First Parish Bedford UU

Dark of Winter

A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert

First Parish in Bedford

December 14, 2008

I'm sure you've heard it said that sometimes preachers preach to the congregation, and sometimes they preach to themselves. A month or so ago when I decided I wanted today's service to be a contemplative take on the holiday season, I thought of it as a gift for you.

As I wrote about it in the newsletter, "Much like the hush before snowfall, our service this day will be a bit of quiet in this often hectic season, with poetry and shared silence woven into the sermon, and contemplative music throughout. Come join us to rest and to be restored if that is what your spirit longs for, or if the season finds you in a centered place come to be deepened in it, or just come for all the reasons you usually come on a Sunday… for the community… for the coffee!"

Well, given what the past week was like in my household, I should have said that this service would provide ME with a pause, a respite, a reminder to slow down, to not take it so fast or squeeze even more than usual into an already full life.

If that's what you need, too, well then, let it be for all of US!

My husband, Don, dubbed this past week "Car Karma Week," and that was before my car ran out of gas!

Car Karma Week began last Saturday night, when our car hit an SUV that was trying to make a left turn, having just a second prior been in the lane to the right of us! No one was hurt, fortunately. The SUV suffered only a scratched hubcap, while the passenger-side corner of our front fender was dented in the exact round shape of his rear tire, with a smashed headlight. Luckily, it was still drivable. The next few days of Car Karma Week were spent filling out forms, chatting with insurance agents, an appraiser, auto body shop and car rental personnel, as you can well imagine.

Then, on Thursday morning, we came out of the house to find a flat tire on our other car! Its worn side-wall was evidence that all four tires were in need of replacement. So, on Friday afternoon, we left that car at Precision Tire and when the job was done, I dropped off Don there to pick it up.

On my way home, Car Karma Week peaked: my car ran out of gas! The guy at Lexington Toyota shook his head, "How can someone with a Prius run out of gas?"

But, I have to say in my own defense, as soon as I finally noticed the "low on gas" light blinking, I really did pull into the nearest gas station to fill up….only to be told that they were "out of Regular."

How many times in all your driving years have you tried to get gas and were told they were all sold out??? It was between there and the next nearest gas station, that the car stopped, completely out of gas.

A full week has gone by since the accident and more than a day since I ran out of gas. So, we are hopeful that Car Karma Week is over.

And I'm ready to take a deep breath, here with you.

So, if this sermon is about anything, it’s about calming down. It’s about taking Sabbath time at this dark time of year, this time that is full of frenzy for many, wrought with such a variety of possible emotions, not only the ones related to good cheer and peace on earth: loneliness, sadness, anger, disappointment.

This sermon is about calming down now, so that we will know how to carve out future moments for calming ourselves in the midst of what might be ahead.

This sermon is also about maybe learning to calm, not just our selves, but the holiday frenzy itself.

It’s about the hush before a snowstorm. It’s even more about the quiet at the end of a snowstorm, like Mary Oliver's “immense silence" in the poem that John read for us. An immense silence that feels like an answer to the “oracular” questions a snowfall calls us back to: “why, how, whence such beauty and what the meaning?” (from First Snow).

Indeed, sometime soon the first real snow of the season will fall. It will fall, as Mary Oliver writes in another poem, “into the world below like stars, or the feathers of some unimaginable bird that loves us…that has turned itself into snow.” (White Eyes in Why I Wake Early, 2004).

Perhaps that day, or evening, of this year's first snowfall we might all go out into the hush before the storm, hear the wind softly sing in the tops of the trees, and feel the heaviness of the clouds about to fall like stars or feathers, as snow, to the ground.

And, as the storm ends, we might each greet the snowy scene with awe and admiration, and dwell for some long moments in its "immense silence" considering its oracular questions, “why, how, whence such beauty and what the meaning?” before we tackle its removal or brave the mess it may make on the roads.

In the Christian calendar, this time leading up to Christmas, known as Advent, is meant to be a time of quiet, a time of waiting. Not a time of hurrying, cleaning, shopping, baking, trimming, shopping, cooking, wrapping, mailing, last-minute shopping, eating, giving, unwrapping, un-trimming, returning, sale-shopping, and cleaning again, all in such a rush that we and our loved ones may find not much holiday cheer at all, really. Truly for Christians, Advent is meant to be a time of waiting, waiting for the baby Jesus to be born, waiting for Jesus Christ to dwell in human hearts.

