“THE SEASON OF RENEWAL”

A sermon by

The Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, September 13, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

The leaves are just barely starting to fall. It began about a week ago that I noticed them on our back porch. How did that happen? Where did the summer go? The change of season came so fast.

Looking at the title of this sermon, it appears I am to talk about “The Season of Renewal.” Such a sermon does not come easily, I confess, for sermons on renewal are typically reserved for spring, when the earth awakes from its sleep and the green and other colors pleasure our eyes. Spring is when life around us is renewed and we witness the abundance of nature. Sermons about renewal in spring are especially popular among us Unitarian Universalist ministers because . . . . well, because at that special time of year we can use all the metaphors we can get to talk about the resurrection story! Yes, our hymnbook includes the traditional Easter Hymn “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” but if you turn in the hymnal to the section on spring, you will find the exact same Easter tune with the title, “Lo, the Earth Awakes Again.” As a Unitarian Universalist minister, I can’t thank God enough for metaphors. And renewal, I’m quite aware, is an accustomed metaphor for spring.

But here it is on the edge of autumn, and I am to speak on “The Season of Renewal.” The truth is that all changes of seasons are about renewal, and more importantly, that all changes we experience in life are food to nourish renewal of life.

This lesson speaks to us through the poem and prayer of Rabbi Jack Riemer that was read earlier. The leaves are turning from green to fall colors, the birds are turning to head South, and animals turn to store food for the winter. For leaves, birds, and animals, says Riemer in his poem, “turning comes instinctively.”

But for us turning does not come so easily.
It takes an act of will for us to make a turn. 

It means breaking with old habits. …..
But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday's ways.

Spring is a time for renewal, not because it brings more abundant life, but because it changes, it re-directs, the life we’ve become used to living. Fall is also a time for changing life, and therefore also a time for renewal, an adjustment, a re-direction of life.

You may have heard the story about a traveler driving through New England, who eventually realized he wasn't sure about which road he was taking. So at the next village, he stopped a gentleman on the street, rolled down his window and said, "Sir, I need help. I'm lost."

The villager asked, "Do you know where you are?"

The traveler replied, "Yes, I saw the name of the town as I entered."

The villager asked, "Do you know where you want to go?"

The traveler responded that he did, and he named his destination.

The villager paused in thought, and finally turned back to the traveler. "Mister," he said, "You're not lost. You just need directions."

Change is going to happen. That is true for seasons, and it is true for life. The trick is to find directions to lead us through that change. For me this story gives some perspective. A person who is truly "lost" is a person who doesn't care where he or she is, or who doesn't care where they're going. A person is lost when he or she stays put when the world outside of their lives changes. A person is lost when directions don’t matter.

But a person who cares about how things turn out, and is working to find a destination, is not lost; that person is just in need of help and direction.

This distinction applies, I think, to the prospect of renewing the life we live. If one feels like

Ø life is stuck in some rut,

Ø or one feels like there's little or nothing to motivate us toward the future,

Ø or if one feels for the moment that the best of life is in the past,

Ø or if, like in the reading from Forrester Church, life is like a continuous reading of a page over and over, with glazed eyes, without any sense of what the words mean,

Ø or if life is such that no matter how hard one tries, each tomorrow seems as routine or as meaningless as yesterday,

… Then cheer up! You're not dead! You just need to be some kind of renewal!

Now I doubt that anyone in this room would object to being renewed. All of us know how refreshing it can feel. Still, it seems to me, after considering this topic for a while, that one quality essential to any life renewal is change. Change in circumstances, change in experience, change in perspective. Under normal conditions, life, without embracing change, tends toward stagnation and stasis. On the other hand, it is also true that change can seem threatening to us. So we face this real paradox that while all of us admit to the value of revitalizing life, we also have a natural resistance to, and a suspicion of, change, which is at the core of renewal.

To be renewed might mean, to pump into us new life energy, and thereby regularly renewing our passion for where life is going. It helps us get ready to turn to the next page of our lives.

