Making Ready for Transformation

Transformation is our religious exploration theme for March. We adapt to the changing world. We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.

Sermon audio

Sermon

Making Ready for Transformation

Rev. Joe Cleveland

March 3, 2024

 

Rev. Joe looking like the dictionary illustration of a clean-cut white guy.
The Rev. Joe Cleveland and his banjo.

The number one country hit is Texas Hold ‘Em by Beyoncé and people are freaking out.  The world has changed!  Some people are yelling at Beyoncé, “Stay in your lane!”  The whole of the music landscape in America is changing.  All of a sudden.  Just like it always does.  A fretless, nylon-string low-tuned banjo all alone starts a number one hit song.  Beyoncé, artist that she is, is always changing, growing, evolving.  And music, that protean, shifting, necessary human living thing, will always evade the music industry’s attempts to tell it what it is.

What science tells us about the world is that it is always in process, always shifting and evolving and changing. No matter how still it feels, the ground beneath our feet is moving.  

In my experience of growing up in Catholicism, I didn’t get the idea that change was the fundamental reality.  Just the opposite.  It might have been trying to teach me something else, but what I learned was that this mortal, changing, transient world is nothing compared to the immortal forever unchanging that is above and beyond it all.  And our goal is to be permanent, to be part of the unchanging realm and to leave this changeable, mortal world behind.  

The most shocking delivery of this message to me was at the funeral service for my uncle.  The priest at the service made a little homily.  He read from the obituary that had been published in the paper.  Sort of a recitation of a few select facts in the life of my uncle.  And then, in an attempt to reassure us about my uncle’s well-being beyond the grave, he painted this picture of the spirit of my uncle floating above us and turning his back on us to leave us for the bright eternal paradise of the hereafter.  It felt like a blow to the head, a punch to my heart—knowing my uncle, however bright and wonderful that other place might be, he would never turn his back on the people he loved.  The spirit of the uncle I know is here, part of this shifting changing evolving world, shifting and changing and evolving along with us who are also changing and evolving.

The transformation preached by that priest was a sort of one-and-done transformation.  All the rest is just hanging out in heaven, the place that the band the Talking Heads told us is a place where nothing ever happens.  

I believe in a happening world. I believe in lives that are happening.  The river flows, the tide goes in and out, the winds blow, and the continents drift around the globe.

What resonates me would be something like the teaching of 12th-century Zen master Dogen.  According to a 21st-century Soto Zen Buddhist priest, “For Dogen, impermanences isn’t a problem to be overcome with diligent effort on the path.  Impermanence is the path.  Practice isn’t the way to cope with or overcome impermanence.  it is the way to fully appreciate and live it.”  Dogen wrote that “Impermanence itself is Buddha Nature.”

What resonates with me is this beautiful sentence written by James Baldwin,

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.” 

Baldwin has such a gift for language and yet as beautiful as his words are, he does not pull any punches or let you off the hook.  He shows you real hurt and suffering and makes sure that we feel it and are discomfited by it.  The beauty of Baldwin’s words, plus the unease and discomfort he helps us feel, point us in the direction of the change and transformation we want and need to help happen.  

We live in a happening world and we are here to help shape it, and, as Baldwin says, “to make the world a more human dwelling place.”  

Everything changes, and one place to look for hope is in the persistence of growth and change we can see in the natural world.  That’s one place Howard Thurman finds it:

“All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born.  The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit.”

UU Shared Values (graphic by Tanya Webster chalicedays.org)

Another place where I find hope is in a faith tradition that strives for and to change.  And Unitarian Universalism does that.  Part of this commitment is rooted in our Universalist theological heritage.  What Universalism tells us is that we are all destined for transformation.  The inspiration we find in science tells us that evolution is always happening.  And so transformation is a key Unitarian Universalist value.  In the new statement of UU values we’ll vote on this summer it says that, valuing Transformation, “We adapt to the changing world.”  And with the value of transformation before us, what is the commitment we are called to make?  The way the proposed statement of values puts it is this:  “We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically.  Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”

I love the “never complete and never perfect” part of that.  All that constant change could feel overwhelming.  ‘Never complete and never perfect’ makes space for compassion and even failure.  Not everything we’re gonna try is going to be a success. Or, as the organizer adrienne maree brown says: “Never a failure, always a lesson.”  

