One of the great joys of ministry, and there are more than a few, is the excuse to ponder a spiritual theme for a week or more and then share some thoughts about it.  Everyone’s different, I think you already knew that, but for me, I like to choose topic that, while it calls to me, when I begin the adventure I have no clear idea where I’m going to be when it concludes.  Today’s topic fits right in.  For years I have wondered about the concept of “spending time,” “spending our lives,” and just what it is we mean when we say it.  We use the word “spend” so freely and in so many ways, under so many circumstances – and, just perhaps, without a whole lot of thought about it.  But what’s really there?

 The more I did think about it, the more I came to realize that there are really two rather distinct topics here.  The first is the most obvious.  What is it that we value?  We are here such a brief instant of time.  How will we spend our lives?

 As an example, I have a dear friend, I’ve known him nearly twenty years, who spends most of his life being angry.  There is certainly much for a caring person to be angry about.  There is so much injustice in the world.  There is so much disappointment in the world.  There is so much that humanity could be doing to help one another.  And yet there is so little that is actually done to help.  For me, anger can be a positive thing if it moves us to stay involved and active.  But I would submit that to spend one’s life consumed by anger, however righteous, is at best a waste of precious life. 

 And then, as the Eagles put it in Take It to the Limit, yes, I am dating myself, “You can spend all your time making money.  You can spend all your love making time.”  Neither of these pursuits is spiritually rewarding.  And for many, I think, who approach their … golden years … after using their lifetime trying to maximize profits and accumulate toys, life can feel rather meaningless and empty – a life, if you will, belatedly discovered to be misspent. 

 So yes, how we choose to spend our lives can be a pretty important decision.  And it’s not irrevocable.  We can change course or, if you will, we can change our life-spending priorities.  And it is a choice.  True enough, most of us can’t choose to be, say, President.  And most of us can’t choose to cure cancer, or to win an Academy Award.  But we can choose, every day, whether or not we spend our lives in disengaged anger or in engaged hope.  We can spend our time lamenting a door that is closed, or spend it kicking a new door open, with new promise.  We can choose to spend ourselves looking out for number one, or looking out for others, or choose to spend ourselves looking out both for number one and for others – they aren’t mutually exclusive.  

But after all that, what really intrigues me and what I’d like to use the bulk of our time considering this morning, is our choice of the word “spend” to describe what we do with our lives, and how this one word and how we use it, so completely captures who we are as a culture, who we have become or, perhaps, who we might like to leave behind in favor of a new us.  So stay with me.  Let’s launch into this and see where it takes us.

 Have you noticed that with the word “spend,” we seem to boil the entirety of our lives down to an item of commerce?  We don’t live a life.  We spend it.  A life becomes a bank account … to be doled out carefully, even miserly. How will we spend our vacation?  How will we spend the day?  How will we spend our lives?

One may reasonably argue that it’s just words.  But I believe words matter.  We shape our words, and, perhaps even more importantly, our words shape us.  When we speak of spending our lives, we treat our lives like a commodity, like any commodity.  And, since life is a commodity, we can also try to buy it.   And, of course, when we buy something, we want the best value.  We want more, for less.  The idea of slavery becomes easier, though we prefer not to use the word.  Treating those who work for us as cheaply as we can becomes merely a dollars and cents proposition.  A life is just a commodity.  It becomes possible for us to say that this life is less valuable that that life.  The most obvious example is in the realm of sports, where players are quite literally bought and sold.  And, of course, it goes far, far deeper than that.

One of the things that captured my mind this past week is how and where we use the words “give” and “spend” in our daily lives.  Give time.  Spend time.  When we’re with our children, or our parents, or our friends, it’s something to ponder.  Are we giving time or spending time?  How do we phrase it?  And what are we telling our loved ones … and ourselves … by how we phrase it?

Is this just a word game?  I don’t think so.  When we spend, we want and expect something in return.  When we give, no exchange is expected.  Giving time and spending time really are quite different from one another.

So, do we want to “spend” time with our friends and family?  Is that the hallmark of our relationship?  Or might we want to think of it as giving time to those we care about?  And isn’t it interesting that we “give” love, but “spend” time? … though I have a feeling that all of us know at least a few people who rather carefully spend their love as well, very much expecting a return on their investment.

When we come together here, on the second and fourth Sundays of the month, are we spending time with each other?  Or perhaps are we giving time, or perhaps sharing time with one another?  Again, does it really matter what we say?  I think so.  I think our hearts know the difference.

Every day, on TV, on the radio, in our “news” papers and on billboards, we are told to buy.  You deserve a new car! … or at the very least a new toaster.  The economy’s in trouble?  It’s because you’re not spending enough.  That’s what we’re told.  And yet I am moved to wonder if the real problem is that too many of us aren’t giving enough. 

Why did Jesus tell his disciples that they had to give away everything they owned to the poor if they were to follow him?  Why did the Buddha give up being a prince to live a life of poverty?  Neither one has talked to me recently, so I can’t be certain, but I believe that it was not for the fact of it but rather for the example of it.  I don’t believe we have to give everything away to follow Jesus.  I don’t believe we need to become beggars to follow the Buddha, or Baha’ullah, or Hillel, or to walk any spiritual path.  But do I believe that it might be good from time to time for us to pause and to ponder: are we primarily spenders, or givers?

Maybe we could take a moment when we get home, each of us within the quiet and privacy of our own minds to ask ourselves: “Am I primarily a spender or a giver?”

It’s time for a reality check.  Personally, I would much prefer to live in a society where one’s ability to make money does not determine the quality of his or her healthcare.  But in case you haven’t noticed … we don’t.  I would much prefer to live in a society where we truly believed, as Jesus put it, that what you do to the least of these you do to me.  But again, the truth of it is: we don’t.  I would like so very much to live in the world that Micah described (4:3-4), “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.  But they shall sit every man under his vine and his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid.”  But again, this is not the world we live in.  If we want to eat, we need money.  If we want healthcare, we need money.  If we want a roof over our heads, we need money.  So I am not here today to encourage anyone to give everything away.  And I’m not going to suggest that if we’ll just give, give, give, 24/7, that we’ll somehow survive the madness.   But I also very much do not want us to lose sight of the world we would hope for, and, of course, work for.  And that, I would suggest, is a world rooted in giving, not spending. 