There are endless examples which teach us how change often brings unanticipated feeling of renewal. There is the story of the composer Johannes Brahms, who

in old age announced to his friends that he was going to stop composing music and enjoy the time left to him. Several months went by without Brahms' writing a note. But there came the day when a new Brahms composition made its debut.

"I thought you weren't going to write anymore," a friend reminded him.

"I wasn't," the composer said, "but after a few days away from it, I was so happy at the thought of no more writing, that music came to me without effort."

Some changes in life circumstances are surprises; other changes can be downright scary. There are lots of changes we would wish away, if we could. Yet even frightening changes can provide an avenue for healthy new perspectives, for an opportunity to look at the world in new and positive ways. Just ask anyone who has come through a life-threatening illness or accident. The world looks a lot different on the other side of the experience, and often it appears a whole lot brighter and more colorful. Renewed, one might say.

It is surprising how ominous experiences can in fact become revitalizing ones by offering a new way of perceiving things that we never noticed before.

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It is change or new experiences or new insights that often serve as a source of renewal. For parents, for example, there can be extremely tough times and challenging circumstances that help restructure their own thinking about life and give us a fresh way of looking at our children. Most families understand the value of vacation not just so much because it might offer new and interesting scenery, but also because it forces new ways for each family member to relate to other family members simply because the routine circumstances of relationships are different from what is normal.

Perhaps the sense of freedom and renewal that comes with change is tied to the quality of human choice. Change usually (though not always) broadens the limits of our choices and allows us to make decisions we previously may never have considered. This is part of what freedom is all about.

It is amazing how many choices we have, what we can do with our lives. Remember the Rubik’s Cube toy, the box with a different color on each side, but nine different boxes per side, per color? Someone has computed the possible combinations of relationships on the cube and it comes out to over 43 quintillion (for those of us who have poor math literacy, that's about 43 trillion billion possible combinations!). This, however, is child’s play compared with the number of choices which face each one of us over a lifetime. Everything from what to eat or wear in a day, to what to read next or who to talk to next. Each of these simple decisions presents us daily with at least thousands of possible choices before us, and each one can be made constantly throughout the day, minute after minute, day after day, year after year. Each choice we make gives some shape to our future.

Changes in circumstances may or may not alter the number of choices we make at any point in our lives, but changes can profoundly refresh the way we look at choices.

It is probably a tenet of the Unitarian religion that there is no one right answer to any important question in life. Life is composed, in fact, of ambiguous answers, neither black nor white, but in varying shades of gray. More importantly, we would regret if that were not the case. We would probably be disappointed to find we traded our freedom, our ability to choose, for the comfort of right answers. If we knew with absolute certainty how to raise our children or what job we should take or who to marry or what to wear or what to read or when to go to bed or what to say to someone who is hurting, or whether there's a God or gods, or what happens when we die -- if we knew the answers to all questions of life, life itself would lose its vitality.

Life's vitality comes from our ability to choose, and changing circumstances keep our choices alive -- they renew our spirit. The very essence of life is choice; the very denial of life is being certain. Certainty smothers choice.

Agnes de Mille is a choreographic artist who put it this way:

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what is next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Not knowing the answers should not impede our choices. Being stuck should not prohibit moving on. It is our task to shape tomorrow, to renew our lives, revitalize them, into the world we inhabit. Sometimes to do this, we have to, as Forrest Church says, just "turn the page" to the next part of life, even when we don’t have the present part completely right. The next page might, in fact, bring new vision that makes present dilemmas unimportant.

And as Rabbi Riemer tells us, “it takes an act of will for us to make a turn.” Renewal doesn’t happen, it is a deliberate choice.

New concepts bring new perspectives, and new perspectives refresh our choices. Our religion, after all, is centered around freedom, and freedom is at the heart of choices about the future. It is up to us which perspective we choose. This is true of us as a church, and it is true of each of us as individuals.

