Part One: “A Flower Blooming at Your Door”
I spent a week in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, the week before Easter.
It was my husband’s “spring break” week. He teaches history at a middle school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Jim hadn’t been to Washington DC in several years. There are several museums that neither of us had visited and wanted to see, the African American History Museum, principally. And I have a brother who lives in the area. So we decided to take our week’s vacation and visit Washington DC.
As the week of the trip approached, I realized, with some excitement, that there was a chance that we might be in DC at the right time to see the cherry blossoms! Wouldn’t that be cool? The annual fantastic show of the blooming cherry trees around the city. As it turned out we were about a week past their peak. We still saw some, but not the glory that I had been hoping for.
But truly I couldn’t feel disappointed. Many of the cherry trees were still blooming. And many other flowering trees were covered as well with white and purple blossoms. And because we were at the end of the season the blossoms were coming off the trees so every time there was a breeze the air would fill with flowers floating past us like a light, fragrant, snow.
One day during our week in Washington, we rented a car and we drove about a half hour out of town to visit a private art museum that I had wanted to see, called, Glenstone. This super-rich couple built an art museum on their estate to show their personal collection, basically as a tax dodge, so there is that. But the art is spectacular, so we went to see it.
The drive was lovely, up along the George Washington Memorial Parkway along the bank of the Potomac, and then on into rural Maryland. Gorgeous big homes on wide estates.
Again, Jim and I noticed the trees. Not blooming trees, just trees. But not like the trees in California. Even their names sound exotic to our Pacific Southwest ears: Beech, Elm, Holly, Linden, Chestnut, Dogwood. All of them green and gorgeous.
We flew home on the Friday before Easter. Jim gave me the window seat in the plane. As we flew into Los Angeles I had to exclaim with delight. I poked Jim who was listening to a podcast in the middle seat and had him look out the window with me as we made our descent into the LA area. All of the hills to the east of Los Angeles were covered with yellow: the “super-bloom” brought on by our abundant rain the last season. I’ve never seen the hills so spectacularly colored. All the way from the snow-covered peaks of San Jacinto and Gorgonio, until we touched down at LAX, any open space, hill or park or vacant lot, was covered with yellow. Maybe you saw it, too, if you came in by plane, or drove through our Southern California hills.
The yellow is actually an invasive species called, Black Mustard, so there is that. And it will dry out in a few months and create a fire danger, so there is that. But for now, for that day, flying into Los Angeles, it was a delight.
So, I learned that I didn’t need to fly to Washington DC to see a spectacular show of nature’s beauty. There was a similar show right here. And I didn’t need to regret that I’d arrived in Washington a week too late to see the cherry blossoms at their peak, because even off their peak there was something wonderful to experience. And I learned that even without the cherry trees there were other trees, and other blossoms.
I learned, what we have all had countless opportunities to learn in our spiritual lives but never seem to completely learn: that there is always much to appreciate in what is right in front of you. “The flower blooming at your door,” as we just sang, is able to bestow just as much happiness as any other flower anywhere else, or any future flower, any time else. You didn’t miss it, because “it” is always right in front of you.
The spiritual lesson is not to think that happiness and health is only contained in a single place, or time, or experience, and that all our effort must be focused on achieving just that one distant pleasure. Or that, when we do focus on achieving a distant goal that all our effort to get to that goal and the journey along the way would count for nothing, if, at last, we fail to achieve that long sought goal.
We know that isn’t true. We know it’s about the journey not the goal, even as we work toward transformation. We learn the lesson again and again in our lives and we are reminded in sermons like this one at church. But we forget. I forget. And so we step over the flower blooming at our door, or we step right on it. We crush the flower we have in our eagerness to find some other flowers, or catch a plane to Washington, or do whatever else we’re rushing off to do instead of appreciating the moment and the place we already are.
Go not abroad for happiness; behold
it is a flower blooming at your door.
Bring love and laughter home, and evermore
joy shall be yours as changing years unfold.
In fact, Jim and I had done some local flower-appreciating just a month earlier. We rented a house in Palm Springs with a couple of friends and drove out for the weekend. The first morning we all got up early and drove out to the Salton Sea and then south into the Anza Borrego area to see the super-bloom out in the desert. So we drove around, stopping here and there, getting out of the car to walk among the spectacular flowers: yellow and blue and white.