What I would ask of us this morning is this.  May we perhaps begin to frame things a little differently within our own minds, and, when we dare, in our discussions with others?  When we speak of our lives, our culture asks, “How do you spend your time?  How do you spend your life?”  What I have resolved to ask of myself … and of others as it comes up in conversation … is: “How, and to what, and to whom do you give your life?” 

If we can give our time to our parents, our children, our friends, even the stranger, it can be truly so much more rewarding than spending time with them.  The person who gives his/her time can be truly present for the other.  And so, we rewrite the title of this morning’s message.   Our question this morning is not, “How do we spend our lives?”  Rather it is, “How do we give our lives?” 

Amen.

Some are calling for the owner of the building to be tried for murder.  And surely he is the most directly complicit.  He’s kept the workers at slave labor payment and under deadly working conditions in order to produce the huge quantity of cheap clothes that the market demanded.  Others are pointing particularly at Wal-Mart, but also companies like J C Penney.  These are the companies that buy the cheap clothes at cheap prices.  They are the ones that demand that every possible “savings” be wrung from the manufacturing of the clothes … even at the expense of the safety of the workers.

But there is a much larger group that no one seems to be talking about.  And yet, it is this larger group that is the root cause of it all.  And this larger group is us.

Yes, the workers are kept under horrific conditions so that the manufacturer can make the cheap clothes so in demand by so many stores.  But WE are the consumers who continue to demand our clothes and everything else on the cheap.

Thus the soul-searching needs to begin with our own souls.  As Shakespeare has Cassius  put it, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  We are the ones who insist on cheap.  We not only shop sales, we now have “apps” to compare prices for us so that we can get our goods at the cheapest possible price.  What we continue to overlook, what we willfully and carefully continue to overlook, is just how high a price cheap comes at.

Cheap doesn’t magically appear out of the air.  Cheap has to be prepared with careful intention.

I will grant you that sometimes an item is high priced simply because the manufacturers feel they can get away with it.  Maybe it’s a patent-protected item like a drug.  Or maybe it’s a status item, where you are paying for the bragging rights.  Here, a generic or a “knock-off” that simply reflects the cost of decent production can bring the price down.  But better than nine times out of ten, that’s not how we get cheap.

Most of the time, we get cheap by paying the workers less.  One of the high costs of cheap in the U.S. is watching wages stagnate or even decline.  When that happens we are getting our items cheap off the wages and standard of living of the people who make what we buy.  I would submit to you that a major cause of the decline of the middle class in the United States can be found in our demand for cheap.

Another way to get an item cheap is to make it without regard for such “mundane” items as safety or the environment.  One of the reasons items from China have been so cheap can be seen in the massive amount of pollution that has gone into China’s water and air.  Now we are getting cheap not only at the cost of a worker’s wages but a people’s health.

So yes, when hundreds of underpaid workers are burned to death in Bangladesh, we should be angry.  But we should be mostly angry at ourselves.  Would Wal-Mart even exist if we didn’t shop there?

I submit that the cost of cheap is too high.  If we care about anyone other than ourselves (or is that anti-American?), the cost of cheap is too high.  It is much too high.  And we, the consumers, are the only ones who can truly make a difference.  We need to become ethical consumers, who think beyond our own pocket-book, and not self-centered seekers of cheap.  Our choice.  Not only will we have to live with it, but if we choose wrongly, more and more will continue to suffer and even die from it.

Palm Sunday is both very happy and full of dark portent, for it marks the beginning of Holy Week.  One week, from triumphantly entering Jerusalem to being crucified.  There is much to be learned from that week.  I very much look forward to the service, and the Palm Sunday message from a good friend who was a Catholic chaplain before becoming a full-time mom.

But I will confess that  it is Passover that calls to me.  It always has.  And it is Passover that helps to teach me what it means to be “rooted” in one’s spiritual path.  Ah the memories of the smell and taste of Charoses (there are at least four ways to spell that!), and the memories of Passovers past that it calls to mind.  Charoses is a once a year dish made from chopped apples and almonds and cinnamon and wine (or grape juice).  An enterprising Jew makes a LOT of it so that there’s at least several days worth of “leftovers.”  I recall some of the wonderful traditional foods and dishes some of my Muslim friends have shared with me as we broke the Ramadan fast, and I realize that besides the teachings of our spiritual paths, it is our traditional foods that help to make us feel at home and rooted in our heritage.

There are other ritual Passover foods, of course, and indeed foods much closer to the holy day itself – particularly the matzo (unleavened bread) and horseradish (a most bitter herb).

What has always held my mind and my heart and my spirit about Passover is the thought that it has been celebrated, uninterrupted for over three thousand years.  Sometimes those years were wonderful.  Sometimes those years will filled with horror and death.  But always, always the Passover was celebrated.  Three THOUSAND years of celebrating the right to be free.

Being an Interfaither by DNA, even as a child it never occurred to me that Passover was only about Jews.  It never occurred to me that Passover was solely about Jews being set free by God.  Passover is about all of us.  Passover is a reminder of the perils of fear (Why were the children of Israel enslaved?  Because Pharaoh feared that, the children of Israel might “multiply and join our enemies and fight against us.”  Sound familiar?).

It remains remarkable and inspiring to me that even at Dachau, in the midst of the Shoah, the Lord’s Passover was kept.  And now, today, more than three thousand years after the first Passover, we still celebrate, eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs.  All to remind us.

To remind us of our covenant with God, a covenant that for Jews was forged in the deserts of Sinai.  To remind us that freedom, freedom not only to move but to think, to speak, to be different – this freedom must be treasured, protected and, most of all remembered.  It must be remembered because we humans are much too forgetful.  And in our forgetting, we risk becoming Pharaoh ourselves.  And let us remember too that if one be slave, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, any race, any creed, any spiritual path; if this one be slave, then none of us is truly free.

Selah.

This morning we’re going to heed Mom … concerning politics.  But what about religion and the “I’m right, and you need to keep an open mind” syndrome?  And how does this relate to constructive agnosticism?

Ok.  Before we launch into this, a quick re-introduction to the word agnostic for any who may not be familiar with where this all begins.

First, agnostic is a fairly recent word.  It was coined in 1869, give or take a year, by Thomas Henry Huxley, an English biologist and educator.  Frequently today, as it has for some time, agnostic is seen as equivalent to atheist.  So the first thing to know is that  that’s not what Huxley meant.