Henry David Thoreau put it this way:

It is something to be able to paint a picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of art.

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The All Souls Board and Council has chosen this year as a time for “Renewal.” It is the theme for our church over the next year. After a decade of very important and practical work that brought us through our centennial and our successful renovation, now is the time to look more closely within and think about the direction of our future.

Next spring, Nancy and I will take a sabbatical leave, something that is often described as an experience of personal and professional renewal. Beginning this fall, and continuing through the sabbatical time, the church will be looking more closely at itself to find new ways of doing things, new ways of being a church and a community. This might involve some experimentation. This might involve some stretching of thinking. But it will definitely require the gifts of many people to step up and be part of the renewal effort.

Renewal is a continuing goal of life, something we must approach intentionally. Turning takes an act of will. This is true whether it be in relationship, job, lifestyle, church, or in more aspects of our personality. It gives us freedom, which gives us choice, which will give us a life that is more abundant, exciting and rich. I invite you to be participate in “turning the page” -- in your lives and in our church.

READING (Responsive) #634: by Rabbi Jack Riemer

Now is the time for turning.
The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red and orange.
The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the South.
The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for the winter.
For leaves, birds, and animals turning comes instinctively.
But for us turning does not come so easily.
It takes an act of will for us to make a turn.  It means breaking with old habits.
     It means admitting that we have been wrong;  and this is never easy.
It means losing face;  it means starting all over again;  and this is always painful.
     It means saying:  I am sorry.
It means recognizing that we have the ability to change.  These things are hard to do.
     But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday's ways.
God, help us to turn -- from callousness to sensitivity, from hostility to love, from pettiness to purpose, from envy to contentment, from carelessness to discipline, from fear to faith.
     Turn us around, O God, and bring us back toward You.
Revive our lives, as at the beginning.
     And turn us toward each other, God, for in isolation there is no life.

READING

From Lifecraft by Forrest Church

Think of your life as a book, difficult but potentially worthy. The cover attracted you. The first few chapters won your interest. Not a great book perhaps, but a good book. How will it turn out?

Thumbing through the pages of our lives, sometimes we get stuck. We read a single page over and over. Surely, this has happened to you. It happens often to me. I read a page only to realize that my mind wasn't tracking. So I go back to the top to read it again. As often as not, when I reread the page, I get even less out of it than I did the first time.... I concentrate harder, but to no avail. I go back to the top again, more anxious and dedicated than before to make sense of what I'm reading. This time, I really concentrate. I read the passage word for word. The words ring in my brain, but now they don't even compose sentences. The harder I try to get through this page of my book, the more incomprehensible it becomes. It means absolutely nothing.

If you are stuck at some point in your life, when the harder you try the less you comprehend, when you have read the same page three times with diminishing returns, my suggestion is this: Turn the page.

You will miss something, I understand that. [But] sometimes trying to find something you know you have missed delays you from discovering things that await you when you turn the page. Action. New characters. A turn in plot. Or the development of character, which almost never happens when we are stuck, going over the same old page, caught in a trance, looking for paragraphs and finding only sentences, or for sentences and finding only words.

How many ruts there are. How often we go back over what our parents did to us. Or some lover or hater, or bad boss, bad gene, or bad friend, even our own bad decisions indelibly etched on the page, forever to haunt us as we read them again and again waiting for some new insight, afraid to turn the page. Turn the page.

Don't assume that you have to get everything right with the past and the present before you dare approach an unknown future. Don't focus so hard that your focus blurs and the images double -- twice the problems, twice the troubles. You've been there. I know you have. It has to make sense and you just can't make sense of it, so you read it again and again. Resist the temptation. Turn the page. Put yourself in the big picture. Look out, not in. Look up. Try the heavens. Try a star. Try a loved one. Connect. Try enthusiasm, ecstasy, empathy. Try praying, practice dying. Then live. If you are stuck in one passage of your life, re-stock and re-launch. Turn the page.