MORE THAN A CELEBRATION

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday November 6th, 2005

It’s a fairly well-known point of minor historical trivia that the inspiration for Emerson’s “spectral” preacher, immortalized for generations of subsequent seminarians as the stellar example of what a minister should aspire NOT to become, was none other than the Reverend Mr. Barzillai Frost, junior colleague to Ralph Waldo’s own ninety-year-old step-grandfather Ezra Ripley just up the road at the First Parish in Concord. And I suspect that at least some of you knew this already, since it tends to be something that virtually every incoming Harvard Unitarian Universalist Divinity Student learns sometime during their first semester, and then often incorporates into one of their early student sermons. Emerson’s Divinity School address is perhaps the next best thing to scripture in our denomination, at least for clergy, and his admonition to “acquaint men [and one assumes women as well] at first hand with deity” is a charge which every rookie Unitarian Universalist preacher learns to take seriously. Yet one of the details often overlooked in those early student sermons is that Barzillai Frost faithfully served the people of Concord for two decades, and left those duties behind only when failing health forced him out of the ministry (and into an early grave) when he was still in his fifties, while Emerson resigned his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church after only three years, (although, in fairness, he then went on to become one of the most celebrated American writers of the 19th century, before finally passing away only a month shy of his eightieth birthday).

Here’s another seldom-mentioned bit of trivia about the Divinity School Address. Scholars believe that the “devout person who prized the Sabbath,” who Emerson overheard “say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church’...“ was actually Emerson’s own wife Lidian, and her comments were inspired, not by her local pastor Barzillai Frost, but by a visiting preacher, her husband’s half-uncle the Reverend Samuel Ripley. So even in the same family, people have different tastes. And although Emerson himself would later write in his essay on Self-Reliance “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,” like his wife he also prized both the sabbath and a good sermon. At the conclusion of the Divinity School Address he characterized preaching and the sabbath as the “two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us” and challenged his listeners to “let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing” rather than attempting to invent something new. The Sabbath he described as “the jubilee of the whole world, whose light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being,” while good preachers “speak the very truth, as...life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts...with new hope and new revelations....”

Bold statements like these may suggest to some that Sunday is really all about the sermon, along with the implicit corollary that without good preaching, the sabbath is basically a waste of time. Yet I doubt this is truly what Emerson had in mind. People spend their Sabbath attending church and participating in public worship for all sorts of other (some might even say better) reasons than listening to a sermon. Some come for the music, so that they might feel uplifted and inspired in ways that mere words can never really manage to achieve. Some come simply to see their friends, and to feel connected to a society of “neighbors and fellow creatures” with whom they share a common history, common values, and a common vision of the future. Or perhaps they are feeling alone and fragile, and long for that sense of connection to something larger and more enduring than themselves.

These are all great reasons for coming to church, and investing (I won’t say “spending”) ...investing an hour or so of our lives each week in the routine attempt to forge a connection, a “communion,” with something greater than ourselves alone: to a wider community of friends and family, neighbors and strangers, each of whom has inherent worth and dignity, and who together form part of the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are also a part; or to that vital Force which gives us life, and the powerful Spirit which gives life meaning -- to become part of the Circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and to know, deep within our hearts, that we are both part of the whole and still whole within ourselves. This is why people come to church, and wouldn’t it be great if it happened for everyone every Sunday. But you’ll have to confess, that’s a pretty tall order. Yet hopefully, on any given Sunday it happens for someone, and over time we all have our turn.

These are some of the reasons people come to church. But what do we actually DO here? And by this I don’t mean the important but mundane (that word means “worldly” by the way) work of institutional maintenance. Rather, what do we do when we participate in an Act of Worship? The word “liturgy” means literally “the work of the people” -- so what kind of religious or “spiritual” work are we talking about when we create a “liturgy” together?

Obviously the preaching has something to do with it. Saint Augustine once wrote that the purpose of a sermon is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” which logically leads me to the assumption that the purpose of listening to a sermon is to be instructed, delighted, and inspired. But there’s obviously a lot more going on here than just a sermon, which at best takes up only about 25-30% of our time together. So what else do we do in the way of “people work” during this hour on Sunday morning? And what do we hope to get back in return for our efforts?

I’d like to suggest that there are actually at least four different activities that comprise the work of worship, some of which overlap, all of which go together, and which build upon one another in order to change both our lives and the world for the better.