Huxley believed that exact nature of God was unknown and unknowable.  That put him at odds with most theists of his time, who were perfectly ready to tell you precisely who and what God was and wasn’t, with all the dictum, doctrine and dogma that goes with it – and if that person happened to be European, God was most likely a dignified, older white male.  And there are some who still yet cling to that concept.  Clearly, never Huxley.

But Huxley did believe that while we couldn’t know the exact nature of God, that this unknowable God was there – “just” above and beyond our power to comprehend.  That put him at odds with most atheists of his time, who were perfectly ready and indeed eager to tell you that God wasn’t anywhere.  Period.

Huxley wanted a word to describe his beliefs – that God was there, but not in any knowable way.  He made a word up.  Agnostic.  “A” meaning without, “gnostic” meaning knowledge.

Huxley was saying, “I don’t know who or what God is, and there’s no way to know.  But whoever God is, and whatever God is, I believe God is out there.”  Agnostic.

You might say, then, that agnosticism is the epitome of open mindedness.  You would be wrong.  I know this from personal experience.  When I was younger, I was what might be called a fundamentalist agnostic.  I tried not to talk religion much, Mom was generally right about these things, but when I did my typical comment to both Atheist and Theist alike was, “You can’t possibly know.”  I was a true believer – an agnostic true believer.  And I was certain of my position.  You could, and I now would say that I was suffering from the “I’m right and you need to have an open mind” syndrome.

That was fundamentalist agnosticism.  I like to think, and certainly hope that I’ve grown out of that.  What I’d like for us to ponder today is constructive agnosticism.  Ok.  … Sounds good.  … Maybe. … What do you mean?

Constructive agnosticism, as I see it, acknowledges and indeed embraces the notion that each of us does indeed experience the sacred as we experience it.  What a constructive agnostic says is that the totality of the sacred is not knowable.  One of us encounters the sacred through Buddhism, another through Christianity, another through Islam, or Judaism, or Baha’ism or a walk in the forest.  It all has the potential of being sacred.

This moves us away from how we’ve discussed our spiritual paths for millennia.  In the past it has been: I’m Atheist.  I’ve never experienced God.  I don’t believe in God.  If you think you’ve experienced God, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.  Or, I’m Christian, I’ve not only experienced God but experienced God through Jesus as Christ, and if you’ve experienced God in some other way, or haven’t experienced God at all, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong.

For agnosticism to be constructive, I believe it has to be able to embrace our differences, not deny them, not to say they are unimportant, but to embrace them.  For me, constructive agnosticism says that whatever the sacred is, it’s bigger than any one experience of it.  And since we are dealing with what we believe, not what we know, we need to cut each other some respectful slack.

Ok.  So what is the relationship between what we believe and what we know?  What’s the  difference?  We don’t generally ask this question, and when we do it can be quite perplexing.  I think that stems in large part because we have become rather careless in how we use words.  I say “we” because I can be as guilty as anyone.  … well ok, not as guilty as some!  But still, I think that if I’m called to participate in the next great conclave of spiritual leaders, I will lobby hard for verbal carelessness to be included under the general category of sloth among the seven cardinal or deadly sins.

So.  Belief and knowledge.  We tend to have a stronger grasp of knowledge. … I think.  Knowledge is based on facts.  I know that this room is a Middle School cafeteria.  I know that I drove here today.  Knowledge can also be learned.  It doesn’t have to be experienced first-hand.  I know, as example, the George Washington was our first president … even though I wasn’t there!

And we need to recognize that knowledge is not immutable.  Humanity “knew” that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun orbited the earth … right up to the time that the first astronomers said, “Well, actually, the earth goes around the sun; and there’s one heck of a big universe out there.”  Still, for the most part knowledge is pretty straight-forward.

Beliefs … not so much.  Beliefs can, and I believe should be divided into two general categories.  The first category of beliefs are things we’re pretty sure of but can’t say we “know.”  As example, I believe that Judy drove here today.  I don’t “know” this for sure.  I didn’t see her drive up.  Maybe someone dropped her off.  Maybe she carpooled.  But she generally doesn’t, so I think I’m justified in my belief.  These sorts of beliefs can be and frequently are confused with knowledge, and at least most of the time I would say, what’s the dif – no harm done.

The other, larger, category of belief comes from the realm of the spiritual.  I believe that it is wrong to kill another human being.  You might well say, “Wait a minute.  We know that.  It’s not a belief, we all know that it’s wrong to kill another human being.”

Do we?  Is putting a convicted mass murderer to death wrong?  Some will say yes – it is wrong to kill another human being; any human being.  Some will say no – this person murdered other people; justice demands this murderer be put to death.   I will say it depends on what you believe – not what you know, but what you believe.

This is why I tend to cringe when I hear someone say that what you believe isn’t important.  What we believe is crucial to who we are and how we act.  Justice, our sense of what is right and what is wrong stems from our beliefs, not our knowledge.

But still, there is no empirical certainty to our beliefs.  And I think it is this very uncertainty that causes us to fight, verbally and sometimes literally, with such passion and emotion over our beliefs.  We rise to such emotion because we know there is uncertainty.

The truth of it is, we human beings love certainty.  We demand certainty.  But this quest for truth, absolute and perfect truth, particularly as it concerns our beliefs has left us ill-equipped to deal with the uncertain. This makes it very hard to separate what we believe from what we know.  Which can make it very hard to talk about what we believe without sounding as if we think we are speaking absolute truth.

For me, belief and knowledge, while distinct from each other, are essential aspects of being human.  On another day, we might speak of it as the need to be both spiritual and scientific.  Today we’re saying belief and knowledge.  Thus to say that we cannot know the totality of the sacred is not to say a belief about the sacred is wrong.  What constructive agnosticism will teach us is that any belief about the sacred is, by definition, incomplete.  There is more to know.  Baha’i, Buddhist, Humanist, Pagan, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh (and we’ve still just scratched the surface), whatever our path: there is always more to know.  The book of the sacred remains open.

I will admit that one of my personal heroes is Werner Heisenberg, who took uncertainty out of the realm of the spiritual and brought it to science.  I will not today discuss Quantum Mechanics, for which you may all be grateful … except to note one of my favorite constructs.  Before Heisenberg, a particle was a particle and a wave was a wave.  And now, after Heisenberg, we know that sometimes a particle is a wave, and sometimes a wave is a particle … and we can’t know at any given moment which will be which.  There is something wonderfully humbling about that.

