The Days of Atonement, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are a time to notice where we have fallen short of our ideals, to ask forgiveness for our failings, and to re-commit to our ideals for the coming year. Unitarians, too, strive toward the perfectibility of human nature, as modeled by Jesus, while acknowledging how far we are from that goal. But if we never actually become the people we know we ought to be, can we still claim to be the people the world needs?
Watch the video of this worship service
In our Call to Worship, we said the words of Rabbi Chaim Stern. We said, “Once more Atonement Day has come.”
Atonement Day, or Yom Kippur, is the day, once a year, when Jews atone for their sins of the year past and prepare for the year to come.
Atonement Day comes this year beginning on Tuesday evening and lasting through the night and through a day of prayer and fasting to the evening of Wednesday. We say, “Once more Atonement Day has come” because Atonement Day comes every year.
Take seriously with me, for a moment, what it would mean, to spend a day in contemplation of your sins. We don’t have an annual ritual like that in Unitarian Universalism. What if we did?
Consider every fault, every misstep, every mistake. Every moment of anger, selfishness, greed. Every meanness. Every sharp word. The smallest thought of lust that objectified the humanity of another person. The times when charity would have been easy to give, but you withheld it. The glee you sometimes feel when an enemy finally gets the punishment they deserve. The forgiveness asked for but denied. The times you were quick to judge. The words that escalated the conflict and took offense, instead of seeking to understand and diffuse.
We can quibble over the word “sin”, or what exactly constitutes a sin in your personal ethical system. But we could agree, I feel confidently, that none of us is perfect. In the course of a year, surely there was a day, a moment, or maybe many, when you fell short of the best that you imagine you could be. You missed the mark, by a millimeter or a mile.
Of course you did. Me, too.
Even this morning, in the few hours between waking and arriving at church, were you at every moment, the best, the very best, you are capable of?
We so want to be good. To live our values. Perhaps the words of our Opening Hymn express our intentions for the lives we wish to live, the people we want to be:
“Be that guide whom love sustains.
Rise above the daily strife:
lift on high the good you find.
Help to heal the hurts of life.”
Doesn’t that sound like paradise? O to be that person! Oh to live among such people!
How well does that describe you last year?
Is a little bit of that impenetrable Unitarian Universalist self-regard starting to crack?
You’re good! You are. I know you’re good. I love you. You are a person of inherent worth and dignity.
But I don’t see perfect people. I see lovely, striving, willing, gosh darn, doing the best they can under trying circumstances, too high expectations, and a world some days seemingly designed to bring us down. I see heartbreakingly beautiful, flawed people. People who know they could be better. And sincerely want to try.
So honestly, now. Humbly. Not judging only by your best days, but by a year’s worth of days, including the lowest.
How did you do?
From Rosh Hashanah, which began the Jewish High Holy Days at sunset last Sunday, through Wednesday, we move through a time of accounting. Honest reflection. Sincere evaluation. A reckoning.
As Chaim Stern asks the question:
“At what did we aim?
How did we stumble?”
And then he asks the question that has always intrigued me about a day set aside for repentance that we know returns every year. Rabbi Stern asks,
“Last year’s confession came easily to the lips. Will this year’s come from deeper than the skin?”
He includes a little dig, in that sentence. It stings, Rabbi Stern. He includes a little suspicion that maybe at last year’s service we didn’t really do the work of repenting. We didn’t actually do the difficult work of confronting our flawed selves. We said the words. We felt the rebuke on our skin. But we didn’t take the accounting into our bones.
And not truly acknowledging where we had fallen short, we also didn’t give the necessary gravity to our promise to be better.
You shouldn’t be leaving the Yom Kippur service whistling a happy tune, and saying, “I’m glad that’s over for another year.”
Rabbi Stern says we should stand at Yom Kippur, “All pretense gone, naked heart revealed to the hiding self, [standing] on holy ground, between the day that was and the one that must be.”
Trembling.