And the first of these, the one we talk about all the time, is the work of Celebration. Celebration, in the sense of its original Latin root, is the work of honoring or praising publicly -- it is the same root as the word “celebrity” -- and it also has a technical meaning in the sense of performing the ceremony of the Roman Catholic Mass, or formally observing any other public “holy” day. But I prefer the colloquial definition, which is “to have a convivial good time.” Celebration is the unrestrained expression of pure human joy. It’s a party, where we loosen up and let our hair down and just take pleasure in the experience of being alive. To worship is to celebrate: to honor and praise the force which gives us life, and to manifest that force in meaningful ways which fill us with a spirit of love and compassion and transform us into something better and greater than we now are.

But worship is more than just celebration. Worship is also an act of Devotion, through which we demonstrate our commitment to the values and principles that make our lives meaningful. Devotion is one of those great religious words which we hear all the time, but rarely take the time to ponder. A devotee is basically anyone who has taken a vow, and who by doing so not only becomes devoted, but also devout. The word simply oozes with connotations of piety and holiness, but generally when we hear it in ordinary usage it is almost always in the context of marriage and family: the devoted husband, wife, parent, child...people who are bound together not only by formal vows, but by bonds stronger than any vow. Yet ultimately these avowed obligations which bind us together are religious in nature: they also bind us again (RE-ligious) to something larger than ourselves, which was here before we got here and will still be here when we’ve gone.

The work of Worship also often includes an act of personal Sacrifice. In fact, if you just think back a bit about the likely historical and anthropological origins of worship, sacrifice was probably right there at the top of the list from day one. Sacrifice means giving up something of value, typically with the expectation of receiving back something even more valuable. Primitive people offered sacrifices of animals and agricultural produce -- and sometimes even the lives of other human beings -- in order to appease angry gods, or perhaps in the hope of cultivating divine favor. When someone sacrifices in baseball it means giving up an out in order to get a run, or at least to move a runner into scoring position. Yet on another level sacrifice is also an act of submission, acceptance, and obedience: the recognition and acknowledgment that there are certain things which are simply beyond our own power to control, and that we sometimes need help from a higher power in order to obtain or achieve the things we truly desire.

In the ancient world the sacrificial system also often functioned as a vehicle for the redistribution of wealth and the creation of social capital. Those who had been blessed with a bountiful harvest were expected to offer the first fruits of their produce to God at the local temple, where it went to support the priests and was also redistributed to those in need. The word “sacrifice” itself means, literally, “to make sacred.” When we surrender or “give up” some portion of ourselves and our goods to a greater power or a greater good, we undergo a process of personal transformation which somehow brings us closer to the power of Goodness itself, creating a relationship of trust and mutuality in which we receive back in proportion to what we have given away. It’s almost as if, by letting go of some things we create an open space in our lives which can then be filled with something else. When we stop trying to grasp and cling to everything in reach, our hands miraculously become free to embrace something new and different and even more precious.

This brings me to the fourth thing I wanted to talk about today, which is that the work of worship is also often simply an expression of Gratitude, which manifests itself through acts of Love and Creativity, Charity and Generosity. And it’s funny how those two sets of words have such different connotations, even though they are essentially synonyms. Charity MEANS Love. Generosity IS Creativity.

Gratitude is an attitude of thankfulness, and is related to a variety of other familiar English words which share the same Latin root: gratify and gratification (as in to give or receive pleasure or satisfaction), gratuity (which is generally some sort of gift or monetary “tip” for service), gratuitous (something that is uncalled for or done without sufficient reason), and of course gratis (meaning “free”).

Both charity and generosity also carry with them this same deeper sense of something ”freely given,” which is one of the things that differentiates these words from more general understandings of love and creativity. A profound sense of Gratitude is at the heart of many of the core values which inform both authentic spirituality and a meaningful religious faith and practice: compassion, hospitality, humility, forgiveness, to name just a few. We express our gratitude for what we have received -- beginning with the precious gift of life itself -- by “paying forward” to those in need: a tangible celebration of our devotion to a greater good, and the sacrifices we willingly make in order to attain it.

A few weeks ago you may recall I mentioned Rick Warren’s idea that worship is anything that makes God smile. I love this image, and try to keep it in mind throughout the week as I prepare myself to stand up here and lead our weekly worship service. It is a work we do in partial fulfillment of the mission explicit in our covenant: “to the end that all souls might grow into harmony with the Divine.”

And over the years I have learned to look for God’s smile in the smiling faces I look forward to seeing here every Sunday, as together we “raise a joyous noise to the Lord” and gather for prayer, and to make our offerings, and to hear a little preaching which attempts, at least, to convert life into truth, and thus bring us closer to both God and one another.

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