For me, this uncertainty is what makes Interfaith not only possible but desirable.  This larger framework for agnosticism does not say you can’t know God.  For if you’ve experienced God, however you have experienced God, that’s what you’ve experienced, and for me to tell you “No you haven’t” is arrogant and foolish.  What a constructive agnosticism does assert is that whatever we’ve experienced, regardless of how powerful and potent and even life-changing that experience, it is not the totality of the sacred.  A Muslim who has experienced God through Islam has experienced the sacred.  A Christian who has experienced God through Jesus has experienced the sacred.  A Humanist who has experienced the unity of life with no regard to God at all, through perhaps a walk in nature, has experienced the sacred.

Constructive agnosticism is, then, more than “simply” acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers.  It is joyfully embracing the realization that we don’t have all the answers.  And we never will.  Not in this life.

By embracing the uncertainty that comes with constructive agnosticism, we are freed from the need or, I hope, even the desire to convert or convince someone who believes differently than we do.

To paraphrase one of my favorite poets, John Donne, “No spiritual path is an island, entire of itself.  Each path is a piece of the continent, a part of the whole.”

Does this mean, then, that “Constructive Agnosticism” is the one “right” way to understand the sacred?   I trust you know me well enough by now to know that I don’t believe that.  But I do think that constructive agnosticism can help us to be a better Christian, a better Buddhist, a better Humanist, and so forth.

And I do believe that being a better human is at its heart what all of our spiritual paths are trying to encourage us to become.  The bottom line will always be, that it’s not what we believe, but what we DO with our beliefs that counts.  And whatever spiritual path helps you to be that better human being is a righteous path.

Amen.

Not that long ago, many humans were bought and sold on the open market.  At the time, the southern states liked to refer to that as its “peculiar institution.”  Most of us would call it slavery.

Slavery of course, still exists today.  It exists in the United States.  It’s against the law, but it still exists.  Yet that topic is for another day.  Let us ponder instead at what is legal, and more than, what is not only spiritually acceptable but even looked on with fond regard.

For me, the sparkplug of this pondering came with the new seven year one hundred seventy-five million dollar contract that a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners has just signed.  That’s twenty-five million a year, which comes to a smidge less that half a million a week … for throwing a baseball.  As I wondered why throwing a baseball really fast is worth so much money, I recalled Babe Ruth’s reported reply when asked why he had a larger salary that the President of the United States.  “I had a better year than he did.”

But why is this a spiritual matter?

Let us consider that money, and the ability to make money, and how much money is involved frames our lives.  How much a person is paid determines whether or not that person can eat and what kind of food, whether that has a place to live and what kind of home, whether or not that person can afford to be treated for illness and quality of that treatment, and what kind of education that person’s children will receive – among a multitude of other things.

Let us also consider that money, and the ability to make money, and accumulate money is one of the primary drivers, if not the primary driver of how we regard a person’s value.  Put crudely, we look up to people who are rich, just as we look down on people who are poor.  No, I am NOT going to burst into the song, “If I Were a Rich Man”!

Yet it is true that in every sense of the word, our value as a human being is driven overwhelmingly by our value as a money-maker.  Indeed the two are all but equated.  And we accept that.  Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” accepts that.

That acceptance is what I would like us to ponder.  Was Babe Ruth right?  Is the ability to hit home runs more valuable than being President of the United States?

I don’t think so.  I would suggest that a person’s salary is based neither on that person’s worth as a human being nor a person’s value to society.

If salaries were based on value to society, our teachers would be hugely wealthy, and hedge fund managers would barely bring home enough to feed their families.  I’m serious.  If our teachers disappeared tomorrow our society, our culture, and our children would all suffer grievously.  If all hedge fund managers disappeared tomorrow, what would change?  Hedge fund managers create nothing, teach nothing, grow nothing.  They move money around.  That’s it.

It’s worth taking a few moments and pondering this complete disconnect between value to society and salary.

Since our spiritual selves, as taught by all our spiritual paths, is based upon, compassion, love and community, there is then a complete spiritual disconnect between our spiritual teachings and our system of payment.

Why is this?  For one thing, the spiritual foundation of capitalism (as currently practiced) can be summed up best as elevating “me,” rather than “us.”

This is the dirty little secret that so divides our politics.  But it is, at its core a spiritual question not a political one.  The relative value of “me” as opposed to “us” is a spiritual question, not a political one.

Politics is about how things get done (ok, or how things don’t get done!).  At its most basic, politics is about the best way to accomplish something.  It is our spiritual concerns that will inform us as to what that “something” ought to be.

As example, whether or not the poor in our country should be given the resources they need to climb out of poverty is NOT, I repeat, it is not a political question.  It is a spiritual one.

What IS a political question is how best to help the poor, if our spiritual selves have decided that the poor indeed are “worthy” of our help.

As a minister I am not here to try to convince you or anyone else what the best politics might be.  But I do feel it outrageous that in the name of politics we have allowed  our spiritual selves to be shelved.

A simple example I found from a web search.  While there is so MUCH sound and fury about raising the minimum wage for most to $9.00 an hour (about $15,000 a year), are you aware the Major League Baseball HAS a minimum wage?  The minimum wage for a baseball player is $480,000 a year (which comes to about $19,000 a week).  Thus a baseball player, at the minimum wage, makes more in one week than the average person on a minimum wage makes in a year.  And that doesn’t take into account the a MLB player averages only twenty-five weeks of work a year.

Who’s at “fault”?  This is what I believe is crucial.  It is not the baseball player who takes the money thrown at him.  It’s a society that accepts and indeed basks in this sort of valuation.  What if we, as a people, listened to, oh, I don’t know, being that the majority of us are Christians, maybe Jesus?  “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

But don’t just take Jesus’ word for it.  Confucius taught, “The superior person takes as much trouble to discover what right as the lesser person takes to discover what it will pay.”  Take that, Wall Street!

Jainism puts it succinctly.  “What avail riches for the practice of religion?”

From Taoism, “Do not race after riches, do not risk your life for success, or you will let slip the Heaven within you.”

From Buddhism, “Through craving for riches, the ignorant ruin themselves as they do others.”

This is what our spiritual paths have TRIED to teach us.  And we haven’t learned it.  When we stop taking pride that “our” team has the highest paid pitcher in baseball;  when we stop holding up the wealthy as models for emulation to our children, and instead look with disdain on the idea of greed;  when we at last embrace what our spiritual paths have tried to teach us, that our lives are to be about “us” and NOT “me” – then and only then we will at last reclaim the truth worth of humanity.  It’s up to us.  Not “them,” us.