This was the same weekend that the “painted lady” butterflies were migrating through the region. So the desert floor was filled with color, and the air above was filled with life: orange butterflies like smaller monarchs flitting their chaotic way up to Oregon.
How incredible it is to see that much blooming life in the middle of a desert!
Where does that color come from? How is it possible that a flower can find the ingredients to make that brilliant blue and that bright yellow out of the desert sand? What magic happens in those roots and stems and leaves to take the dull, dead, desert, and push it up and out into the shape and beauty of a flower?
The butterflies do the same magic. Where does that orange come from? Not to mention where does that flying flapping, purposeful migration come from? Where does the life come from?
Somehow, and although it seems magical I know it’s not, the desert flower and the butterfly wing, are the end result of a process that starts in dirt. Doesn’t that make the dirt itself kind of glorious?
There’s a seed, or an egg. Or there’s a hibernating remnant of a hardy desert plant from previous years lying buried in the soil. And then through just the right combination of sunlight, and heat energy, and lots of rain, and not too much wind, and protection from insect pests and animals, and human beings that for once just leave it all alone and let it do its thing. Every few years it all works just so, and for a few weeks in February, March and April, the desert blooms.
And the bloom is gorgeous, of course. Worth a special drive. Or at least a look out the plane window as you fly over.
But it’s important, too, to remember, that those plants are there all the time. Maybe stunted and small. Maybe the only living part of the plant is buried beneath the soil. But it’s there. And the desert itself in its own kind of desolate beauty is there. The bloom is spectacular, and rare. But the scaffolding that the bloom eventually and fleetingly appears upon, is always there.
So to love the spring-time bloom, and not to appreciate the plant surviving through the desert summer and winter, is to make the same mistake that we make when we miss the flower blooming at our door in our rush to see some other, better, flower, somewhere else.
To praise the bloom and make a special trip to the desert to see it is somehow unjust to the plant that no one visited when it wasn’t blooming.
It’s all one thing: dirt and roots and stems and leaves and bloom. All one system: the few weeks of color and butterflies and all the long months of slow growth and keeping life going through the desperate conditions of desert heat and cold. It’s all one story. To love the flower in its fullness, standing there in the spring time, we should appreciate also the desert dirt, the waiting seeds, the deep roots searching for water, the stems, the leaves, all those months of slow process and patient waiting to be ready for the rain when at last it falls.
In wonder workings or some bush a flame,
we look for Truth and fancy it concealed
but in earth’s common things it stands revealed,
while grass and flowers and stars spell out the name.
When I met with the District Board and others a year ago to begin planning for this District Assembly, the first item on our agenda was to come up with a theme for this gathering.
I suggested two ideas. One was a feeling quality that I hoped we could have in our gathering. And the other was a metaphor for an aspect of healthy congregations that I hoped we would focus on.
The feeling quality was, “joy.” I wanted our gathering to be joyful. Wouldn’t that have been enough of a success all by itself? I wanted some joy.
And boy we’ve had it, right?
I’ve been missing joy in our Unitarian Universalism lately. We have been working hard on very difficult issues. We are deeply aware of the suffering in the world. We know the threat to our planet from climate change. We’re feeling the injustice of systemic forms of oppressions. And, of course, we’re all reacting to an astonishingly cruel and dangerous President and his cronies and enablers in the Administration. So times are tough. God knows. There are dis-spiriting issues that require our work. And these are dis-spiriting times.
But I know that spiritually healthy people can hold on to a form of transcendent joy even when working with the suffering of the world.
That was the embracing, realistic joy, I wanted to have at District Assembly. I didn’t want to invite my brothers and sisters in the faith to come to another Unitarian Universalist gathering where they would return home feeling weighted down instead of lifted up. Could we find, instead, this weekend, those parts of our experience where we could feel good, we could feel powerful, we could feel optimistic about our future, and successful with what we have right now?
And that feeling got me to think about where I find joy in my Unitarian Universalist experience. And I realized, appropriately for a District Assembly program, that where I find joy is in my congregation. When I’m here, with you, I’m happy. Here I feel lifted up, not weighted down. Here I feel good, and powerful. In our congregations I can be optimistic about our future. I’m proud of my church. I’m proud of these people. I’m proud of what we’re doing together. I see the difference we’re making in people’s lives, including our own.
