It’s August 21st and I’m not at the beach. This is unusual for me and my family. We always used to go to the beach late in August. But this year we went in early July. We love Bethany beach. And it was as beautiful in July as it always was in August.
I love to walk along the ocean early in the morning. I’m drawn by the vastness, by the dawn’s early light. A new day on the beach makes me feel new born...I can imagine that anything is possible...I am filled with hope. I hate to sleep in at the beach...I hate to miss the chance for that early morning walk.
I scan the water for dolphins. I face the east feeling an urge to bow to the day. And I grip the sand with my toes, following footprints made by those who have gotten up even earlier than I.
This morning I speak to you of our new day as a congregation, and as individuals. I want to share witht you the beauty spread before our eyes, the vast possibilities of this moment. I speak of my hope in sacred community. I bow to the holiness of this day...to the holy in you....and I dig my toes into the footprints made by those who have walked here before me.
Some might think that a sermon about sand would be boring...or at least weird. But I find sand fascinating. I find that everything in life is richer and deeper and more interesting than one might imagine. Some people call this richness of daily life...ordinary miracles. I think of it as the amazing intersection of science and spirit...of the material and the mystical. This intersection has been remarked upon by great thinkers since the beginning of recorded history.
The poet William Blake did.
“To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.”
Blake’s words are my text for the sermon this morning. They are so wise. For, I believe we can see the world in a grain of sand. I believe that every part of nature contains the whole.
This accounts for the amazing pull that nature has on us. How long can you contemplate a single tree? Hours, days, a season, years, decades? I still can see in my mind’s eye the tree that sheltered me as a child...the tree I climbed into with my book. To feel the hint of truth in a wildflower or to see the mystery of life in the eyes of an old cat, to endlessly sift sand through your fingers or carry a stone in your pocket...is to touch the poet, the philosopher the mystic in yourself.
Theologically speaking, this deep experience of nature can be an awareness of the immanence of the divine. An experience of immanence is a sense that God or the holy exists in the material world. Many of our Unitarian forebears and many UU’s today reject the idea of a transcendent God in heaven in favor of an immanent spirit of holiness. I believe the holy or divine is both in and among us...that it comes into being in community.
When I walk on the beach in the early morning, it is easy to feel the presence of the holy surrounding me, holding me, blessing me.
And it is possible, there are moments ...when we feel that same power, that same heightened energy and beauty in halls of worship, in sanctuaries filled with light and children and the shining eyes of lovely people.
That’s what brings us back to church every Sunday. The possibility of feeling that power, the inspiration of holy light, the blessing of voices joined in song, the one word that helps us see the world of truth and beauty that is all around us....and of which we are a part.
To see the world in a grain of sand. Sand offers up so many perspectives, so much evidence of the whole world. Geologist, Raymond Siever, has written...
“Sandstone is my favorite kind of rock. It reveals the history of the planet, it is easily accessible for simple physical and chemical testing...it relates to mountains, rivers, deserts, glaciers and the ocean floor and sand is a tracer of all movements of the earth’s material.”
Sand has long been used to measure time. How much sand would run through a giant hour glass in the course of this sermon? Remember that huge hour glass in the Wizard of Oz...in the witches castle...remember how your anxiety rose as you watched the sand fall....there was no stopping it, no stopping the sand, no stopping time.
Sand contains both temporary and eternal qualities. The lines we draw in the sand at the water’s edge are wiped clean with every tide. The sand is blown about and washed away....and each morning the beach is renewed. Each morning, the sand offers, once again, a clean slate.
This morning we stand on the pristine edge of a new day. This morning we share a brief succession of precious moments...the sand is running through the hour glass–this is the moment we have. I call us to live this moment fully. To imagine and to embody, to experience, the fullness of all that is possible in this very moment...and in each moment.
Reflections on time are central to religious thought. The meanings of life and death are informed by questions of time. Did you see the story in the paper about the woman who died at age 110...How do we measure a life, is it by duration? A famous Unitarian sermon by William Ellery Channing asked the question...what is transient and what is permanent in this life...are lasting things more valued than things that pass quickly and are gone?
Are longer marriages better than brief ones? Are old traditions more meaningful that new ones? An infant’s life less meaningful than the life of an elderly person?
Some religions give up on the temporal altogether...they suggest that only everlasting things matter...they focus on eternal life almost exclusively, they hold that the supernatural or infinite is more relevant than finite nature.
Religion has been arguing about time for a long time. Was the earth created in six days? Did the Hebrew patriarchs live several hundred years? Is the Bible literally true throughout time? Is the end time coming?