New Years, of course, are very Interfaithy.  Every culture has one.  Every spiritual path either has a New Year of its own, or has adopted one.  And we here get to celebrate them all.  Last year, we built a service around the Chinese New Year.  This year we have another theme.  But it is good to remember the lunar new year, and to recognize it.  As Interfaithers, we recognize that there’s no one “right” date to start the year, no one “right” way to celebrate the new year, just as there is no one “right” way to pray about the new year.

And I think it’s important to note, for posterity, that it’s not ambivalence.  It is not ambivalence.  It is respect.  This is the foundation, this is the paradigm shift that is at the core of who we are: remembering our own traditions, while respecting the traditions of others.

Which brings us to what we will be recognizing and celebrating and pondering today: World Interfaith Harmony Week.

The idea for Interfaith Harmony Week originated with the King of Jordan.  And Jordan, being right in the middle of the Middle East – if you will, literally caught between the Arab rock and the Israeli hard place – certainly understands how profoundly important and helpful at least some harmony between our spiritual paths would be.  In 2010, the UN adopted the idea.

Interfaith harmony.  I love the concept.  And I love that there has been for the past few years a designated Interfaith Harmony Week.  One week out of fifty-two.  Hey, it’s a start!

But what do we want to be talking about here, today?

First, I very much want to share with you that I am supremely grateful that they didn’t call it Interfaith Tolerance Week.  If you’ve read my book, you know why.  But just in case you haven’t, or at least haven’t memorized it … yet , let chat about interfaith “tolerance” for a few minutes.

Ok.  We’re tolerant.  We know the truth.  You poor slobs don’t.  But we’re tolerant.  It’s a free country.  You’re wrong.  You’re misguided.  And you’re probably going to hell.  But that’s ok.  We will generously allow you to believe whatever hokum you need to.  And by now I’ve heard it from just about every angle.

“If you need to believe in God, then that’s ok.”   Or,

“If you need to believe that God doesn’t exist, then that’s ok.”

Both are said with the clear implication that you’re wrong.  But … it’s ok.

I won’t ask for hands, but I would ask us to consider.  What would we rather have our beliefs be, what would we rather have our beliefs be … tolerated, or respected.

Now I do have to say that tolerance is not to be sneered at.  Just this last week I was reading an article in the New York Times about a minister who, of all things, had participated in an interfaith service in Newtown, Connecticut for those murdered kids at Sandy Hook Elementary.  He was instructed by his superiors to apologize …to apologize for participating in an interfaith service – and he did.  You see, in his denomination one is not allowed to pray with nonbelievers.  And a nonbeliever is anyone who doesn’t believe precisely what “we” do.

This happened to be the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church.  But the Missouri Synod is not alone.  There are other Christian groups that feel that way, and Jewish groups, and Muslim, and so on.

So this is not an isolated incident.  We see it all over the U.S..  We see it all over the world.  So yes, we need to recognize that tolerance is important.  It’s an essential step, a positive step.  But I would submit that it is only a step.  It is not a good place to stop.  Yet many have.

It is, I would submit, a much too tempting place to stop.  It allows me both to be patronizing (“I’m right and you’re wrong, but if you need to believe that you just go right ahead.”) and at the same time feel good about myself (“Look at me!  I’m tolerant.”).

Again … seen from the flaming and destructive abyss of intolerance, tolerance is a fundamental and important step forward.  If you are unfamiliar with the history of edicts of toleration, and the grudging agreement of governments  to allow at least certain spiritual paths to exist, I’d invite you to check out Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_toleration).  One example.  The Maryland Edict of Toleration of 1649, mandated tolerance of … Catholics … in a Protestant colony.

But still, toleration is only a step.  If it becomes a goal, we are in trouble.

So I do truly appreciate the goal of Interfaith Harmony, rather than Interfaith Tolerance.

Among other things, I like the metaphor of Interfaith Harmony.  Most of you know that I’ve been a choir director most of my life.  A choir is made up of differing parts.  Each part not only has its own notes, but frequently its own rhythms, which make up its own line.  In rehearsal, we practice each individual part.  After all, a singer needs to know his or her own notes.  But harmony happens when we combine the parts, each part singing its own line with all the other parts singing theirs … together – listening to each other, to balance, so that the choir truly becomes one.  If all are singing the same line, it would be unison, not harmony.  In harmony, all the differing parts come together to make up the whole.  In all honesty, this is what drew me to choir.  All the differing parts becoming one.  Each individual singer depending on the other singers in his or her section, and each section depending upon the other sections to come together – to become one.

And, of course, it’s not just singers.  The same is true of an orchestra.  And of a single chord.  A C major chord is made up of CEG.  Question.  Do you imagine the C “tolerates” the E and the G?  My guess is that they all get along, just fine.  Not only that, but my hunch is that in its heart of hearts (or is that note of notes?), the C knows that without the E and G there is no harmony.  For harmony, we need each other.

John Donne wrote that no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

World Interfaith Harmony celebrates, or can celebrate if we will let it, the idea of the differing faithpaths, each singing its own line, each being a part of a single, great harmony of the human choir.  No faithpath is an island entire of itself; every spiritual path is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

And what’s interesting is that faithpaths recognize and indeed urge this way of approaching and seeing our common humanity.

Hinduism tells us, “Like the bee, gathering honey from different flowers, the wise person accepts the essence of the different scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.”

I particularly like this quote from Jainism.  “Those who praise their own doctrines and disparage the doctrines of others solve nothing.”

Likewise from Buddhism, “To be attached to a certain view and look down on other points of view as inferior – this the wise call a fetter.”

You’ll find similar sentiments in Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and, I’m sure, others.

From the Baha’i faith comes an acknowledgement that the specifics of our beliefs depend on the culture they come from. “There can be no doubt that whatever the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, they derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source … The difference between the ordinances under which they abide should be attributed to the varying requirements and exigencies of the age in which they were revealed.”

So if every spiritual path preaches this … what happened?

It’s not a new question.  We’ve been here before.  We all agree that we should love one another – the Golden rule is everywhere.  And now we see that that there is universal acknowledgement that we should all respect each other’s spiritual paths.  As Peter says in the Acts of the Apostles, “ Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  So why is World Interfaith Harmony Week even necessary?

