to repent, to go beyond the mind we have to know and see differently. And isn’t that one of the spiritual tasks implicit in the Unitarian Universalist principle to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part?
Some years later in my first semester at seminary, I found myself discussing a story from the Hebrew Bible with a classmate. It soon became clear something was amiss, at which point I said to my classmate something like, “I understand this story as metaphor. It sounds like you understand it literally.” To which she replied, “Yes, I do.” adding, “If these stories aren’t literally true, then my whole faith would collapse.” I don’t remember what I said after she said that, but I’m not sure I needed to say anything as my face probably said it all. I was shocked. To my knowledge I had never met a religious fundamentalist before.
Over the next several weeks I unconsciously constructed, in my mind a, shall we say, unflattering profile of this person based on that discussion of a biblical story. Whenever she spoke in class, I smugly predicted in my mind what she was going to say about the topic at hand and I was right every time.
And so I was completely unprepared when she stopped me in the hall one day to ask if the red AIDS ribbon I wore on my jacket was for someone in particular. I told her no, explaining that it I wore it in general solidarity with AIDS sufferers. As I began to walk away, she said, in a soft voice, “I’m sorry, by the way.” Not knowing what she meant, I turned and asked, “For what?”
Now this was back in 2006 and in November of that year, voters in the state of Virginia ratified a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage there.
And as it turned out my fundamentalist classmate whose views by now I was sure I knew so well was from Virginia. “I’m sorry for the vote in Virginia”, she told me. “It’s wrong and embarrassing.” I was as shocked hearing this from her as I was the day I heard her affirm her literal belief of the bible story we discussed.
She went on to tell me she had urged her pastor in Virginia not to support the ban but to speak against it and that she herself traveled home to vote against it. Her words left me speechless. I managed to squeak a thank you out from underneath the weight of the shame I felt inside for making a caricature of her.
I did not share her faith, but in that moment she showed me she practiced the spirit of hers more faithfully than I did mine.
Religious stories often feature teachers in disguise. In Buddhism these are usually people who rub you the wrong way or push your buttons, so to speak, or people you might easily dismiss or disregard for any number of reasons, their theology, political views, education level, social class and so on. And it’s not that these potential teachers are secretly all good, all wise, or otherwise perfect. They are, like all of us, human to a fault. In this they are like mirrors, revealing to us something we’re not seeing about ourselves. And like the guru in our second reading these teachers expose our ignorance, offering a chance for us to turn things around.
In our reading the guru tells the distraught monk his community is faltering because they are ignorant of the Messiah’s presence among them, a nod to the teaching in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus instructs, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Unsure of who among them is the Messiah, they resolve to treat everyone as if they were he. Soon, the community is again flourishing.
Unitarian Universalism doesn’t teach that a savior or god incarnate lives among us, but we do covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people. Which, at the very least, asks we resolve not to reduce people to caricatures in our minds or our hearts, nor treat them as such by our speech and actions. Something increasingly difficult in this time of hyper-polarization. Accepted and practiced with relative ease when applied to those who look and assume think like we do, the real challenge and power of Unitarian Universalism’s first principle is revealed when we encounter those whom we find hard to embrace for any number of reasons. Indeed, it reveals itself, at its core, as a call to repent, to go beyond our defensive, default setting of mind that we might see and know the world and each other anew.
We are both wonderful and woeful creatures. Our woefulness, characterized by deeply embedded habits of the mind, guarantees we will be wrong about a lot in our lives including, not infrequently, how we see and relate to others. Part of what makes us wonderful is our capacity to break with the habits of mind which keep us from seeing and living in a better world. A habit we might more readily break not by making annual resolutions to do so, but by receiving them as they come to us throughout our lives, like teachers in disguise instructing us in a right way to be wrong. Namely, to go beyond the mind we have that we might awaken to a new dawn. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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