To know the good we can do, the joy we can bring, the beauty we can make, and so on is only the beginning. Unless our knowledge connects to our will, our dreams will remain unrealized and our lives and the world will never change. To move from vision to action requires the “kindling power” of passion that great leaders can light within us
READING, “Psalm 30, A psalm. A song. For the dedication of the temple. Of David.
1 I will exalt you, Lord,
for you lifted me out of the depths
and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
2 Lord my God, I called to you for help,
and you healed me.
3 You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead;
you spared me from going down to the pit.
4 Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people;
praise his holy name.
5 For his anger lasts only a moment,
but his favor lasts a lifetime;
weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.
6 When I felt secure, I said,
“I will never be shaken.”
7 Lord, when you favored me,
you made my royal mountain[c] stand firm;
but when you hid your face,
I was dismayed.
8 To you, Lord, I called;
to the Lord I cried for mercy:
9 “What is gained if I am silenced,
if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it proclaim your faithfulness?
10 Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me;
Lord, be my help.”
11 You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
12 that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.
Lord my God, I will praise you forever.
SERMON, “A Leader Inspires” Rev. Rick Hoyt-McDaniels
We’re talking about leadership last month and this.
The practical purpose for a worship theme of leadership is to get us started thinking about the qualities we will look for next year as our congregation elects a search committee and we give them the task of interviewing candidates for your next settled minister.
The spiritual reason to focus on leadership is to think about leadership in our lives: the leaders we follow, the way we lead others, the way we lead ourselves through the journey of our lives. What does a leader do, to be good, to be helpful, to be effective?
Of course, we’re also in the midst of the so-called “holiday season” so there are other stories that need our attention during worship.
Today we’re in the midst of the eight days of Hanukkah.
Tuesday is the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The gift of religious stories like these as they reappear, year after year, is that they have a depth, and also an ambiguity, that makes them endless interpretable. Every year, in every circumstance, for every purpose, they are relevant.
What lessons of leadership can we find in the stories of the Maccabean uprising against the Greeks, and the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego on Tepeyac hill outside Mexico City?
About 200 years ago before the Common Era, the Jewish people lived in the middle of a vast Greek empire, the empire that Alexander the Great had conquered a hundred years earlier.
The Greeks had conquered the territory from the Persians. It was under the Persian emperor, Darius, that the Jews had been allowed to return to their former kingdom west of the Jordan river and rebuild the temple of Solomon that had been destroyed by the previous empire, the Babylonian empire under Nebuchadnezzar.
Under the Babylonians, the Jewish people had worked hard to retain their culture and religion in captivity, distant from their homeland, and without the temple that was the center of their religious practice.
Prior to the arrival of the Babylonians, the Jewish people had enjoyed what they thought of as their Golden Age, the reign of Solomon, who built the original temple in Jerusalem, and Solomon’s father, David.
We talked about David a month ago, who was a shepherd for his peasant family before being raised to royalty through his success on the battlefield and his friendship with Jonathan, the son of the previous and first King of Israel, Saul.
The Psalm I read for our meditation is a Psalm attributed to David, traditionally read for Hanukkah. But that invites a question. Why this Psalm?
The Psalm isn’t about the events of Hanukkah. It couldn’t be. It was written 600 or more years before the Maccabean revolution. Hanukkah is about re-dedicating the Jerusalem temple after it had been profaned by the Greeks, that’s the second temple built after the Jews returned to Jerusalem from the captivity in Babylon. That second temple replaced the first temple built by Solomon, who came after David.
There was no temple in Jerusalem when David was King. So if David actually wrote this Psalm, or someone else wrote it during the time of David, it couldn’t be about dedicating a temple (which didn’t exist) let alone re-dedicating a temple that had been destroyed, rebuilt, profaned, and won again. So what is this Psalm about? And why is it a psalm for Hanukkah?
The Psalm begins with a memory of a time when life was bleak. The Psalmist uses the language of “the depths” “my enemies gloat over me” “the realm of the dead” “the pit.”
