Make of Yourself a Light
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 14 November 2010 00:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2010-11-14-9am-sermon.mp3}
“Make of yourself a light,’ said the Buddha before he died.”
Mary Oliver says she thinks of these words in the morning “as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness,” as she watches that sky become suffused with pink.
She thinks of these words in the morning but for me, this week, it was in the late afternoon.
Standing in my yard, rake in hand
Dark comes earlier now in these days and I love that late afternoon light
That luminous time just before dusk.
I am raking; two boys play touch football.
The sky is a kind of orangey gold at the horizon and then a glimmering purple.
The moon comes out, the dusk deepens into gloaming, and I put away my rake and go inside. To light a candle on the kitchen counter. To start dinner. To do all the things we do to bring another ordinary day to its close.
It is November and the early darkness has us gathering our tribes around the table, lighting the lights, settling in for the winter. What is it inside of us that seems to crave that light? That needs it so?
“Let your little light shine, shine, shine,” the choir sang at the beginning of the service, “There’s someone down in the valley trying to get home.”
We come here and on some days, I am the one in that valley and on some days it is you.
You told me this week: Your sister is back in the hospital. You’re starting radiation you’ll go every day. You are moving. You like the new place. You don’t like it. You are home with the new baby and life is good.
We come here, each one of us, carrying a bit of the journey we are walking this week, we are in a sunny patch, we are in the shadows. We are on the mountain peak. We are walking the valley.
* * * * *
Make of yourself a light, the Buddha says but on some days that is not always the easiest thing to do. Things get in the way. Worries. Duties. Concerns. We turn away from our own inner light; it seems shaded; foggy; dim.
And perhaps that’s a reason why some of us come here:
To touch down into the deep well of our religious tradition,
this faith that has been burning bright and shining here for so many years,
to hear stories about women and men who have been scared and who have struggled who have tried to hold onto what is good in their own lives,
women and men who have tried new things, who have dared and dreamed
who have reached out to the stranger,
who have welcomed the lonely, the lost, the sick and the sad.
We come here because we know that just to be alive
is a gift beyond all imagining
We know that with our heads but sometimes our hearts forget,
Our busy lives rush us on and on
and we forget that gift, forget to live in a way that honors it.
We turn away, we drift, we grow distracted, petty
We come here because it can be hard for us to live in a way that most honors the gift of life
and because that’s what we really want to do deep down.
That’s the kind of person we want to be, awake, grateful, taking it all in
This day is all we have and we don’t want to miss it
We come here because part of us knows we’re going to need some help. We can’t do it alone.
We look into each other’s eyes
and listen to each other’s voices as we sing
and touch one’s another strength in this hour.
We rest in the spirit that fills this room, right here right now, can you feel it?
and then we pick ourselves up and go out those doors
and on a good day we’re a little stronger for the living of whatever it is that happens next, that life hands us next, that lands on our doorstep next.
We are not perfect people here we say. We are a human people.
We don’t always get it right. Sometimes, we let each other down. We make mistakes.
We say the wrong thing. We don’t say anything. We try to ask one another for forgiveness and start again.
We do it better on some days than on others, this loving each other, this loving our community into being.
We keep on trying.
Strengthen the fainthearted we say every week
and sometimes it is me that is the fainthearted
and sometimes it is you
but we keep on walking together
trying to love each other and love ourselves and love this world a little more.
And maybe, just maybe,
being part of this place makes us a little better equipped when we go out those doors to practise some of the things we sing about or talk about in here:
Small things like being more patient with a child, smiling at the check-out clerk, letting the other guy go first in traffic. Or big things like working on global warming or harassment of gay teenagers or any of a hundred passions you bring here.
“Religion isn’t something you think,” writes Karen Armstrong, “ it’s something you do.” That’s been true since ancient times, and it’s been true here.
* * * *
From the very beginning of this community,
When women and men walked out here from Cambridge,
When they hacked their way through thickets
Walked on rocks
Dug out holes in the ridge to live
From the very beginning
This faith community has done two fundamental things:
Loved one another, in here
Been oriented towards life, out there.