And questions of time rise in lesser matters as well. Should the church service be at 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock? Should we have Sunday school in the summer? How long should a moment of silence last? Can we expect teenagers to get up early? When will our new building be finished? What is a good length of time for a minister to serve a congregation? Yes, religion has been arguing about time for a long time.
Buddhist thought and practice weave together the concept of change with the concept of the eternal...suggesting that all is change, that change itself is eternal, that we must let go of each passing moment, learn not to cling, but to let go into the next moment and the next. This is, for me, a challenging part of Buddhism...acceptance of the fleeting nature of life, the letting go of one moment and the embracing of the next.
Sand teaches the same lesson. Your sand castle, no matter how well constructed, will not last. The dune you walked today will be changed in shape and position next season. The split of land at the edge of the river may one day become a penninsula.
Sand flows, piles up, blows, gets buried, hardens, softens–sand is ever-changing. Separately each grain of sand, though it embodies a world of potential...can be blown wildly, aimlessly about. But in combination, grains of sand...become a force of nature, a desert, a storm, an island, a cave bearing the drawings of ancient peoples.
Remember the movie, The English Patient, in the opening scene, a plane circles desert sands....you see the rolling lines of dunes, the pattern of the wind on the sand...it takes a while to figure out what you’re seeing....and later the film takes you into a cave...where pictures are drawn on the sandstone walls...it was, for me, a lasting image, a primal scene. Sand as a canvass.
Thinking about sand and deserts brings to mind soldiers in Iraq and Afganistan–how strange that landscape must be for men and women from the midwest or the Atlantic states...they must struggle daily with the harsher realities of sand....sand in their eyes, in their beds, in their shoes.
If the world is seen in a grain of sand...then there we will also find suffering and war and oil and pain and hunger.
Also, this week were the desert pictures from Gaza...and the removal of the Jewish settlers there....reminding us of the sacredness of a piece of land, the human need for a home place, for roots that reach across generations...seeing those people torn for their homes, however necessary politically, was a searing scene. The desert is a canvass, a slate for the story of a people.
As we engage metaphor and symbol, as we use poetry to inspire creative thought, it is important to avoid romanticism, over-simplification, naiveté. Present in all our lives...present in all of life, is struggle....and the paradox of that which is passing away, and that which is coming into being.
Each moment, each moment of our lives, carries the possibility of death and destruction as well as renewal and birth. A few weeks ago I visited the botanical gardens in Chicago...I found myself transfixed before a pond filled with water lilies...dozens and dozens of deep green lily pads were floating together supporting beautiful yellow flowers. The flowers were in various stages of the life cycle...some were new buds, green and tightly shut....and some buds were ready to burst open...some flowers were shyly just beginning to warm to the light, and others were in full display...some flowers had finished blooming, had shed their petals and left the stem lying spent on the surface of the water...The scene seemed to capture life in a time-lapse photo...all phases of the birth, life and death of the water lilies visible simultaneously.
When you pay close attention, you see that life is like this...all things visible simultaneously...the whole world in a grain of sand. Birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, middle age, old age, dying, death...beauty, ugliness, strength, weakness, celebration, loss....all laid out before us every day.
Too often we see only partially. We feel the anguish of loss so profoundly that we fail to see the green bud.
This is the challenge of human consciousness...to know death intimately and still believe in new life, to know suffering and still hold to hope....to know failure and still try again, to know loss and still to open to love.
We’ve all been through a lot. When I speak of this new day and its possibilities...I speak not naively but aware that we all come to this moment with the maturity of experience...We all stand in the foot prints of those who have gone before us (our parents who were church leaders in their day, the minister of our youth, who we still yearn for, the ministers of the Rockville congregation who we still miss and love, the lay leaders who founded this church, who have given of their energy and money and dedication) ....we think not only of the strengths and successes of the past, but also of the struggles, and the hurts.
We think, not only of the struggles and hurts, but of our vision and dreams. We hold all of this in our consciousness simultaneously....we live in the time-lasped history of this congregation. And so we inhabit this precious moment in time...hold all of this...in our hearts.
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour is a spiritual exercise, an act of religious and ethical maturity.
Blake, was, most likely, referencing God’s hand, God’s creativity...but in our liberal religious tradition, we more often, reference humanity. We tend to think that we hold infinity in our own palm and that eternity is present in this hour and that here, now, we can exercise some creative capacity.
The liberal humanism of Unitarian Universalism has in recent years been softened and humbled by an increased sense of mystery and holiness. Just as the edge of the ocean shore offers evidence of both nature’s hand and humanity’s footprints...here in religious community, and in our daily lives...we experience a unique and powerful awareness of having the power in our humanness to affect events, while at the same time....experiencing limitations.
