First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, December 10, 2011
This service begins a series for the winter holiday season. Next Sunday, we will celebrate our Winter Holidays of Light ser-vice, and will decorate the church tree. On December 21, in honor of the Winter Solstice and the longest night of the year, we will hold our annual Candlelight Labyrinth Walk at 6:30 pm. On Saturday evening, Christmas Eve, also at 6:30 pm, we will celebrate the birth of the Christ Child with a traditional service of lessons and carols and an open-table communion. After the service, there will be an Open House with Christmas goodies and hot cider to share. Then, on Christmas Day, we will delay our service til 11 am to give folks time to open presents, and I’ll lead a simple circle of sharing. On New Year’s Day, the service will also be delayed til 11 am, and our Director of Religious Education Lydia Pélot-Hobbs will lead an informal service. On January 8, we’ll mark Epiphany or Kings Day and will share kingcake at Coffeehour. Our annual Greater New Orleans UU cluster Jazz Funeral for the Old Year with a Dixieland band is set for January 22, so that we can enjoy it with the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association, meeting in New Orleans for the first time since Katrina.
This morning we look at Advent. For Christians, it is a time of waiting and quiet reflection before Christmas; it symbolizes the time of waiting for the birth of the Christ. For many children, Advent is the countdown to presents on Christmas Day, and there are literally thousands of Advent calendars to help make waiting easier.
Sometimes waiting can be positive. The old adage, “Good things come to those who wait” – said by many of our parents – became a common saying because it’s often true. Some things can’t be rushed. No matter what you do or what you want, babies take 9 months, seedlings take 2-3 weeks, bread dough takes about 40 minutes to rise, new kitchens take however long they take.
Unitarian Universalism is a religion of action, not of words, not even of meditation and prayer, although of course many UUs DO meditate or pray. Our historic watchword has long been, “Deeds not creeds.” Waiting is a form of inaction, and is not comfortable for most Unitarian Universalists. Waiting can even be harmful, especially if immediate action is called for.
If your toddler is wandering off in a mall parking lot, for instance, or if your kitchen catches fire while you are preparing your holiday dinner, waiting is not a good thing. In the story by Arnold Lobel, "The Letter," Toad glumly waits for a letter to come in the mail – even though his best friend Frog is right in front of him. In the story by UU minister Robert Fulghum, a young woman sobs in the Hong Kong airport about her lost ticket home – which she is sitting on top of. Waiting is sometimes the wrong thing to do, especially if it keeps people from doing what needs to be done.
The young woman in the Fulghum story had everything she needed to move on, but she didn’t know it. She was stuck, over-come with powerful negative emotions that glued her to her seat; she felt helpless and lost and confused and sad. So she sat and sobbed. If she had gotten up off her chair, she would have discovered that it was in her power to get where she wanted to go. No one was preventing her from getting there, she was stopping herself. She was sitting on her ticket.
In our congregational situation, waiting would also be wrong. No matter what decisions the Board makes, there’s important work to be done right now, and no reason to wait. The faithful, faith-filled work of coming back together as a congregation, of forgiving and reconciling with each other, cannot wait, and must be done now. We must start as soon as possible to learn clear UU pro-cesses and procedures and implement them; we must mend fences with our district and re-establish communications with the wider UUA. We must not succumb to the temptation to “sit on our ticket.” We already have everything we need to move ahead right now, to educate ourselves, to heal the congregation, to practice forgiveness, to better organize our committees and teams to perform their responsibilities in our shared ministry, to encourage attendance at district workshops so that our lay leaders can learn to be better church leaders. Waiting on any of this would be wrong.
Several years ago, in the newsletter of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Eliza Blanchard wrote a short Advent meditation:
For Christians, [Advent] calls for reflection as well as joyful anticipation, since the infant they await represents redemption, salvation in the hereafter. For those of us focused on bringing about salvation in the here and now, the season offers us the opportunity to ask: What are we waiting for? There is no one anticipated event that we expect will save the world.… During this season, we may rest for a while in the glow of holiday lights, but we do not wait. We will not stop working for all to share life’s blessings. We light our lights, pick an avenue for change, and work in the world, knowing we have the power to make it a better place.
You know those holiday commercials that urge you to buy now, saying: “Don’t delay! Operators are standing by!” Let’s take those words to heart spiritually. We don’t have to wait; in fact, we should act right away. There is work to be done, and no reason to wait. Your family needs you, your church needs you, your city needs you, the world needs you. Don’t delay! Get up off your ticket! So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