Of course churches have their problems, too. Not every Board meeting is a delight. But some are. No, really. Some programs fail. We miss the mark. We struggle with the same issues of systemic oppression in our churches as does every other institution. And climate change has impact in the church kitchen and the church parking lot, as well as on a global scale, so we face it every day.
But as the planning team got together and began to discuss together our ideas for a District Assembly theme, we began to narrow down ideas to a metaphor I’ve already been using in this sermon.
What if, instead of focusing on the blooming flowers of our faith, what if we looked at the roots and stems and leaves? What if we talked about the dirt of our faith, and the power of a faith that rises from the ground up?
What if, instead of focusing on an expression of our faith, what we do with our faith, what we show of our faith, what if we focused on the support structures of our faith? What if, instead of picking an issue to tackle with our faith, we focused instead on the source of health and power that makes effective work on those issues possible?
I’m talking about the power of our healthy congregations.
Instead of making our gathering into an examination of some work required in our world and then a sending forth into the world to hopefully do that work, let’s gather this time, to recognize and celebrate where the power has to come from if we ever are going to have the strength to do that work in the world: healthy congregations.
The outward expression of our faith, the bloom at the ends of our stems, comes from stable ground, deep roots, strong stems, and nourishing leaves. We can’t be always about the blooms and neglect the ground and plant structures that support them. We can’t be only about the spring time expression of our faith, and disrespect the long summer, the fall, the quiet winter of our faith, too, where strength is developing, building, waiting. We shouldn’t always be so quick to rush off and make our faith flowers bloom somewhere else, while stepping over the beautiful flowers of faith, blooming right here at our door.
If someone would scatter seed on the ground
And would sleep and rise night and day,
The seed would sprout and grow.
The earth produces of itself
First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.
When the grain is ripe, the harvest has come.
Some of the programs we do in church or in the larger community are expressions of our faith. The harvest of our faith, as it were. The places where we demonstrate our faith or act or live out our faith.
But we live our faith, also, when we aren’t living out our faith, but just living it. The parts of our faith where we are holding, storing, doing the inward work of nurturing, strengthening, developing capacity.
I’m thinking about the soil and roots work of making sure our pledging is generous, making sure our buildings are accessible and the roof doesn’t leak. Making sure our leaders are trained and honored. Making sure there’s a solid RE program for every age of the lifespan. I’m talking about the super mundane stuff like making sure our Bylaws reflect our practice, and our practice reflects our bylaws, that people know where to get the information they need, that visitors are welcomed, and that worship recognizes that every Sunday might be somebody’s first ever experience of Unitarian Universalism and hopefully won’t be the last.
That is faith work we should be proud of. Work we should be excellent at. Work we should brag about when we do it well. Good solid church work that eventually allows us to push out a flower of our faith.
Wendell Berry talks about the importance of work we do in the present for the payoff in the future. He writes:
If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here,
That’s good. Work in the present that pays off later. But I’m talking about the payoff we get right now, too. The work of the church that is for this moment, for this gathered group of people. The church that is here this morning, in this room, at this door. The joy in the experience we all are having in this place, in this time.
The work of the church that doesn’t need to be for anything else. The church work for the joy of church itself. That ground and roots and stem and leaves work that isn’t everything in the life of our faith, but in the long months between blossoms, is the faith we are blessed to have.
Part Two: “In Us the Earth is Knowing”
I love the image from that hymn, “We are the earth, upright and proud.”
We are the earth. We happen to be the part of the earth that stands up, looks around, sees, and listens, wonders. We are the earth regarding itself. We are the earth, asking questions. Searching for meaning. Studying. Exploring. Philosophizing. Theologizing. Transforming our earthy experience into poetry and painting, hymns and anthems. “In us the earth is knowing.”
That we are a thinking animal is pretty cool.
That we are the earth thinking is even more interesting: the earth itself, thinking about itself, through itself.
Through our consciousness the earth expresses its own consciousness. Through our art the earth makes art. Our music is the earth’s songs of joy and sadness. Our love is the earth’s passions. Our hopes are the earth’s longings.