Like the lilies on the pond...each moment offers the full array of possibilities of life and death and everything in between. We live our lives in the time-lapsed frame of the whole.
There is sand in deserts because they are low places and sand collects in low places. Sand accumulates...it buries things. Sand is everywhere. Stand still for too long and you will be covered with it...buried under it.
Asking us to think about what history, what life we stand upon...Dillard describes the excavation site in China near the city of Xi’an, the place where the terra cotta soldiers were uncovered in the 1980’s. An emperor’s tomb was found and with him were buried hundreds, thousands, of clay soldiers...almost full size, detailed clay soldiers. Custom has been for an emperor to bury his army of living men with him...but first Chinese Emperor Qin found a more compassionate solution... Dillard visited this site as the soldiers were being disentombed. She writes,
“There at the top of the stairs was the world, acres and miles of open land, an arc of the planet, curving off and lighted in the distance under the morning sky. At my feet and stretching off into the distance, I saw nothing resembling an archeological dig. I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and a neck. Everything was the same color, the terra cotta earth and the people–the color of plant pots.
“Everywhere the clay people came crawling from the deep ground. The earth was yielding these bodies, it erupted them forth, it pressed them out. The same tan soil that embedded these people also made them, it grew and bore them. The clay people were the earth itself, only shaped.”
The clay people were the earth itself, only shaped. The world in a grain of sand.
We also are shaped by the land upon which we build and live. As urban dwellers it is easy to lose sight of our connection to the land...to the history of the land.
One of the blessings of our building project here at UUCR is to remind us of our connection to this piece of land. All the dust and dirt that is messing things up reminds us of how it is we build. First we dig. We find out what is buried here. Then we begin to shape. Then the rains come. Then we are shaped by nature. Then we set down the foundation. Then we begin to shape again. It is, as we are learning, a messy process...over which we have only partial control.
This is true of the internal congregational structure as well as the bricks and mortar structure.
So here we are on the shore of a new day as a congregation. We stand upon our history. We dig, we shape, the rains come, the sun returns, we shape again.
Somehow we have come to this place, to this moment in time, together. We could have been any other place...it could have been any other time. But here we are holding infinity in our collective palm and sharing this eternal hour.
Protestant theologian Paul Tillich speaks of the kairos moment...the moment toward which all things have moved....there is a moment in time, which carries an auspicious quality...the time is right for a particular action to be taken. Tillich thought of it as an intersection of divine potential and human potential.
Rosa Parks sat down on the bus in Montgomery Alabama at a kairos moment... Law students in Illinois challenged the moral dilemma of capital punishment at the moment when DNA evidence made changes in the law possible...a kairos moment. The Berlin wall came down at a kairos moment. Perhaps Cindy Sheenan, the mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq is acting at a moment of kairos.
So what does all of this rumination on time and change, on sand and eternity mean for us? Well, I’m not sure yet. But I’m hopeful. And I sense you are hopeful as well. We will be welcoming many visitors this fall. We will be making ourselves more visible in the community. We will be moving into our new worship space. We will be welcoming more children and families.
Let’s enjoy our walk on the beach. Let’s write our history in the sand. Let’s be aware of those in whose footsteps we follow. Let’s make the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville a place of welcome...a place of intersection of science and spirituality, of old and new, of young and old, of humanist and mystic, of Republican and Democratic and progressive...of working class and middle class and poor and privileged.
Let’s not stand still and let the dust bury us too soon.
There are two upcoming activities that I want everyone to participate in... Friday September 9th...a Party and Dance to welcome me, your new minister.... And the last weekend in September...Friday night and/or Saturday, the “Start-Up Weekend” for our shared ministry.
This will be the time for goal-setting, for sharing expectations....for imagining what is possible in the coming year and how to achieve it and take care of each other along the way.
My primary task as minister is to be your spiritual guide. I will try to bring a sense of spirit and a moral compass to all that we do together. This is easy for me, because I see with a religious eye, meaning I see the divine seed in each of you. Sometimes I have trouble seeing the divine in myself, however, so I will count on you to reflect that back to me....just as you see and reflect the best in each other. So there will be a light shining, bouncing off the walls and between the buildings....as we do as this divine reflecting back and forth.
The sand has moved through the hour glass. And we have shared this eternal moment. Let us hold infinity gently in our palm. Let us celebrate the world in each grain of sand and the heaven in each wildflower.
I bow to the divine in you. Now may you bow to the divine in one another.
Amen...Blessed be.