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SERMON: Choose to Bless the World
Rev. Wendy McNiven
“10 simple things you can do today that will make you happier”[1]:
#6. Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical number. … to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives. … spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. What about spending our time on other people? A study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away: … scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise [they] have tested.
The author of Luke-Acts was right in saying “It is better to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:5)
For most people, the natural tendency is to want to help others and to be of service in some way. Especially, we want to be of service to people we love or are friends with. Also when we see a way to make a difference for someone who is in need – even when we don’t know the person. We all do it. Some of you volunteer to feed the hungry citizens of Kamloops at Pit Stop. Some donate money to beneficial causes. You pick up litter or pack Christmas hampers or buy goats for Guatemala. You even serve on the board of the church!
When we feel as though we can make a real contribution, we are mostly eager to do that.
“Your gifts / whatever you discover them to be / can be used to bless or curse the world.”
Not everybody is “gifted” in obvious ways. Each of us has been shaped at least in part by our heritage: our genes, culture, family birth order, economic environment, our social associations. We have shaped ourselves to some extent, but it hasn’t all been up to us. But that’s neither an excuse for mediocrity, nor an excuse for down-playing one’s own inner beauty, uniqueness or ability to give love.
Malala Yousafzai has a gift of courage. If you find you need heroic examples to bolster your own strength, Malala could be such a person. When I accidentally tuned in last week to an interview between Malala and CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti, I expected to be unimpressed. Instead, I was deeply moved … blown away, even. This young woman was clear and articulate. She described, as if commonplace, the offences visited on people she knows, people her family knows, people in Pakistan who do not support the Taliban’s point of view. If it happened in Canada, we would be utterly shocked and outraged. Sixteen-year-old Malala refuses to allow the circumstances of her people to deprive her of hope or love. She refuses to allow fear to have the upper hand.
She has a gift for leadership. Not everyone has that. It remains to be seen whether or not her heroism results in any changes to educational opportunities for girls in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the world is blessed by her actions.
What are your gifts? What makes you come alive? That’s the place from which you can make your mark.
I don’t want anybody to hear in this sermon that there is a big measuring stick somewhere that says whether your “gifts” are adequate or not. I’m not going to compete with Margaret at the piano, for example. Does that mean I can’t enjoy being musical at all? It’s up to me to discover what my gifts are, and live from that place. I want us to live by the truth that everybody has something to contribute. Each of us comes alive in our own ways.
If it is human nature to give, why is there a need for the instruction to “choose to bless the world and not to curse it”?
I am inviting you, us, to look at the spiritual depth that lies below our conviction to be good people.
It is not just an act of will. It is MORE than an act of will. We need will power, to be sure. But will-power flags from time to time, even for the strongest of us.
If Unitarian activists are guilty of something in the area of social justice, it might be that we can be relentlessly earnest, demanding of ourselves constantly to labour to shape, heal and change the world for the better. And for this good-hearted labour, some of us pay a high price: burn-out. Compassion fatigue. Loss of heart.
People who find a spiritual reservoir on which to draw are likely to find their strength has more resilience.
Quoting the earlier reading from Rebecca Parker[2]:
The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will
a moving forward into the world
with the intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition,
a confession of surprise,
a grateful acknowledgment
that in the midst of a broken world
unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.
There is an embrace of kindness,
that encompasses all life,
even yours
Life is full of complexity and contradiction. In the midst of brokenness, there is beauty and grace and mystery.
I love this poem by Rebecca Parker, and I am inspired by the depth of theological, social and political analysis that underlies it. The poem says so much in its short lines. For Parker, her faith, this awe and connection with the Mystery beyond, is what keeps her - and it’s the same for many others – keeps her alive and active. This is what under-girds that strength to bless the world and not to curse it. She articulates an awareness of the beauty and grace and mystery of life, holding this awareness close, even in the face of sorrow, injustice, agony, and environmental threat.
Maybe this beauty and grace is God. Maybe it would be called from a more humanist sensibility: universal life force, or reverence and awe. Whatever this spiritual touchstone is that is bigger than you or me, we’re not It. Call it Earth, or universal love, or the Buddha nature, or “that which holds all” – we collaborate with this power as co-workers, in our choosing to bless the world.
Parker goes on to confess her faith further:
And while there is injustice,
anesthetization, or evil
there moves
a holy disturbance,
a benevolent rage,
a revolutionary love
protesting, urging, insisting
that which is sacred will not be defiled.
