Metaphors Be With You Love. That has to be the first word of my days in your pulpit. It will seem that I am speaking to you of many things in the months to come. I will reflect frequently on how we think about and celebrate whatever is sacred in our lives. I will speak to you about Justice. Mercy. Death and dying. Sex. Prison. Food. Loneliness. Technology. The Economy. I will tell stories from U.U. history because, as a lifelong U.U., it never ceases to amaze me how little we and the public at large know about the huge contribution of Unitarians and Universalists to American history and religious liberalism. I will draw on my experiences as a New York Times reporter and a parent. I will explore with you who we are as a congregation and who we want to become. Sometimes I will be speaking passionately, or solemnly, or analytically. Sometimes I will be calling on you to share your reactions as the sermon progresses. Frequently, at least part of me will be laughing and hoping you will be laughing along with me – you already know that from my offering story and the Star Wars pun in my sermon title, which I will come back to in a minute. But, really, if I am to be the minister you want and deserve, I will in every instance actually be preaching about some aspect of love. Beyond that, I pray that everything I bring to a counseling session, a church meeting, or my representation of this fellowship in the community will appear to you as a spoke stretching out from a hub of love. Those of you familiar with Unitarian Universalism know we come from a Biblical tradition. One of the greatest spiritual gifts handed down to us by our religious forebears in this tradition was the recognition that the Bible, if read literally, frequently makes no sense. Worse still, a lot of the Bible rests on

dangerous assumptions and advice if we take the words – or rather their common translations from the original Hebrew and Greek – at face value. We are charged to use reason and experience in how we read the Bible, just like anything else. Indeed, as William Ellery Channing preached in 1819 in a pioneering Unitarian sermon republished all over the nation, “We profess not to know a book which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible.” i When we do as Channing advised, we see that the Bible for all its faults is also loaded with spiritual wisdom. Thus, you can expect to hear me refer to it frequently. For purposes of this morning, I want to say that, in my view, truer words were never spoken or written than Paul's reported advice in his first letter to the quarrel-ridden church in Corinth, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Paul did not say that he would be like a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. He said he would actually be them. I am “like a gong” is what linguists call a simile. To say I am that gong is to use what they call a metaphor. Metaphors are the heavy artillery of poetry. They utterly destroy the distance between the two things being compared. They are the most powerful tools poets can use to blast you out of complacent, narrow-minded visions of who and where you are. I point this out because religion is filled with metaphors. In the New Testament of the Bible, God is identified as Father, Lord, a shepherd, and the head of a body, to name just a few of the most common metaphors. By implication, you are essentially a child, a subject or slave, a sheep, or some mindless part of the body – and probably not your first choice of which body part to boot. Many of you who came here by way of Christian upbringings may have done so because you said, in essence, “Hey, wait a minute, I want a religion where the most common metaphor for me is 'human grown-up'.” But Christianity isn't the only religion

exploring the divine through metaphors. By one estimate, there are 330 million forms of the Divine in Hinduism. Other religions focus on metaphors of pathways or energy fields. And, of course, the Star Wars movie series introduced us to the Force, a mysterious power that encompasses the “light” and “dark” sides of nature, irresistible energy and numerous other religious concepts. Nothing pivotal that is good or bad in Star Wars films happens without the Force in some way affecting what transpires. Now I'm not a serious Star Wars fan. I not even sure I have seen all six movies in the series. I certainly cannot give you a coherent summary of the many plot lines. As a diversity-loving U.U., I have to admit that my favorite scene is still the comedic one in the original Star Wars movie where we meet violence-prone outlaws of many different species relaxing and scheming together in a seedy cantina. In a sweet satirical twist, robots are barred from entering this saloon, not because they are too alien but because they don't drink. In other words, they are not good for business. There is nothing reverent about this scene or most others in the series. But George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, felt the story needed a religion to come to life. Hence, the Force, which Lucas described this way: "The Force evolved out of various developments of character and plot. I wanted a concept of religion based on the premise that there is a God and there is good and evil. I began to distill the essence of all religions into what I thought was a basic idea common to all religions and common to primitive thinking. I wanted to develop something that was nondenominational but still had a kind of religious reality." ii Lucas showed himself to be a good student of religion when he depicted the many different civilizations that appear in Star Wars as having varied beliefs about

the exact nature of the Force. He showed himself to be a good story-teller by noting this in passing rather than allowing it to become a distraction. As you know, the series became so popular that many characters, scenes and snippets of dialog became part of everyday culture. Inevitably, they also became targets for humor. Thus, “May the Force be with you” – a common phrase meaning farewell or good luck in the films, emerged as the bumper sticker “Metaphors be with you.” My wife is a teacher and I was a journalist at the time so, of course, we had to have one as soon as we saw it. We immediately tracked down a source on the Internet. We have one on our van and another on our 1993 Mitsubishi sedan. This kind of word play is not just witty. Humor is often a spiritual practice testifying directly or indirectly to things we hold sacred. It may be a twisted form of love, but every laugh expresses either love or a plea for love. I love religion jokes, including those about Unitarian Universalism. You can count on me to tell every one of them I know during my time here. As long as I am your minister, there is going to be plenty of room for humor in our worship and our other times together. I want us to laugh together. If I end up going over some line and hurting someone's feelings with it, please let me know. You will find me ready and anxious to apologize. And I hope each of you will do the same. It will be easier if we can assume good intentions about jokes and indeed about everything that we say to each other. That, of course, is easier said than done for all of us and we need to talk more about the limits of good intentions at some point. Today, though, I want to go in another direction that I hope will clarify my vision of our future together. One of our older members whom I visited this week told me, “I'm so glad you are here. We really need a minister as our glue.” Well, glue is a vivid metaphor, but as I told her, I hope to be more often functioning as grease. In my short time with you, I have been impressed – maybe awed is the

