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  • BUUC Home
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  • About the BUUC
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    • BUUC Committees >
      • Executive Committee
      • Worship Committee
      • Membership Committee
      • The Women's Alliance
      • Flower Committee
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
  • Newsletters
  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!

A Year’s End Reflection 
given at
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
December 27, 2020
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak

2020 will soon be behind us. A reflection in the rearview mirror of our lives. Judging by the sheer proliferation of merchandise and cards and even events produced and planned bidding farewell, or more usually, good riddance to the last twelve months, sometimes in language I can’t repeat from the pulpit, 2020’s transition from present to past can’t come soon enough. 

And to be sure, as I noted in the December newsletter, 2020 has been has been quite a year to say the least. An ongoing global pandemic, a presidential impeachment, stock market crash and rebound, record unemployment, Black Lives Matters protests, wildfires, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a new president-elect, a defeated president who still refuses to concede, and oh yeah, and those murder hornets. 

And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s all the usual stuff that happens in any given year. Those less widely known, more personal, and thus often more impactful events from our own lives. Births, deaths; illness, a lost job, a new career, a new school or home, and the like. Changes to our routines, some for the better, others for the worse. Events whose emotional, physical and spiritual toll may feel intensified against the backdrop of an especially harrowing year globally. 

And yet, in four days all of these will officially become part of last year. We will have bid 2020 so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. 

At least on the calendar, that is. 

In truth we will still be dealing with the effects of the events, public and private, of 2020 well into the next year and beyond. 
Which is why we might pause before the end of a year that inspired T-shirts emblazoned with a middle finger directed at 2020, lest “2020 was awful” become the only truth we’ve discerned from the last twelve months of life here on earth. 

For as Jane Rzepka, quoting Anais Nin reminds us from our reading this morning, “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of us [them] acquire it, fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”

It’s an apt metaphor. 

Several Christmases ago, my husband Kevin gave me what appeared, at first glance, to be a tiny painting of the Colosseum in Rome, not more than an inch in height or length. Upon closer inspection under a magnifying glass, the image is revealed not to be a painting at all, but a mosaic, a micro-mosaic, to be more precise. Thus the image was formed not by the application of paint with a brush, but the careful, sometimes painstaking selection and arrangement of hundreds of tiny pieces of multicolored glass into something recognizable, and in the end, quite beautiful.

In likening the acquisition of truth to the creation of a “laborious mosaic”, Anais Nin cautions us against making instant or total truth claims based on what appears to be obvious at first. This is trickier than it might seem because we tend to prefer answers to questions. 

Answers, even when they don’t quite make sense, are convenient.  They generally require less investment in thought and thus time. They’re also easier to store. For they fit neatly into our mental drawers and can be tucked away out of sight and out of mind until we need them. 

Questions, on the other hand are generally inconvenient. They take time and effort to formulate and to think or reflect on. And the best ones are not easily answered or even definitively answerable.  Likewise, they’re often unruly and not easily tucked away or forgotten. Eschewing certitude in favor of faith, they linger, drawing our attention back to them repeatedly over time for deeper reflection. 

In his book, “Beyond Words”, Frederich Buechner writing on the topic of questions, notes, “On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, ‘What is the answer?’ Then, after a long silence, ‘What is the question?’”  Buechner, a minister, goes on to say people shouldn’t start looking in the Bible for answers, they should start by listening to the questions it asks. Questions he says we tend to lose track of. Questions about things that matter, “life and death questions about meaning, purpose and value. Or what we might call, mosaic building questions. 

For Buechner these include questions like this from the Gospel of Matthew, 

“For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?”

Or this one from Genesis, 

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Or from Luke’s gospel, 

“Who is my neighbor?”

These are powerful questions whose pondering need not be confined to the traditions from which they emerge. I admire Buechner’s approach to the Bible. It certainly makes it more useful than when it is used as an answer key to life, which too many people, religious or not, treat as a test to be passed or better yet, aced, rather than a miracle to be lived. 

And indeed we could apply Buechner’s approach to the writings of any religious or philosophical tradition and beyond.

Not surprisingly, as we read this morning, Jane Rzepka, a Unitarian Universalist would have us take it even further and apply this approach to our everyday life, which is its own form of sacred story. Thus can she hear potential mosaic building questions in questions like, “Can somebody’s curls really ruin a person’s day? How can you tell when the World Series is necessary and when it’s not? and Would parents really make fun of their children?” Questions that deep down have to do with and reveal over time what truly matters, what is worthy of our attention, and how to get along with one another in this often bewildering world. Indeed, she notes that it is by asking everyday questions her children work on their mosaic, and significantly, hearing their questions, she’s nudged to work on her own mosaic.

And if such questions can emerge from advertisements on the radio, television listings and a notice from school, surely they also arise in reflection on events personal and public from the year almost passed. 

For everyday questions are simply those which emerge from both our privately lived and publicly shared experience. Questions that form and inform the very histories and ideas we here at BUUC (Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church) strive to share, “with warmth, loving friendship and an open mind.”

As we prepare to send 2020 on its merry way with one foot squarely aimed at its behind, I confess I also find myself reflecting on the year past and wondering, 

Who are we?

What is justice?

To whom or what are we ultimately accountable? 

Questions for which I might have once had, or a least wanted to believe there was, a definitive answer, but that I now find, as Elie Wiesel wrote, “Possess a power that does not lie in the answer.”

And so, in the days remaining before the new year, I encourage you to set aside some time to reflect on the questions that have emerged for you from events personal and public in 2020.

For it is these questions and others like them asked and pondered by people around the globe that will remain far beyond the events or the year in which they occurred, revealing truth over time that is greater and perhaps more hopeful than what appears perhaps most obvious in the moment to many, that 2020 was an awful year we can’t wait to bid, so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye!

Amen and Blessed Be

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