It is necessary, and you know this already, it is necessary because also once again, what we proclaim, even from the mountain tops, and what we practice day to day are frequently from different corners of the galaxy.

Thus in a very real and important sense, World Interfaith Harmony Week is about us:  Living Interfaith.  This is our week.  In the coming years I hope we will build more and more around it.  Interfaith Harmony is who we are.  We are living what others around the world are hoping for, what others around the world are preaching, what others around the world pray for, are striving for.

There’s a question that comes up from time to time.  Either we ask it of ourselves or someone asks us.  Why are we here – this small church?  What do we hope to accomplish?  Well, obviously there are many reasons for being here.  But for me, one of the most important, and quite possibly the most important reason is to exemplify that we can indeed practice what we preach.  We can close the gaping chasm between practice and preaching.  This small church, and other churches as they begin to form, and they will, small as they may be, and they will be, are a crucial component of bringing about the world that we all seek, and yet has seemed to be beyond our grasp.  We hold this sacred space, this welcoming and open sacred space, so that others, as they begin to seek it, have a place to come.

My friends, you are the pioneers.  Your are the keepers of this sacred space.  NOT the defenders of the faith, but the keepers of the space.  We build a home for the world.  We build a shelter for humanity.

We do not evangelize.  But we do hold the space, the sacred space, for Living our Interfaith – a sanctuary, if you will, for all, all of humanity.

What we do here, I hope, is fun.  In the sharing that we do here, we grow and are spiritually nourished.  Yet more than that, what we do here is important.

Amen.

Charles Poland died on Tuesday, January 29^th.  So what, you may ask?  Surely lots of people died on January 29^th.  People die every day.

Charles Poland was murdered on January 29^th.  Tragic to be sure.  But, unfortunately, a lot of people are murdered.  What’s the point?  What makes Charles Poland different?

Ok.  Charles Poland was a bus driver.  He put himself between a deranged man (whose name will not appear here) and a busload of kids and was shot to death for his efforts.

What continues to sadden and, I will confess, anger me, is that his assassin has gotten endless press coverage.  “Who was he?”  “Why did he do it?”  “How did he do it?”  You may have followed this in the news, because the deranged man was able to spirit one child away and then held that child hostage in a bunker for days.  Finally, law enforcement was able to rescue the child while killing the deranged kidnapper.

Yet even when “covering” the funeral of Charles Poland, which many did not, most of the media spent most of its time talking about the deranged man.

What about Mr. Poland, the man who laid down his life to save the children in his charge?  “Who was he?”

What does it say about our media that these questions, if asked at all were asked only in passing?  And what does it say about us that what we want to hear about is every morbid detail we can about the deranged man?

Charles Poland was 66 when he was shot to death.  He was a vet, having served as a mechanic and then helicopter pilot in Germany and Korea.  He was married for 43 years to Mary Janice Poland, had two children and two grandchildren.

Charles Poland had a sister, Patti Hook, who now lives in Deer Park, WA.  His mother had been the postmaster of Athol, near Spokane.

After his service, Charles Poland worked as an auto mechanic.  But after he retired he began driving school buses.  For him it was the perfect fit.  He loved being around the kids, and driving supplemented his income.  He also gardened, had a shop where he spent time tinkering, and he kept a few chickens.

On January 29^th, a deranged man got on his bus and demanded two children.  Charles Poland refused.  He opened the emergency door and then put himself between the gunman and his kids.  For his efforts his was shot four times and killed.  One kid, a boy named Ethan, didn’t clamber out with the other kids.  He was taken and held hostage.

This is as much as I can distil from what little there is available on the web about the selfless hero, Charles Poland.  I wish I knew more.  I pleaded with the NY Times to do a follow-up about him.  They weren’t interested.  No one seems interested.

The media tend to give us what we ask for.  So I can’t help but believe that the reason we haven’t heard more about Charles Poland is that there has been no outcry, demanding his story.  That says much about us.

And it says much about our culture that we give such notoriety to deranged people.  It’s not surprising to me that the assassin of Charles Poland had plans to talk to the media about his “grievances” with society.  Why not?  Look at how much press we gave to the mass murderer in Oklahoma who blew up the Mura Building.  Look at how much press we give to all mass murderers.  Has it not occurred to someone that this kind of notoriety actually encourages deranged people to murder?

I would ask us, we the people, to demand to learn more about our Charles Polands, to hold them up and recognize them for the heroes that they are.  And I would ask our media to sit down and develop a code of ethics for dealing with publicity-seeking deranged individuals.

In the meantime, thank you Charles Poland, for your life and your kindness.  Thank you Mary Janice Poland for sharing your hero with us.  Mary Janice, our prayers are with you and your family.

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

One of the great challenges of any era, every era, is to disenthrall ourselves from old ways of thinking.  To disenthrall, to free ourselves, to become unchained.

This morning we strive to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Last Monday.  We will seek to honor Dr. King’s memory and legacy by pondering freedom, both physical and spiritual, and remembering the long road to freedom, here in this country.

We want to acknowledge the importance of both physical and spiritual freedom – for they are linked.  They are linked.  And I must tell you that one of the truly intimidating things about writing this morning’s message was realizing that, among many others, two giants, Dr. King himself and President Abraham Lincoln have already trod this path.  And I ask myself, what can I do?

All of us are aware that when this country began, slavery was a part of it, institutionalized in the Constitution.  There was a fascinating series on PBS recently called “The Abolitionists.”  If you missed it, I’d recommend it.  It chronicles the long and painful road from accepting slavery to the realization, at least by the majority, that no human being has the right to own another.  And from that struggle came the Civil War.  We all know that.

One hundred-fifty years ago this month, the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.  It was an Executive Order which, constitutionally could only apply to those states currently warring against the U.S. government.  Two years later, in 1865, at long last, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned slavery forever, anywhere within the United States.  This you already know.

What you may not know is the history of what happened between the Thirteenth Amendment and the mid 1940’s.  I didn’t, until I read Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  If you have any interest at all, it is worth reading – just not late at night.

But if you do read it, it will ground for you and make much more clear why Dr. King, along with Rosa Parks and so many other incredibly courageous men and women were needed to lead the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.  From 1865 to 1945, when black GI’s returned home to usher in the beginning of a new era of race relations, black men could be and routinely were taken off the streets, jailed on some trumped up charge, and then sent to work in factories, unpaid, as slave labor, and in chain gangs or the like.  You see, there was a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment.  Involuntary servitude was allowed if it was punishment for a crime … any crime.  It was indeed slavery, all over again … legal, and institutionalized across the South.

