A Spiritual Fire We Pass On: Sermon for High School Senior Recognition Sunday
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- Created on Sunday, 17 May 2009 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2009-05-17-9am-sermon.mp3}
I’m thinking about the high school seniors who will be here at 11 am to be recognized and sent out into the world with the blessing
Of this congregation
Where they have come over the years
Finding their footing, finding we hope some fun, some learning, some growing, a number of seniors met with Gary at his house on Wednesday night and talked about some of these experiences
Like Transylvania, City Year, youth group, Common Cathedral, New Orleans, being an angel at Christmas, Coming of Age and so many more
Experiences that have challenged them, changed them, helped them become, in even the smallest of ways, the person they are
When I first came to First Parish in 1997, I had 2 children, little girls who were 3 and 5
And this big bustling parish was all a whirl to me as I tried to learn names and faces,
Figure out committees and governance structure
I had served churches much smaller than this one and it took me a quite to get my feet under me.
And in the midst of that, I met some of you who are now high school seniors.
I have a tendency (annoying to some)
When I meet someone, especially a child, to remember them at the age I first saw their face.
So in my mind’s eye I am picturing you now,
You are a six year old girl, dark eyes, shy
Hanging back by your mother’s side in coffee hour
You are an 8 year old boy in a baseball cap pulled down low over blond hair
Today your eyes are still brown or blue, your hair is still red, and I guess that child is still somewhere inside of you but now you are young women and young men,
Poised here at the edge of high school,
The whirl of proms and graduations,
Poised on the edge of the next leg of the journey we call life.
“Once when the lawn was a golden green,” the poet writes
And the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects,
I lay in the grass
Feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
What I would become and where I would find myself….”
Whether we came to this community as a child or more recently,
We find here, I hope, a place where we can lie down, metaphorically, in the grass for a while,
Where we can wonder about things in a new way.
Where we can take a step back from the rush and roar,
From lives that get too scheduled or stressed
And muse, reflect:
“What I would become and where I would find myself”
We come here in search of a community that will help us grow into the person we really want to be in this life time.
We come seeking spiritual sustenance, especially when life tests us
When parents get ill, our children face challenges, our marriages falter, jobs melt away, a new diagnosis comes
And we come to try to give our children
(Maybe even ourselves?)
A spiritual foundation.
What is that foundation?
Well, it’s a personal foundation for sure – an individual orientation or grounding in the values of reverence, dignity and justice expressed in our benediction and in our UU tradition. Things we want our children to know and live by.
It’s a collective grounding too, in a Unitarian Universalism that stretches across this country and around the world
(you who have gone to Transylvania know that better than anyone).
We see that foundation shining in the eyes of the the people here right now, sitting around us in the pews, it’s in the eyes of the young people in these first two rows.
But it isn’t just the here and now. Because the community you can see with your own eyes today is part of something much bigger that is not visible.
It’s the foundation we walk on, unaware, every step of our journey,
The boulders of human spirit and the shoulders of forebears,
A kind of physical and spiritual DNA we inherit and have in different ways passed on to others.
Although we can’t see with our eyes the women and men that came before us, sitting here as we do, bringing their babies to be blessed, their beloved dead to be buried,
Although we can’t see with our eyes the ones who will come after us here,
We are connected to them I believe in some mysterious way
With their struggles and sorrows,
Their courage, weariness and hope
We put our grief alongside their grief,
We gain our strength from their strengths.
We are connected to people like the little boy who grew up in the next town over,
Whose grandfather was a captain there on the Lexington common the day that first shot was fired in the American Revolution
We are connected to this boy who grew up on a farm and whose family was too poor to send him to Harvard Divinity School, so he had to wait and work and wait and work.
We are connected to this young man who liked to learn so much it was like he was inhaling knowledge, learning languages by the dozen, piling up books by the thousands.
This boy who when he became a man realized that he was living at a specific time in history, a time when there were slaves in this country
And he realized with all he had in him that his soul was calling him away from the life he loved, his parsonage in the countryside with pink phlox in the garden and books in the study
Calling him into a life of action to fight this evil thing called slavery with all his might and his main.
We are connected to this young minister who wrote his sermons with a pistol on his desk in case a slave showed up and needing his help.
To this man who preached before thousands in Boston, moving them to tears and to a kind of inward stillness
As he spoke to them in words they’d never heard before about religion and life
Who spoke to them about a God who was different from the distant God of the Bible,
A God who was closer, more immanent, more present in the stars and winds and in the days of their own lives.
We are connected to this man who fought so hard to make the world a better place that his body wore out before he was 50 years old
Who fled to Italy to get better, who died there in Florence and you can visit his grave there to this day.
We are connected to this man who said “The arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Words that Martin Luther King, Jr. would take up so many years later in his cry for civil rights.
His name was Theodore Parker,
He was a Unitarian.
We are connected to him and his fire and his passion even now.
We are connected to that little girl who grew up in Oxford, Massachusetts.
Her family didn’t’ have a lot of money, her mother worked so hard she was weary and strict.
She was 11 when the brother she loved best in all the world fell off a high ladder and lay there so close to death.
For two years she nursed him and when she grew up and was teaching near Washington DC and the Civil War was raging, she thought of the wounded men on the battlefield. In that day and age, they would load up the wounded soldiers and take them miles away to where the doctors and medicine were waiting. And by the time they got there, so many had died.
We are connected to this young woman who had a big idea. Instead of bringing the wounded from the battlefield, she would bring all that they needed to them.
And when the Army disagreed, when they said no,
When she heard rumors of a battle about to begin,
She got up at 1 in the morning and loaded the mule-drawn wagon herself.
She put in lanterns and candles, bandages and food and water and drove that wagon to a place called Antietam.
She took an old barn, made it into a makeshift hospital and the next day when the fight broke out,
She was there and she was ready.
The soldiers poured in, arms and legs blown off
Desperately wounded
To lie on hay bales in the barn or on the floor
To get the help they needed right there right then.
And all night long, the surgeons worked by the light of the lanterns she had brought
The day was September 17 1862 and it was the Battle of Antietam and 23,000 died that day, more than in any other single day of the Civil War
And if it hadn’t been for this young woman,
How many more would have died that day?
Her name was Clara Barton
She was a Universalist
We are connected to her.
To her anger and her energy and her determination to respond to the age she lived in and make a difference.
These are just 2 stories. There are so many more.
But this is the line in which we stand, as Unitarian Universalists.
These are our people
They are the community we join
The spiritual rock we stand on.
“We live not by things but by the meaning of things,” we read from St. Antoine d’Exupery today. These are the passwords that needed to be handed down from one generation to another.
This is the spiritual fire we inherit, you and I. This is the fire that burns somewhere inside this tradition and it is the spark we try to pass on to each other
This flame of all that is holy and alive and real.
So let us connect with that fire, and let us connect with the spiritual fire that lies inside each one of us.
“Once when the lawn was a golden green….I lay in the grass….and wondered what I would become and where I would find myself,
And though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
That the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
My name as if for the first time . . . . .
Whether you are a high school senior,
Or you have been here for years or you are brand new today
Wherever you are in your journey,
Come, we say to each other, lie in the grass,
Here under the starry sky
Feeling the sure foundation of those who have gone before
Wondering about the spiritual fire of those who will come next
These young people we celebrate today who are next in line
Let us lie in the grass under a wide sky and hear our names
As if for the first time ever
And begin to find
Our own place
In this great beautiful world
Which needs each one of us so very much.