Weekly Sermons

READING:  Rainer Maria Rilke

You, darkness, that I come from

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them! -

powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

READING: "Sweet Darkness" by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love....

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

SERMON:

Barbara Wagner and I were planning a Sunday Morning worship service some years ago - it was for a mid-December Sunday like today, and I wanted to celebrate the interplay of light and dark in the holiday season. I asked her if there were any hymns with a theme like that.

Barbara laughed and told me a story about the hymnbook we use, "Singing the Living Tradition." Barbara was on the national Commission that created the Unitarian Universalist Hymnbook - perhaps the first hymnbook ever to include language that described God as she, the first hymnbook to call us all "people" instead of "mankind", and the first hymnal in which darkness would not be equated with evil while light and white would be equated with all that is good and pure. Barbara explained that the Hymnbook Commission hoped to find hymns celebrating the blessings of darkness.

And that, Barbara explained, was almost impossible. Barbara and her colleagues on the Hymnbook Commission looked at tens of thousands of hymns - barely any hymn in all of Western religious history had anything good to say about darkness. In all of Western Literature, culture, and theology, it seemed that darkness was evil, darkness was despair, darkness meant something was wrong with the world.

When I first met Feminist theologians as a student, I felt at-home with their new images of the Feminine Spirit and the Feminine Divine - especially of a blessed darkness. I'd long felt an imbalance in light and dark - with too much of that glorious light from the world's big religions - the promises of eternal damnations and lakes of fire reminded me of the over-heated, over-whelming, over-the-top gods at the extremist edges of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Humanism, and all the other world's major religions. At the extremes - and too often in the mainstreams - were these relentlessly masculine gods (or not-gods) who always seemed to be burn as some sort of inescapable lights....

The light that blesses us may EN-lighten us, or it may harm us as it blazes us senseless. And we can enter more than one kind of darkness: darkness can be a consuming emptiness, or be like a womb, a nurturing shell for the unknown possibility of birth and rebirth, the advent of a new life.

Light and Dark have their meaning in their balance and contrast - too much of either one makes both meaningless. And like this existential balance between light and dark, we humans also need a balance between the self that lives in the lights of our shared public and the self that dwells in the solitude of the private.

I don't normally read gossip columns or magazines about celebrity-lives. But when lurid details of Tiger Woods private catastrophes became front-page news this past week, I confess that I found it interesting - and I worried that my interest might be too much like that terrible freeway accident is interesting as the rest of us safely drive-by. We all rubber-neck at freeway accidents, pouring the light of our curiosity in at what happened, evoking sadness for the losses of strangers, happiness we've been spared their fate, shame at our hopeful and prurient disgust at blood and destruction.

Tiger Woods' life has suddenly re-appeared like a gruesome, slow-motion freeway accident. I remember in 1996 how a 20-year old kid named Tiger with a racial identity he called "Cablinasian" became in a year the star player in a sport that was once notorious for its racism. Tiger Woods made golf interesting to me.

Tiger went professional at 20 years old - and signed $40 million dollars worth of endorsement contracts before he