Then the 1960’s, and the freedom riders, and the marches, and the leadership of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..

Fifty years ago, Dr. King shared his dream with us.  It was and remains a beautiful, profound and inspiring dream.  Yet we know that the march towards freedom in this country has been a long one and a painful one.  And it’s not over.  Slavery is now outlawed everywhere.  But it still exists.  Much of the world’s clothing comes from slave labor.  There is a thriving business in human trafficking, particularly but not only women.  And that includes this country where, as but one example, a woman is tricked into coming to the U.S., smuggled in, seeking employment and a better life, only to work in a household with no rights, and no way out.  And as many of us know, half of the world’s chocolate and virtually all the cheap chocolate comes from slave labor, and frequently child slave labor.

“I have a dream” Dr. King told us.  But it wasn’t the sort of dream you wake up from and put aside.  It is a goal, not a gift.  It was and remains to this day a dream from which we can draw hope, and inspiration … the inspiration to pick up the mantle and work, work to make that dream  real.

Dr. King was taken from us forty-five years ago – and I still remember that horrid, gut-wrenching day.  For some, he has become merely an excuse for a three day weekend and MLK Day sales.  But for those of us who hold his words in our hearts and in our souls, we become the keepers of the dream.  And as Hillel said … if not now, when?

Keepers of the dream?  “But what can I do?”

It is time to speak of spiritual slavery, the chains we forge for our own minds, that can confine us in the smallest and darkest of prisons.

Here we are, in the 21^st century.  And we still, to this day, separate ourselves by “race,” by religion, by gender, by wealth, by creed and by country.  And it must stop!  And if we won’t stop it, who will?

“But what can I do?”

First, we must break the chains of our spiritual imprisonment.  One of the most formidable of those chains is the choking leash and collar that yanks at our throats and tells us, “You’re too small.  They’re too big.  The task is too great.”  A lie!  But it is a paralyzing lie if we believe it.

Dr. King wrote in his last book, a book I deeply recommend, entitled prophetically, Where Do We Go From Here – Chaos or Community?, Dr. King wrote, “A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters.  To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory.  It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.”

This is not to say that the cause is not urgent.  Dr. King concludes his hopeful and inspiring book by writing, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.  We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.  In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.  Procrastination is still the thief of time.”

And so the question, in the end, is not what have others done before us.  The question is what will we do?  I believe that this is the fundamental question raised by Martin Luther King Day.  What will we do to help build upon Dr. King’s dream?

Now is indeed the time for action, but it is not a time to despair.  Dr. King, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, spoke of his optimism as well as his hopes.  He spoke in 1964, but it might as well have been yesterday.  He said,

“I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and in an audacious faith in the future of mankind.  I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘is-ness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘ought-ness’ that forever confronts him  I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life which surrounds him.  I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.  I believe that even amid today’s mortal bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.  I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.  I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”

Powerful words.  Uplifting words.  But again the shackles of our own minds beckon us with the imprisoning question, “The problems are so immense.  What can I do?”

Perhaps this can help.

Imagine a scale, a huge scale, a cosmic scale.  On the one side of the scale lie justice, compassion, connectedness.  On the other side lie injustice, hate, and greed.

When we ask, “What can I do?” we acknowledge the enormity of the scale.  Will any of us tip those cosmic scales one way or the other?  I doubt it.  But we remember Dr. King as he spoke of the impact of a succession of small victories, not one complete victory for all time.

Each of us, every day that we live, adds something to those great scales … to one side or the other.  It may be a mote of dust, a twig, and perhaps once or twice in our lives, a good-sized pebble.  But each of us, whatever the size of our offering, every day adds something to one side or the other.

What can I do?  What can any of us do?  We can decide to add whatever we can to the side of connectedness, of compassion, and of justice.

Some examples.  See that box marked “Food Bank Donations”?  At every service we collect food for the Lynnwood food bank.  Every service.  Are our small contributions ever going to make even a dent in world hunger, or hunger in the U.S. or even hunger in Snohomish County?  I doubt it.  But a few families that would have gone hungry – won’t.  And that, my friends, is very much worth the effort.

Another example will be available during our social time.  One of the reasons that we’ll have chocolate walnut pie to enjoy is because that pie, made at The Sisters in Everett, is made with fair traded chocolate.  Now, so far, I haven’t convinced the Sisters to use only fair-traded chocolate in their pie.  But I bring them fair-traded chocolate whenever I want a pie, and they are becoming educated in what that means.  And we as a congregation have started giving out fair-traded chocolate at Halloween.  Small victories to be sure.  But they count.

What can we do?  We can be aware, as an example, of where our clothes come from.  We can be aware of what is frequently the hugely high cost of cheap – what it costs others to bring to us so-called “bargain” prices.  I encourage you to be aware of The Better World Shopping Guide, a consumer book that is interested not in what products are cheapest, but which are the most ethically made.  There is a saying that every dollar we spend is a vote for the world we want to live in.  Think of how many votes we have, every day!

What can we do?  Each of us can do our admittedly small part.  But acting together – not so small.  And if we are willing to gently educate others as we go – even less small.

Our final hymn today is my favorite in the hymnal.  It is a hymn of determination and of hope, and, I believe, a fitting tribute to the dream of Dr. King.

“We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken.  We’ll build a land where the captive walks free.”

Amen

Today we want to honor and reflect on the seasons and, particularly since this is where we are, the season known as winter.  It’s easy to honor spring.  Spring is not only a time for planting, but life awakens – nature awakens.  Ok.  Weeds awaken too, but nothing’s perfect!  Then there are the glory weeks of summer, when the plants shoot up like rockets, the days are long and, at least occasionally, lazy.  In the autumn comes an abundance of fruits and veggies, and huge palate of colors.  But what of winter?  I mean, really, even the bears give up.  “Just tell me when it’s spring,” says Papa Bear and then he lies down for a LONG winter’s nap!

For me, one of the great delights of moving from Southern California to Washington, almost twenty-five years ago now, was that spring, summer, fall, and even winter suddenly became more than abstract concepts.  I was a reader.  I knew what seasons were.  But intellectual knowledge dwells in a different universe from personal experience.  Now I could see that trees really did change color in the fall.  And plant-life, indeed tended to sleep in the winter, only to re-awaken and bloom in the spring.