better word – by how much this small congregation has going for it. I think a lot of my function is going to be helping you see how amazing you are and what you could become. To do that – here's the grease part – I will be making suggestions about things I believe you could do to live into your future without generating too much friction. I'm using my words carefully here. Some friction is necessary. There is no true engagement without friction, whether you are talking about gears or people. There is no movement without friction. There is no life without friction. The key, I think, is not to lose sight of the difference between a congregation and a civic group or something like a book club. Ultimately, we are people promising to walk together in our efforts to live according to U.U. principles. This form of being religious has much deeper roots than you might realize. The Unitarians are descendents of the Puritan churches of New England founded nearly four centuries ago. Final authority for how we organize resides in our congregations, not some national or international church hierarchy. The Puritan churches organized around covenants. Listen to this one from the Salem, Mass., church adopted in 1629, just nine years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. “We covenant with the Lord and one with another; and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his Blessed word of truth.” As Conrad Wright, a Harvard Divinity School professor, pointed out, when you look past the theological language we no longer use, such as the concept of God as Lord, we see that this covenant – this promise -- by these Puritans to each other and God said nothing about everybody believing the same thing. It said only that they bound themselves to walk together in their search for understanding what God wanted of them. iii Wright and others have pointed out that we use the term covenant a lot more loosely today. People join our congregations and those of other religions without

deep commitments to their fellow congregants and often leave them just as casually. I hope our time together will foster among us renewed faith that joining this congregation is a promise worth making and worth keeping. Our covenant works best for us when it is nothing less than a sincere effort to organize our lives around the spiritual quest we have come together to nurture. We need to be together for this because life in general can be tough and living religiously even tougher. Any of one of us can be spiritual on our own. But we cannot be religious except in relation to others. Spirituality without religion is ego-centered. It lacks commitment to a spiritual community (it doesn't have to be a church). Spirituality on its own is hard to sustain. It floats across the surface of life and, usually, leaves little behind of value. Religious thinking and living is primarily about crossing relational boundaries. The boundaries are those that keep you from fully connecting to God or the Spirit of Life or the Web of all Existence – or whatever name you want to give unifying force or forces in the universe. We know that they are both real and beyond our full comprehension. Thus, we experience them as mysterious and sacred. Our religion, and every other religion I would argue, teaches that connecting with what is sacred in the universe is also in some way inseparable from reaching across the boundaries separating us from each other. There is one other thing I believe we all know at some level, whether we are willing to talk publicly about it or not. We know that somehow love is the common element in every pathway across these boundaries. Jesus puts it this way in the Bible: all of the laws come down to two commandments. We are called to love God with all our hearts and minds and souls, and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Jesus seems oblivious to our modern understanding that we often don't do very well at loving ourselves, which makes that a bad standard for some of us

for how we should love our neighbor. But let's put that aside. The point is that only through love can we engage the divine in each of us, the divine out there beyond comprehension, or the divine in friends and strangers. Only through love can we see clearly each new boundary beyond those we manage to cross. Only through love can we discern the most meaningful role possible for us in the mystery of life. I've been pretty abstract so far, so I want to lift up for you one story illustrating specifically what I mean. How many of you read the fall, 2010, issue of U.U. World, our denominational magazine? There was a great article in it! I'm not referring to my piece about technology called “The Gift of Playing God.” I'm referring to the story “Maine teen honored for GLBT Activism.” The article is mainly the story of the dedicated, tireless work of a straight high school student from Bowdoin, Maine, to make schools in the state safer for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender teenagers. The student, Danielle Smith, received a national award at a banquet in New York in May of 2010 and an invitation to a White House reception a month later where she met President Obama. At the New York banquet, Smith said that her involvement showed that “This is not a gay movement. This is a civil rights movement.” The story tells us that Danielle's work was closely related to her participation in the teen youth group at the U.U. Church in Brunswick, Maine. At the very end of the article, we learn that she had been raised as a Roman Catholic. How did she end up at the Brunswick church? The same friend who recruited her to join the gay-straight alliance at her high school in their freshman year had said to her, “You are a U.U. and you are coming to church with me.” Danielle said that once she began to attend, “I felt totally at home and began to take it as a personal faith.” This story is a profile in boundary crossing. Danielle's ability to identify with the oppressed teenagers whose sexual identity was so different from her own

moved me. So did her friend's ability to see across – and reach across – the barriers of Danielle's upbringing to help Danielle become what Love – that's Love with a capital L – called her to be. My dream is that our time together will help you know when to confidently say to your acquaintances, “You are U.U. and I want you to come to church with me.” And I dream that when they do, love in the social dimension – better known as compassion and justice – will bloom as confirmation that we are living out our principles. The earlier portion of this sermon may have sounded critical of Christianity and other religions. That was not my point. True Christians, inspired by their metaphors of the divine, will often be our allies in justice work. We U.U.'s need every metaphor – every image of the divine in our lives – that we can latch on to to help us on this journey, including, at times, some of those found in other religions. We need our collective intelligence and creativity to make and play with and burnish those metaphors that inspire us to live righteously. In closing, let me offer a metaphor I've been playing with lately. I imagine every one of these pathways of connection to God and neighbor as requiring us to fashion some sort of wheeled transport with the help of companions. And all those wheels have to have hubs of love. That is one way to think about what we are doing here, but there are countless others. I look forward to hearing your metaphors. I really mean it when I say, “Metaphors be with you.”

i

“Unitarian Chrisitianity “(preached in Baltimore at the ordination of Jared Sparks)

ii http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Force iii Wright, Conrad, Walking Together (Skinner House Books, 1989) p. 7