The weeks to come are pregnant with the possibility of joy, just as much as they hold the potential for great pressure, if only we would relax our expectations and step outside the commercial aspects of the holiday season.

When is it in your day, in your daily routine, that you could claim some Sabbath time in the coming weeks, some time for calming down, even if just for a few moments of deep breathing every time you get out of the car, right after you remove the key from the ignition?

The word “Advent” comes from the Latin for “to come.” As the Jungian analyst Mariann Burke writes (in Advent and Psychic Birth, quoted in First Days Record-November 2000),

The word connotes a longing or hunger for something more in life, something intimated but still unfelt. For Christians, this longing focuses on the divine child, a child who was embodied in the Jesus of history, and who, from a psychological perspective relates us to “unborn” aspects of ourselves. Advent, then, is the season of the unborn…Each of us nurtures some promise that wants to be born. Psychic birth refers to any potential aspect of ourselves that longs for realization; it refers to our “becoming” who we are meant to be.

What are you waiting to become? What promise are you nurturing within?

Waiting is not easy, often. What is your usual waiting mode? Are you an anxious waiter? Do you feel waiting is a waste of time? Is it to be avoided? Or do you relish it?

When I was ministering in Canton, there was one spot in my morning commute where I sometimes couldn't bear waiting, I’m not proud to say. It was the entrance ramp from Route 2 going West onto I-95/Route 128 south. It backs up so bad there that I have been known to speed pass the back-up, drive quite a few minutes to the Bedford Road jug-handle and then get back on Route 2 going East, so that I can get on I-95 coming from that direction where there’s usually not much of a wait.

The last time I did this my impatience was very well-rewarded even though there was a back-up on that ramp too: while waiting in it, I found myself right behind the car of an old friend who I rarely see but nevertheless recognized when I saw his face in his side view mirror! I called out my window to him; he glanced in his rear view mirror, and waved in recognition. After we got on I-95, I passed him and we grinned at each other, enjoying the serendipity.

Do you resent a long wait? Or, do you usually try to make the best of it? Do you try to get some work done while you wait, or “keep yourself occupied” with busy-work or handi-work? Do you people-watch? Or people-engage?

Or, do you allow yourself to settle into a calm state, and relax into a deeper place within? Finding in the moments of waiting an opportunity to meditate?

We may think waiting implies passivity, but I think that waiting is an activity, albeit one that our action-oriented culture discourages, perhaps especially at this time of year.

Waiting is an activity if we do it with the attentiveness suggested in the idea that advent is a time of giving birth, becoming, nurturing a promise within or to ourselves.

What are you waiting to become? What promise are you nurturing within?

Let us end the sermon by taking a good long time to sit with that advent question, in the snowfall-like hush that can envelop us in this sanctuary, this holy place of history, mystery, and hope. The Quakers call it a "gathered meeting" if that snowfall-like hush envelops them in their silent meetings for worship. If we give the gift of silence to each other by each remaining as quiet as possible, we may experience it too.

After the first moments of silence, I’d like to read you another poem, followed by what may be an even deeper silence, and then we’ll conclude with the closing hymn.

I invite you to get settled with your legs not crossed, hands on your lap, eyes closed if you wish. Take several deep, cleansing breaths and then follow your breathing, in and out, and when you feel yourself to be settled and focused, ask yourself “What am I waiting for, who or what am I waiting to become? What promise am I nurturing deep within myself?”

If your mind wanders elsewhere, be patient with it—just return again to your breath, in and out, perhaps saying silently, one word for the breath in and one word for the breath out, “what… am…I…waiting…to… become?”

Let us now enter into a time of shared silence, to be punctuated by another gentle poem, and followed then by a longer silence.

Beyond the Question: Part One by May Sarton

The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.

Can I weave a nest for silence,
Weave it of listening,
Listening,
Layer upon layer?

But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish
Toward anything that might happen
Or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
Contained in one’s smallness.

Beyond the question, the silence.
Before the answer, the silence. 

Now, I invite you again into the shared silence to “make yourself as attentive as a nesting bird, proffering no slightest wish toward anything that might happen or be given, only the warm, faithful waiting, contained in [your] smallness.”

Let us now sit as nesting birds, waiting. What are you waiting to become? What promise are you nurturing within? “Why, how, whence such beauty and what the meaning?” (More silence).

Amen.

Let’s take our time in reaching for our hymnals, slowly finding #55 and rising if you so wish to sing the closing hymn, Dark of Winter.