Can you feel that place? When in your life have you felt that despair, that depression, the world turned against you. When have your felt that life is literally, “the pits”?
Perhaps now, as we think about wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climate change, Donal Trump ahead in the polls. Perhaps you’ve gone through a personal time of “the depths.” Perhaps a long time. Perhaps, fortunately, just a short time of sadness, or sickness. A time when joy is distant, healing seems far away. Or the world around us has gone wrong. As a country, or a planet, we’re lost. Life is confused. Damage and danger everywhere. People turn to violence in desperation or anger. The path forward is dark. The light of comfort and joy, the light of hope, has grown dim, or nearly out.
The Psalm evokes such a time, but the Psalm is a psalm of praise, for the psalmist did not remain in that place. A positive energy of liberation and inspiration, which the psalmist names, “the Lord” lifted the psalmist from the depths.
“For you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead; you spared me from going down to the pit. Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me.”
When the Persians ruled their empire, their policy was that subject people could live in their homelands and retain their language, culture, and religion. The Jews in Babylon returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and resumed life according to their old traditions.
When the Greeks defeated the Persians, the Greek policy was that subject people should adopt Greek ways, speak Greek, and worship as the Greeks did, a policy called Hellenization.
Of course, some Jews were happy to join the dominant culture. Greek art and philosophy and science were the pinnacle of human achievement. Assimilation offered political and financial power as well.
But other Jews resisted Hellenization. The most obnoxious offense was when the Greeks entered the sacred space of the temple in Jerusalem built, destroyed, and re-built at great cost, representing hundreds of years of Jewish identity and pride, and turned it over to Greek worship, with a statue of Zeus set up in the “Holy of Holies” the place where no one but the highest Jewish Priests were allowed to enter, the literal dwelling place of Yahweh, the Jewish name for God, where images of God were strictly prohibited by commandment.
This would have been, for the Maccabees and their followers, “the depths” that the Psalm spoke of.
And then, through violent revolution, the Maccabees led the Jewish people to defeat the Greeks, retake Jerusalem, and rededicate their temple to Yahweh.
4 Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people;
praise his holy name.
5 For his anger lasts only a moment,
but his favor lasts a lifetime;
weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.
The legend tells us that when the Jewish priests re-entered the temple, they searched for oil for the lamps necessary for the eight day dedication ritual. They found only enough oil for one day. They lit the lamps anyway and, miracle of miracles, the lamps continued to burn for the full eight days.
When we work toward the good, the world conspires to help us.
On December 9, in the year 1531, a Saturday, just like this year, at the base of a hill outside Mexico City, a man named Juan Diego encountered a vision of a woman who identified herself as the Virgin Mary. Juan Diego was on his way to the Franciscan church in the area where he went every day for religious devotion. Mary told Juan Diego that he should ask the Bishop there to build a chapel at the place she appeared, so that she could comfort and heal those who came to pray to her.
Juan Diego told the Bishop. But the Bishop refused to build a chapel. Juan Diego returned to the hill and encountered Mary again. He told her he had failed and that Mary should find someone more important to deliver her message. But she insisted he was the one she had chosen and Juan Diego agreed to try again.
The next day, Sunday, December 10, the Bishop was still doubtful, but said he would agree to Juan Diego’s request if he could produce a sign from Mary. On his way home, again at the hill, Mary appeared and told Juan Diego that she would provide a sign the following day.
Monday, though, Juan Diego’s uncle took very sick, and Juan Diego stayed home to care for him. The uncle’s condition worsened to where it appeared he would not last the night. Late that night, in the early hours of Tuesday, December 12, Juan Diego went to fetch the Bishop to come and give last rites. Again, on the way, he encountered the vision.
Mary told Juan Diego that he should have come to her earlier for help. She said, in a phrase associated with the vision, “¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?” (“Am I not here, I who am your mother?”). She told Juan Diego that his uncle was already healed. Then she had Juan Diego walk to the top of the hill and gather flowers, where only cactus and scrub usually grow, and carry them in his cloak to the Bishop as the sign that he had asked for. When Juan Diego opened his cloak in front of the Bishop later that morning, Tuesday, December 12, the flowers spilled out and an image of Mary remained, imprinted on the inside of his cloak.