As we marked another Earth Day earlier this week, perhaps you were conscious of the harm that humans do to the earth when we think of ourselves as something separate from the earth. And how we begin to move toward healing and restoration of the earth when we remember our close connection to the earth. All is one. The breeze on our skin; the song in our mouth. The river that flows as we sit beside it; the blood that flows in our veins.
We are, the expression of the earth. But we are also the earth itself. The song depends on the singer. The action depends on the actor. The thought depends on the thinker. The living things of the earth depend on the earth.
Sometimes we over-privilege the expressions of the things in the world and forget this essential relationship between that what is produced and the thing doing the producing.
Does that make sense?
Think, for instance, of the situation in our churches.
How often, in our Unitarian Universalism, do we honor the outward expressions of our faith, the showy pieces of protests and actions and speeches, and sermons, without acknowledging the network of support that makes these outward expressions possible?
And yet without a healthy congregation underneath us there would be no action, no outreach, no public ministry, no minister. Or there might be, for a time, a faith expression, but without a healthy community behind that expression, the faith expression would be an unsustainable gesture that would soon burn through its resources and cease to be.
It would be like the human position of imagining ourselves independent from the earth, and only realizing at this late stage how perilous is our position about to burn ourselves out unless we become stewards, restorers, and sustainers of the earth that makes all our human expressions possible.
Yes?
So I mean to celebrate the outward expessions of our faith, but to celebrate also, the inward-focused sustaining, supporting work our churches require.
The pledge drive. The work party. The holy work of the monthly newsletter. The sacred potluck. The choir rehearsal. The person that remembers to order the candles for the Christmas Eve service. The one who gets there early to set up the chairs, or even better, the one who stays late to put the chairs away.
That is actually the way that most of us experience church. It’s the task. It’s the meeting. It’s answering the email. It’s making sure the announcement gets sent to the worship associate. And the table gets set up. And the dry erase board has a dry erase pen to go with it. Someone to greet the visitor. Someone to call the shut-in. The RE lesson you prepared even if no children showed up that day.
I love that church. That church fulfills and sustains me. That’s the church I want to go to, and the church I want to serve.
That is the church that the public expression of the church stands up from. And when the protest is over, that’s the church I want to go back to.
Part Three: “The Ground Below Us”
So what is the ground of your faith?
I don’t mean theologically. I mean practically.
Where does your faith arise from? Where do you go to restore your faith when it’s shaken? Where do you go to nurture your faith when it needs a little attention? Where is your faith fed, and watered, and given the sunlight it needs so it can blossom again.
I’ll answer for you, because I bet I know.
It’s here.
You come here. Or you go to wherever your church is.
You go to your church.
More specifically you go to your congregation. You go to the people. You go to the community.
You go to your minister, sure, because ministers have their role. But ministers are just one of the community. You go to choir rehearsal. And you go to the discussion group. And you go to your friend at church.
You go to the social event. You go, yes it’s true, to the Personnel Committee meeting, because they are going to talk about the employee medical benefits premiums, but really you go, because of the other people on the committee. They will be there.
And they will restore your faith. That person and that one and that one. They will smile. And ask about your day. And if you need to check in with something particularly heavy that happened in your life that week they will suspend the business of the meeting and they will listen. And maybe someone will give you an appropriate hug. And someone else will give you a call later in the week.
All of our faith springs up from this commonest of common ground, which is also the holiest of holy ground: a healthy congregation.
Everything we do to change the world. Every justice cause. All our righteous indignation. All our hopes and fears for ourselves and our world and everything we do in response to them, grows up from planting ourselves in a healthy congregation. “The ground below us, firm and free.”
What makes a healthy congregation? What makes a congregation healthy?
I could answer with the seven elements for a healthy church: building, staff, fundraising, finance, communications, policies, mission. Ask me later and I’ll give you that list.
But more than that, the ground of the ground, the holy ground of the holy ground, is people. Healthy congregations are healthy people in healthy community. People who want to be together. People who like to be together. People who like each other, who cherish each other, who support each other, who watch out for each other. People who speak the truth to each other in love. Who forgive each other. Who struggle and suffer and mourn together. And who recover and work and together, build it up again.
The ground below us, firm and free. Is really the ground around us.
Look around.
You’re looking at holy ground.