This holy disturbance, this benevolent rage, this revolutionary love which protests and urges and insists that which is sacred will not be defiled – I think that is what WE each tap into – a collective unconscious perhaps. It is what comes up within us, each of us, when we feel that familiar righteous indignation at unfairness; when we feel outraged and overwhelmed and unspeakably sorrowful at the forces which defile Life, whether “Nature” or human. And there are many of them – cursing the world, if you like. I need not list them for you. It is enough that you know they are there, and have encountered some of them yourself.
Those who bless the world live their life
as a gesture of thanks
for this beauty
and this rage.
To “bless the world” means to give, to enhance life, to contribute to positive change, to create benevolence, or act out of compassion, to love. It evokes that Gandhian saying “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Malala Yousafzai is choosing to bless the world, and it looks like she is in touch with both the benevolent rage and the revolutionary love. In an interview with Jon Stewart, she sounded almost like she was channeling Gandhi. (
“In the key moment of the interview, Stewart asked her how she reacted when she learned that the Taliban wanted her dead. Her answer was absolutely remarkable:
I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, 'If he comes, what would you do Malala?' then I would reply to myself, 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But then I said, 'If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.' Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that 'I even want education for your children as well.' And I will tell him, 'That's what I want to tell you, now do what you want.'”
She’s right – in every moment, we have a choice to become like our tormentor, or to become what we want to see. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Gandhi said this.
It applies to each of us, every day.
Quoting Parker again:
The choice to bless the world
… will draw you into community,
the endeavor shared,
the heritage passed on,
the companionship of struggle,
the importance of keeping faith,
the life of ritual and praise,
the comfort of human friendship,
the company of earth
its chorus of life
welcoming you.
Not only are we supported by that Bigger Than, we are supported by one another.
This community into which we are drawn can offer us companionship on our journey. It’s something that happens in the process of our all coming together. It isn’t something that one or another of us has to offer – it is a byproduct of all of us being in beloved community.
Recently, I attended the BC Regional Fall Gathering of UU’s, along with 2 others from UUFK. One of the events was a visioning exercise about the kind of CUC that we want to see in the future. I was at a table with 6 youth and one other adult. The young people – of course – had important contributions to make to the vision – and that’s appropriate, since they are the future. What they said they wanted was Community. What they said is that as far as they can tell, the adults don’t do community nearly as well as the youth do. They want deep connection with one another, and an environment of safety in which to bare their souls with one another, to share their dreams, to express their fears and doubts, and to receive validation for exactly who they are without pretense. That’s what their experience is, now, in Youth Cons, as they are called. They fear growing into adults and losing that affirmation and safety.
I tell you this as a testimony to the value of a healthy church community. I know that for some of those young people, their Youth Group was literally a life-saver. For one person, for example, the youth conference group gave their blessing and their acceptance to that young person with all the doubts and insecurities of sexuality and gender identity. Their blessing made her urge to suicide seem unnecessary. For other people, community can be a less literal life-saver, offering companionship in a lonely time, or inspiration in a hopeless space. You never know how your blessings will be received, when you live out of love.
That is the kind of community we are striving to build here.
Community needs maintaining. That is in part why we are creating a covenant of right relations for the fellowship. Just as for individuals, the gifts of this congregation are shaped in part by its heritage. UUFK did not come into being ex nihilo. It came out of a religious tradition, and thanks to a few individuals who had previous associations with that tradition. It was built using their social networks, and shaped by the economic times, and the number of children, and the pre-Facebook connections of twenty years ago. Later we will be talking more about what makes us come alive as a congregation, and how that directs our next steps.
And here we are, together in a boat, afloat on the sea of life, companions on the journey. And still, the chorus of life, that apparently unstoppable urge towards growth and change and aliveness, still it welcomes us. It offers us radical hospitality.
That is what we can offer to one another: radical hospitality. What a blessing that could be to the world, for us to practise radical hospitality – first with one another, and then gradually widening our circles of practice.
Blessing the world – doesn’t have to be this big difficult chore. It’s about how you get up in the morning, and how you interact – from wherever you are, in whatever state of mind. If you wake up grumpy, then pay attention to that, and decide if there is a way to turn that mood into a blessing. Find a way. Might have to change the mood; or might have to write about it, empathize with someone else who is grumpy, give yourself a blessing and forgiveness for being grumpy, or a gift of more sleep or a massage (by the gifted Heather Allen), or a phone call with your closest friend – some way that blesses you. You are part of the world, and need blessing, too.
And then, you can turn around and offer something of yourself to those nearby, or through some other means.
Choose to bless the world. Choose to bless this congregation. Choose to bless your own families – even yourself.
None of us alone can save the world.
Together – that is another possibility,
waiting.
Blessings. Shalom. May it be so. Amen.
[1] From a website called “10 simple things you can do today that will make you happier”
[2] Rebecca Anne Parker, “Benediction”, from Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now