Many spiritual communities draw profound parallels between the four seasons of nature, and the spiritual seasons of our lives.  And we will today.

Still, as Interfaithers, it’s worth keeping in mind that dividing the year into four seasons is a Western idea.  In India, they recognize six seasons; in China, five.  But we’re here.  Let’s speak of the seasons we know, not because four seasons are the one truth, but because these are the seasons of our heritage.  What all of our spiritual communities recognize are the profound changes that can come with the seasons of our lives, be they four, five or six.

The seasons are, of course, a very natural phenomenon.  Let’s face it, it’s hard to have a spinning planet in an elliptical orbit around a sun and not  have seasons – just as it is hard not to have darkness as well as light, night as well as day.  And yet from the beginning, the changing seasons, the contrast of the light and the dark, have all provided powerful metaphors for our lives, and indeed have contained a deeply spiritual component.

There are times when I ponder how marvelous it must have been when humanity first realized that God or Nature has a reset button.

Morning, noon and the dark of night.  But then, morning again.  Spring, summer, fall, winter, but then spring again.  A new beginning.  How important new beginnings are to each of us!

There are times, and I have faced a few, when the darkness seems like it will never end.  But it DOES end.  And then … a sunrise.  Sunrise!

The key, I’ve come to believe, is understanding not that the sunrise will come … but to be committed, to be committed to being a part of the sunrise – and not of the darkness.

The seasons too become a part of us, and a way of understanding our lives.  One way is to see our spring childhood, the passionate heat of our summer youth, the maturity of our autumn, and the more reflective quality our winter years.

But another way of seeing winter is less a part of a progression through life, and more as a hole, to be climbed out of … of feeling stuck in winter regardless of our age.

In the bleak mid-winter                                                                                                           Frosty wind made moan,                                                                                                           Earth stood hard as iron,                                                                                                          Water like a stone.

That’s pretty somber stuff.  It happens to come from one of my favorite Christmas carols, but it still paints a vivid and thoroughly unpleasant image of the winter season.

From Simon and Garfunkel: “A winter’s day, in a deep and dark December.”

And, of course, there’s that rather famous opening soliloquy from Richard III, which in its hopeful optimism bypasses spring altogether.

“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by the sun of York.”  The winter of our discontent.  John Steinbeck was so attracted to the metaphor that he made it the title of his last novel.  “The Winter of Our Discontent.”

The truth of it is that each of us will face a personal winter, or two or more in our lives.  When the dark is all we can see, and the cold is all we can feel.   This is not to be taken lightly or dismissed.

Just yesterday, I was reading about a computer genius, just twenty-six and atop the world, who hung himself because he could see no light ahead, only winter.

But always, always within the darkest winter lies the hope of spring.  That is what the seasons can teach us.

I love this song.  I can hear Bette Midler.  “Just remember, in the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose.”

We can, if we will, see our winters as ripe with opportunity.  After the autumn leaves have fallen, our winters, whenever they come, give us some time to prepare for the spring – the new beginning, the rose.

Honoring the seasons, honors the changes in our lives.  Honoring the seasons, honors the truth that some changes are welcome, and some are not.  But to live, is to know change.

The sun will rise, and there will be a new day.  We cannot stop the new day from coming, even if we loved the day before.  We cannot stop the new day from coming, but we can help to shape that new day.  In all honesty, when I think of what we do here, sewing seeds of Interfaith, I see us as helping to shape the new day.   And it warms my heart.

For everything there is a season.  The changing of the seasons brings us new life, new challenges, new opportunities … if we will embrace them.  This does not mean we must forget the wonderful past.  But the changing of the seasons reminds us that no matter how wonderful, we should no longer live there.  And if the past was not so wonderful, the changing of the seasons reminds us that we need no longer live there.

My favorite passage of Scripture remains the words of Micah: Act with justice, love compassion, and walk humbly.  Second only to that for me, are the powerful words of Ecclesiastes.  To everything there season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

May we embrace the seasons: of our world and of our lives.

Amen.

My roof is just over two years old so I hadn’t expected any leaks.  After breakfast I dug up his number and called the roofer.

First, the roofer was quick to say any leaks were covered, no charge, and that he’d have someone come out to see what the problem was and fix it.

But as we talked I realized something.  He and his crew had done a great job with the roof.  I’ve been very happy with it.  There are times when, coming back from fetching the mail, that I look up at the roof and smile.  I like it a lot.  I’ve even recommended the roofer to a couple of people in the neighborhood who asked about him.  But I’d never called HIM to tell him.  The first time he hears from me in over two years is when something goes wrong.

I mentioned this to him as we spoke, and he was very nice about it and said that this was always the case.

But it shouldn’t always be the case.  Should it?  And I’m writing this in part to remind myself that I need to be intentional about appreciating people’s work.

To be fair, I do try to be sure to show the appreciation I feel to the people I work with at the church.  And I do try to write letters or make phone calls when I receive really good service somewhere, as well as to complain when I receive really bad service.

But in two years I’d never called Mark (my roofer) to tell him what a great job he’d done and how much I appreciated it.  Yes, I’d paid him.  But as is often said: money ISN’T everything.  At least that’s what I tell myself and the Living Interfaith congregation.  We all need money, sure.  Without money, it’s hard to eat, have a place to sleep or get even modestly decent health care (the next blog may well be pondering how it is we became widgets in the health care system instead of people – but I digress).

I believe all of us need more than $.  I believe we need much more.  We need to be appreciated.

No, I am not going to lobby for an “Appreciate Others Day.”  One of my personal peeves is that I don’t think we make up for neglecting something 364 days a year by celebrating it 1 day a year.  But I am reminded of how intentional we need to be, how intentional I need to be, in appreciating other people’s work.

As irony would have it, as I was pondering this, I received in the mail today a beautiful  note from a member of Living Interfaith telling me how much he appreciated me.  And I can tell you first hand, it means a lot to hear that.  We are all human.  We all have self-doubts.  When the only time people talk to us about our work or our lives is when they have a criticism or complaint, it takes its toll.

So I’m asking myself who else have I appreciated in silence?  And, as this is a blog, I throw the question out there for all of us to consider.

I look around and it seems very much that we are a complaint-driven society.  I wonder if we were an appreciation-driven society instead if it might not go a long ways towards moving us in the direction of the world of compassion, love and community that we say we all seek.

Just some random thoughts on a cold, wet day.