Weekly Sermons

READING: Darwin's Finches by Deborah Digges

1

My mother always called it a nest,

the multi-colored mass harvested

from her six daughters' brushes,

and handed it to one of us

after she had shaped it, as we sat in front

of the fire drying our hair.

She said some birds steal anything, a strand

of spider's web, or horse's mane,

the residue of sheep's wool in the grasses

near a fold

where every summer of her girlhood

hundreds nested.

Since then I've seen it for myself, their genius-

how they transform the useless.

I've seen plastics stripped and whittled

into a brilliant straw,

and newspapers-the dates, the years-

supporting the

underweavings.

2

As tonight in our bed by the window

you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean

the brush as my mother did, offering

the nest to the updraft.

I'd like to think it will be lifted as far

as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,

or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets,

the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects

lay their eggs.

Would this constitute an afterlife?

The story goes that sailors, moored for weeks

off islands they called paradise,

stood in the early sunlight

cutting their hair. And the rare

birds there, nameless, almost extinct,

came down around them

and cleaned the decks

and disappeared into the trees above the sea.

SERMON: Liaisons of Life #3

In 1905, my grandfather was 13-years old when he had to quit school and find work. When he finished helping his father work the rented farmland, he rented a horse from a neighbor and delivered groceries to nearby farm-families to earn some extra cash. He knew the landscape of his neighborhood very well.

My grandfather lived to be nearly 100 years old, and in his last years we drove with him to revisit the neighborhood that farmland had become - it had been purchased by the enormous Ohio State University, and in place of a countryside of fields, barns, and farmhouses there is now an urban landscape of streets, buildings, and parking lots. He recognized the names of streets, but what he saw was meaningless to him. My grandfather found the drive so alienating that we quickly left and never returned there.

I had some time to travel this past week, and when I travel I like to scan the radio spectrum for all the different broadcasts - what shows the local NPR station carries, what's being marketed to the young 20-something guys in different cities, or the latest pronouncements coming from the right-wing evangelical broadcasters.

Last week, as I drove, I listened to a broadcast of one of the many right-wing evangelical radio stations, and I listened closely to a lecture for young single women . The lecturer was calling on young women to "keep their purity" and encouraging her Christian listeners to have courage, that even though sexual liberation "may be the way things are in the world, ... we must remember we are in the world and not of the world."

I heard those words and I thought again of my grandfather, who was quite a flirt, even in his last years. I also thought of the utter look of loss on his face when we drove down that road he expected to look like home. He had, in fact, once been OF a specific place in the world, and that world was gone.

And I had to laugh at the backhanded gift in listening to right-wing radio: even as I find its creaky and fanatical theology to be strange and self-immolating, here I am, bound in this interconnected web of existence with them. My grandfather had once been a Director of Education in a Methodist Church, he had once lived by and even taught a theology much closer to today's right-wing evangelicals than the Unitarian Universalism I grew up with; and, even so, my grandfather, like every human who has ever lived, was completely OF this world, completely woven from and in the web of life that surrounds us.

If you're a visitor here today, I should explain that I'm referring to the Seventh Principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association. The Seventh Principle calls us to "respect for the interdependent web of all existence