I’ve been using the name Juan Diego, as he is commonly known, but his full name is Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. He was not Spanish, but indigenous. He was 18 years old when Columbus arrived in the New World. He was 45 when the Spanish conquered the Aztec empire. At 50, he was one of the first to be baptized by a group of 12 Franciscans who arrived behind the conquerors. He had his vision of Mary seven years after that.
The Aztecs, the older tribes the Aztecs conquered, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Persians, the Babylonians. The Romans who conquered the Greeks. The Canaanites who lived in the land before the Israelites returned from Egypt.
To be conquered. To be surrounded by the conquerors. To be the remnant clinging to your identity amid the strange, the powerful, the new. To have what you knew and loved, insulted, put down. To feel both the offense, but also the attraction of the new. To be forced to make a choice: resistance, or assimilation, violence, peace, acceptance, unyielding stubbornness, which may preserve the past but only for a time, and at what cost? or acquiescence, which may lose a piece of the present but gain a future?
These are terrible choices, terrible times.
8 To you, Lord, I called;
to the Lord I cried for mercy:
9 “What is gained if I am silenced,
if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it proclaim your faithfulness?
10 Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me;
Lord, be my help.”
Was Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin right to assimilate? Were the Maccabees right to resist?
Who can say?
What should you do? Whose leadership should you follow?
The central truths of Unitarian Universalism are two.
One, from our Unitarian tradition, is that every human being, each of us, is connected directly through our own hearts and minds, to a loving, liberating, blessing power, which, accessed through our conscience can be a source of wisdom for us, showing the path for us to choose that will lead to the best possible future.
Call that blessed power, “Love”.
Love will guide us, peace has tried us,
hope inside us will lead the way
on the road from greed to giving.
Love will guide us through the hard night.
And lest the frailty of our human condition, and an imperfect intuition of Love’s message lead us into error, we are saved by the truth of Universalism, that we are surrounded by a community that cares for us and corrects us when necessary and a power of Love that will not abandon us no matter how grave and persistent are our bad choices. Or as we were reminded in the words of our Call to Worship, “May we know once again that we are not isolated beings but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to this community and to each other.”
The good leader. The helpful, effective leader, is the one who reminds us that Love is our guide. We have the answer we need. We have the connection, ourselves. We have the wisdom. We know the way.
It is not the leader’s job to show the way. Love shows the way. It is the leader’s job to remind us of our goodness, our wisdom, and our power and inspire us to start walking.
The image of the Hanukkah lights, inspires us not necessarily to make the same choice the Maccabees made, but to make our own choice, for ourselves, for Love, for today. What do we do now, in service to our faith? What do I do now, for me, to be true to myself, to walk toward my best future possible and to help the people I love and the planet we share come all together to the future we seek?
The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe printed on the inside of Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s cloak has inspired millions of people in Mexico and South America and now around the world that they are equally persons of inherent worth and dignity. She inspires with the assurance that Love reaches everywhere. Love touches everywhere. Love includes all. Love embraces all.
What we do inspired by Love, whether we build a chapel, or take back a temple, depends on who we are, and where we live and under what circumstances. The leader’s role is to inspire us, to use our inner wisdom, our sense of hope and possibility felt in our hearts, our fierce commitment to our own liberation and the liberation of all people, and then to do what will. To make our choice. Letting Love be our guide. And then with the leader’s urging, live our life.
The leader’s job is to remind us, when we are in the darkness, of that beacon light within each of us. To give witness to those stories of freedom and faith that can inspire us again when we are low. To kindle anew the flame within us that has dimmed to a flicker, to see again its light, to show us the crowd of supporters that surround us, encouraging us, eager to walk with us. The leader’s job is to rally our spirits so that we might sing with the Psalmist:
“You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.”
And the leader will answer, ‘No, you did it yourself.”