The first building they built that winter was the meetinghouse
This building is the fourth or fifth incarnation of that place
It was the center of their community
It was shelter
Shelter for them, their animals, their more treasured possessions
And it was emotional shelter. Spiritual shelter.
They could come together there and hang on to each other
You could come here and get comfort. You could come here and know people would take you in, notice when you were lonely, care for you when you were sick or sad. You knew they would rejoice when your baby was born and worry with you when you were up in the night with a sick child.
They would dance at your weddings and when your loved ones died, they would prepare the body, make the food for the funeral feast.
But that was not all.
It was a community that was oriented towards the outside world. Watching, learning, caring, acting in the world around them. the religious tussles of the 1700s, the years before the American Revolution, sending leaders out from here into the world, carrying news up and down the Eastern seaboard, opening the meetinghouse for the Provincial Congress, inviting Harvard College to take refuge here,
Providing leaders in the early days of the new nation
And in the days of the cultural renaissance that followed,
In the fight against slavery and on through the Civil War and the 20th century with its world wars, its civil rights struggles.
Time does not allow to tell the story today but this has been a place that has tried to take care of its own,
and made sure at the same time that it didn’t stay closed in on itself,
that it went out into the world and acted in that larger arena
From the beginning, this has been a community that has been called to love each other and to love the world and to let its light shine and we are doing that now.
We are walking through a transition time and we need to keep on walking. We need to be doing what we’ve been called to do: loving each other, loving the world, letting our light shine.
* * * * *
“An old man, he lay down….
And he might have said anything
Knowing it was his final hour . . . .
Around him, the villagers gathered
And stretched forward to listen….”
Make of yourselves a light the Buddha tells us and surely isn’t that what we are called to do here?
As individuals and as a community?
Whatever happens next,
I trust that I will go on trying to make of myself a light, trying to find a way to let the soul that I have been given deepen and grow and shine out in a world that needs it
I trust that you, this community will go on making of yourself a light, deepening, strengthening, shining in a world outside that needs you so very much.
We are walking through a transition time and we need to keep on walking.
We need to keep moving. We have things to do.
We have a ministry to celebrate this year, the ministry of this congregation and Gary Smith these last 22 years
We have a ministry to celebrate and lift up
And we need to turn our face to the future
Because there is more work to do and there is more joy to have
The world needs us and God knows we need the world
“Let your little light shine, shine, shine
There is someone down in the valley trying to get home.”
There are mothers in Haiti walking that valley, mothers who do not know from day to day how they will feed their children
There are single mothers in Massachusetts raising kids
There are fathers looking for work
Families worried about money
The least, the little and the lost
Systems that have lost their way
Structures that no longer make sense
That disenfranchise, exclude, push to the margins, leave out
Structures that snuff out life instead of breathing new life, new hope
Dorothy Day who grew up as a teenager in Chicago feeling that something wasn’t quite right with the world she saw around her, the bread lines, the depression, Dorothy Day who went on to become a Christian activist of the fiercest and most practical sort,
"No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless; there is too much work to do..We must take one step at a time."
We have work to do.
“Make of yourself a light,” the Buddha said and he was talking to us as individuals and he was talking to us as a community.
Our mission as a community is to make ourselves as strong and bright and shining a force as we can be for goodness and then to let that light shine, so in a world where there is a lot to despair over, we are a beacon for hope
We have playing to do. Playing music together, eating meals together, telling stories, getting to know one another better,
We are a religious community
We are true to what we have been from the beginning
Loving one another in here as best we can, some days better than others, loving each other in flawed and human ways
Engaging in the life of the world out there
Growing up leaders
Igniting sparks of hope
Teaching our children what it means to have character
Being a force for goodness in the world
Time and again people have come to this place where the three rivers meet
They have come because they are spiritually thirsty
They have come, we have come
Because we need a little more hope,
Because we need to keep on keeping on and on some days that is harder than others
We come for a feeling of rootedness in a world where we can feel adrift
No one is insignificant
Each person matters
Each spirit is needed here
“Make of yourself a light,” the Buddha said.
And if each one of us let our light shine and then we put them together,
You and you and you and me
So we are shining together, a community, a stronger brighter beacon to the world than we could ever be alone.
“Let your little light shine, shine, shine
There is someone down in the valley trying to get home.”
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