He asks, “Why are our paths strewn with promises like fallen leaves?”
We were here last year! Right here. In this same Temple, perhaps in the very same seat. Last year we made the same confessions. Last year we made the same promises. And then all through the year from last year’s promises to this, we failed again. Repeatedly!
Probably half the congregation broke their promise on the way home from Temple.
I know how people are. I know how we are. You’re hungry from fasting all day. The kids are cranky. There’s graffiti on the building to be angry about. There’s a loud motorcyclist to disturb your meditation. Someone didn’t clean up after their dog and you nearly step in it. A man on the corner asks for a handout a little too aggressively. You’re already thinking about that client you’re going to have to see at the office tomorrow, the one you can’t stand but whose business you can’t do without.
Did we not last year promise that this was the year we would be better?
Did we not say last Sunday that this was the week that we were going to make love the spirit of this church, dwelling together in peace, serving humanity in fellowship?
Maybe you had a good week. And if so, congratulations.
But the reason for weekly worship, not one and done worship, or the repeated sacrament of confession, or an annual rite of repentence and atonement, is that we know how easily we slip. We know how greatly human beings need encouragement to stay on the path. How we must again and again be reminded to return to our best selves.
So it’s foolish to hold ourselves to perfection. No religion requires it of us. We don’t expect to ever be finished with our striving to be better. That’s not the goal. We strive toward perfection. With help we hope to touch it briefly. But we know we are not made to live there.
At the Men’s Fellowship meeting, earlier this week, we continued the conversation that we’ve been having in worship for the last several weeks, exploring the question of identity.
Who am I? And also, Who are we?
I’ve offered several different lenses to answer that question so far. We are what we do. We are who we are in our roles and in our relationships to others. We are members of this community. We are Unitarian Universalists identified by our shared faith.
For the next few weeks I want to look a little more deeply at what it means to say, “We are Unitarian Universalists.” Who we were historically. And who we are now.
For the guys at the Men’s Fellowship, I shared with them my elevator speech. The speech I could recite if someone asks me about Unitarian Universalism as we step on to an elevator, succinct enough to say completely before one of us steps out on their floor.
I’ve never actually said this in an elevator, but it’s a helpful summary, for me, of what I think is important about Unitarian Universalism.
I say,
“Unitarian Universalists believe that human beings are smart enough, strong enough, and good enough, to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, and each other, and for the world we share.”
I start my sentence with, “Unitarian Universalists believe” because people always ask what we believe.
And then, the core Unitarian belief is our trust in the power of human persons to do for ourselves, without the necessity of supernatural assistance. That we are smart enough, strong enough, and good enough, to save ourselves. The doctrine of Original Sin says that we aren’t good enough, but Unitarians say we are. Martin Luther’s doctrine of the Bondage of the Will, says that our thinking is so twisted by sin that even when we think we know the good, we probably don’t. But Unitarians say we are smart enough. The doctrine of God’s omnipotence says that God has all the power and we are entirely dependent. Unitarians say human beings have our own power, and we are strong enough to do the work we need to do.
And then, because we are Universalists, as well as Unitarians, we put our good thinking, our effective power, and our moral clarity, at the service of not just ourselves, but each other, and the world we share. Striving to create here on this earth, the paradise we seek.
I’m not sure my speech is very effective as am elevator speech. I don’t think any of the guys in the Men’s Fellowship thought so. But it does sum up for me what I think we’re trying to do here., and what makes us distinct from other religious.
Unitarian Universalists strive, like no other religion, to make this world, and these human lives, our lives, be the best we can possibly make them.
We don’t wait for someone else to save us. We do it ourselves.
And we don’t wait for some other world. We do it here and now.
And furthermore, we believe that we are smart enough, strong enough, and good enough, to be successful. That our lives will be better. That the world we share will be better.
Isn’t that the promise of Unitarian Universalism. That we could actually do it?
So then why haven’t we done it?
