Sermons

Praise Be!

READING I

What Is Praised Is One
A Poem by Rumi (Coleman Barks translation)

What is praised is one -- so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.

All religions, all this singing - one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.

Sunlight looks slightly different on this wall than it does on that wall
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still one light.

We have borrowed these clothes -- these time?and?space personalities -- from a light,
and when we praise - we pour them back in.

READING II
Try To Praise The Mutilated World
by Adam Zagajewski
(translated from the Polish by Claire Cavanaugh)

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships,
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.

You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments
when we were together in a white room
and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert
where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feathers a thrush lost,
and the gentle light
that strays and vanishes
and returns.

SERMON

Praise the mutilated world.
As we struggle with the causes of the world's mutilation,
as we mourn the loss of life, and even more,
as we lament the loss of this particular opportunity for the world to deal differently with conflict,
to have more elevated and enlightened imagination,
as we contend with all this,
I ask you to praise the mutilated world.

Praise is a word that sometimes gives religious liberals pause. Praise? Praise what? Praise who?

But it doesn't matter who or what. As Rumi says, all water is one, just different jugs being poured into one basin. It doesn't matter who or what we praise, just that we do, indeed, praise. We so need to praise. And when we praise, we also pour something positive and good back in.

I don't mean to belittle the opposite of praise. Lament is also in the jugs we pour out. There is a time and place for lament, for grief, for mourning. We need to go to that place in ourselves and pour our deep ache also into that great basin.

But we must not loose ourselves in lament. Lament is to be released, making room once again for praise, for appreciation, for love, for beauty, for joy, and especially for hope. We have a deep need to refill our souls, and praise is the way.

We praise not because a jealous God requires praise of us. We praise because we need to praise. Our hearts become just too full. Our hearts need to overflow and pour themselves out into what is bigger than ourselves, into what encompasses even the limits of our mortal, human understanding.

Praise is a form of prayer. I have quoted these words with you before: Prayer doesn't change things, prayer changes people and people change things.

Prayer, praise, opens our hearts,
allows us to be more creative,
more imaginative,
more engaged,
more present to both the glory and the brokenness of our world,
more able to participate in mending this mutilated world.

Praise is a stance, an attitude toward life. We human beings have more mastery over our environment than any other creature. We have an enormous amount of power to affect the world around us and how we dwell in that world.

And yet, we are creatures of such limited control. Control is pretty much an illusion. It is so easily snatched away from us, just when we think we have it all wrapped up.

One thing we do have control of is our attitudes. Praise changes us. Praise creates within us an attitude of affirmation, of receiving and welcoming and embracing life. Praise takes us to the existential YES!

There is story about a duck who has religion by Doug Babcock:

Now we are ready to look at something pretty special. It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No, it isn't a seagull. A gull always has a raucous touch about it. This is some sort of duck who cuddles in the swells. She isn't cold, and she is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the Atlantic Ocean and she is part of it.

She looks a bit like a mandarin or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree. But she has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. She has poise, however -- that all philosophers must have. She can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because she rests in the Atlantic. Probably she doesn't know how large the ocean is but, after all, neither do you. But she realizes it.

And what does she do? I ask you? She just sits down in it. She reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity. That's religion and the duck has it. She has made herself part of the boundless by easing herself into it just where it touches her. I like the duck. She may not know much, but she's got religion.

The duck knows how to praise the heaving ocean. Like the duck we need to ease ourselves into the immediate, as mutilated as it is.

We are participants in a steady encounter with the reality of our world, not in another time and place, but right here and right now. And our world, like the ocean, is not always pleasant nor always comfortable. Right now, it seems to us very broken and very scary. We don't know how it will evolve. We have little control over the events of the day and their impact. Like the duck, we cannot know how big this ocean we're in is. But we can realize it. We can become one with it and ride it and find whatever ways there are to praise it along the way. This moment, more than most perhaps, calls for praise.

It would be easier to just stick with lament. It would not be difficult to simply write it all off as hopeless. The world has gone to hell in a handbasket and there is nothing we can do about it and all we can manage is despair.

But we must not abandon this mutilated world.
It is important to face it,
to sit smack down in it,
to know we are a part of it.

The tricky part here is to sit down in it and not get lost in lament, swept away in the swells. The tricky part is to embrace the world as it is, lamenting it as we must, but always returning to praise.

Faith comes in here. Faith in a power greater than ourselves. Faith in the ever renewing nature of life. Faith in the ability of human beings to see a new way. Faith, perhaps, in life itself to have a destination, one we cannot understand, perhaps, but a destination we ultimately know we are part of and one with.

And here we come back to praise again. When we seek opportunities for praise, we return to faith. Remember the gentle light that strays -- and vanishes -- and returns.

This light always returns. In faith, whatever form our particular faith takes, we know that there is an abundance of goodness and beauty and joy and love in this world, mutilated as it also is. And when that light seems to vanish, faith reminds us that it always returns. That is the hope and the promise. It doesn't matter who or what is responsible or why - just praise it.

William Edelen in an article about prayer quotes Unitarian poet e.e. cummings hymn of praise:

I thank you god for most this amazing day
for the leaping green spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky,
and for everything which is natural
which is infinite
which is yes

In the article Edelen shares how e.e. cummings and Buckminster Fuller would greet the sun when they were together. The two of them would stand facing east at the dawn hour feeling the peace, the quiet, the solitude, the rhythms of nature... they stood for ten minutes in total silence as the eastern sky was showing first light of pinks, yellows and oranges with a touch of red. Finally, after ten minutes or so, Buckminster Fuller raised both of his arms in full length to the heavens above, and in a blessing that was an epiphany, address the morning with:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The 13th C. mystic, Meister Eckhart said: If the only prayer you say in your entire life is thank you that would suffice.

Let our lives be about thank you. Let our lives be about praise. Praise what? Everything. The beauty of this mutilated world. The joy of eye and ear and touch and scent.

Why? Because it is so much better than lament. It is so much more useful than despair. Hopelessness leaves us with no possibilities and no options. Lament is necessary, but we must not get stuck there. Despair is the end of the road.

Praise, on the other hand, is full of possibility. Praise saves us.
Go to praise whenever you possibly can.
Go to gratitude.
Go to joy.
Go to love.
Praise this mutilated world.

CLOSING WORDS
from Denise Levertov -

Intricate and untraceable
Weaving and interweaving

Dark strand with light:
Designed, beyond
All spiderly contrivance,
To link, not to entrap:
Elation,
grief,
joy,
contrition, entwined;

Shaking,
changing,
forever forming,
transforming:
All praise,
all praise to the great web.

May praise be in our hearts and on our lips as we move through our mutilated world this week. Amen.

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