“Say then: Why are our paths strewn with promises like fallen leaves?”
If we are as smart and strong and good as we say we are, smart and strong and good enough, to do what we need to do, why are lives of health and joy for ourselves and each other and the world we share still so elusive?
There have been Unitarians and Universalists and other smart and strong and good human beings for long before you and I got here. Why wasn’t the world already a paradise when we arrived?
What use is it to promise that next year we’re really going to do it, when last year we made the same promise and the year before that, and the year before that and every year we arrived at Yom Kippur having to admit that once again, we failed?
The last Sunday I was with you we were in summer. Today we are in Autumn. The weather is a little cooler, although we know hot days will return. The day is a little shorter, although not enough to notice yet. The sun rises and sets more to the south.
And the days will get shorter and the nights longer, until the end of December when we reach the solstice. Then the seasons shift, and winter moves toward spring. April, May, June, seem distant now, but they will come, soon enough. The longest day of the year in June, the summer, the hottest days, again. September, a new church year begins. The first day of Autumn. The High Holy Days.
This is the way the world works. The earth rotates. The earth revolves around the sun. It comes back to where it was. The seasons turn. Individual lives begin and end, but there is a circularity to the rhythms of birth and death, growth and decline, work and rest. The tide comes in. The tide goes out. The moon goes ‘round. One generation replaces the last and greets the next. The world spins. The years come and go. Life goes on.
With all this dizzy turning, circling, spinning, it seems perverse to imagine we could walk a straight line to perfection and that once we got there we could sit down and stay, and while the world and the entire universe changes around us, we would never need to use our smarts and strength and goodness again.
Maybe on our best days we’ll touch something close to perfection, but we will slip away again, because slipping away, is the way of this rapidly spinning world.
If I can commit a bit of Star Wars blasphemy, I have to say that the sage Yoda is dead wrong when he said, “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”
I say, there is only try. Try. Try again. Keep trying.
We aren’t made for perfection. We are made for work. For growth. For running after a world that constantly spins toward a new future. Life doesn’t demand perfection from us. The world doesn’t need our perfection. Because if by perfection we mean some static eternity where the seasons have stopped their progression, and the tides are frozen in place, and the world has stopped revolving, then that is a perversion of reality that is no place for us or the kind of lives we want to live. We are made smart enough, strong enough, and good enough to live in this changeable world. The world turns, and we are made to turn with it.
Our human problem is not that we are unable to achieve perfection and stay there. Our problem is that we imagine a perfect, static, eternity, ought to be our goal.
Jack Reimer, the Rabbi who wrote our words of meditation this morning says, “For leaves, birds, and animals turning comes instinctively. But for us turning does not come so easily.”
Jack Reimer recommends we follow the way of the world, being willing to live happily and healthfully in a turning world, not trying to make straight paths toward perfect goals, but wandering, circling, retreating, starting again.
He says, “It takes an act of will for us to make a turn. It means breaking with old habits. It means admitting that we have been wrong; It means losing face; It means saying: I am sorry. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change.”
We are smart enough, to choose the path of turning. We are strong enough, to admit our mistakes. We are good enough, to change.
I think of the words from the song performed as our Opening Music by Julia Nizinski, Aviva Heston and Reid Swanson.
The Hebrew words by the poet, Hannah Senesh, in English are:
My God, my God,
may it never end –
the sand and the sea,
the rustle of the water,
the brilliance of the sky,
the prayer of man.
May it never end. I have no wish to come to the end of history and sit down. That’s not our vision. That’s not the way of the world.
But to work, and to strive, and to succeed sometimes, and also fail, and to rest, and to try again, and to fail, and to ask forgiveness, and to start again, and to climb high, and then to come down, and then teach someone, and occasionally to save someone, or ourselves, and then to serve, and then to make peace, and always to love, and then to come around to another Spring, and another Fall, and eventually to make way for the ones who will keep the circle spinning long after we’ve stepped away.
May it never end.