The part of this that is the most difficult for humans when it comes to valuing transformation is simply cultivating openness to change.  We Unitarian Universalists sing a living tradition, as our gray hymnals proclaim, and yet it has not been simple or easy to attempt a new statement of values.  Even though I don’t think most UU’s have the Seven Principles (that have been around essentially for forty years) memorized, there has been resistance to releasing them from the UUA bylaws and trying to imagine how to describe a twenty-first century Unitarian Universalism. 

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote an essay trying to describe the task and responsibility of the artist.  And one of the main things that he says an artist is up against is the resistance to change.  

And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it.  They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity.

This is why openness to change is so hard: because being open to change means being open to the possibility that who we are will change, too. I’ve done a lot of work to figure out who I am and you mean that’s going to change?! As Baldwin says in another essay,

“The possibility of liberation which is always real is also always painful, since it involves such an overhauling of all that gave us our identity.” 

Transformation in the direction of liberation and justice and love means changing who we are.  The UU Congregation of Quezon City in the Philippines declares that this works both ways: “When I change, the world changes.”  

The UU Congregation of Saratoga Springs hasn’t said it in so many words, perhaps, but we are declaring that we are striving for and destined for transformation.  That’s what we are doing in taking on the project of leaving this meetinghouse behind and imagining and working to realize a new meetinghouse.  We are saying that we need transformation.  We are saying that we have a longing for transformation and feel a call to transform.  We are saying that we want transformation for our community.  We are saying we want to make a new difference in our lives, in the lives of our neighbors, and in the life of our communities.  We are saying right now to ourselves, our neighbors, and our community: make ready for transformation.

In the amazing novel by Octavia E. Butler called The Parable of the Sower, one of the ways the main character is different from everyone else around her is that she makes ready for transformation.  We first meet the main character, Lauren Olamina in the dystopian future world of southern California in the year 2024, she’s living in a humble but walled culdesac of homes.  Walled because the violence and danger outside those walls is just too frightening, just too threatening.  And yet, Lauren is not content to stay forever in her neighborhood, marry one of the neighborhood boys and have kids and just live out her days within those walls.  She wants to get out.  And she knows that, walled though her neighborhood may be, sooner or later, fire and violence is likely to come.  And so she makes ready.  She puts together an emergency bag with food and clothes and money.  And when the violence and fire does come to her neighborhood, she has trained herself.  She spent time practicing how to find her emergency bag in the dark, and her trained reflexes help save her and make sure that she will have at least a few resources with her as she searches for a new place and a new way to make a new life.

This doesn’t mean she knows what’s going to happen next.  She has a goal and she has values and ideas that guide her, but what will actually happen, she doesn’t know. She knows she is stepping into risk.

We don’t know exactly what is going to happen in our move to a new meetinghouse.  We have an idea of what the new meetinghouse will look like, but it’s still just an idea and a few pictures right now.  Just what will happen we can’t know for sure.  But we have started making ready.  You’ll hear about this after the service today, but there is a team of people working now to find the temporary home that we are going to need for a little while between this meetinghouse and the next.  There is a team of people cataloging everything that we have in the building.  We are committed to transformation.  But when you commit to transformation, it means we have to have faith.  

Faith isn’t belief and it isn’t certainty.  Faith is the ability to act without knowing for sure what will happen next.  The theologian Catherine Keller teaches:

“Faith is not settled belief but living process.  It is the very edge and opening of life in process.  To live is to step with trust into the next moment: into the unpredictable.” 

Faith is about acknowledging where you are right now, being honest about that, being clear about what it means to act on your values, and then to act, move, roll, step into the next moment, whatever it may hold.  Faith is willingness to enter into relationship.  Every marriage begins in and is sustained by faith.  Faith is the attitude of ‘never a failure, always a lesson.’ Faith is a willingness to accept that transformation will happen–is happening.  And faith means allowing that we cannot know in any totally certain or easy way just what we are transforming into. 

Valuing transformation, we are called, in a sense, to submit to the reality that everything is in process, but it is also to commit to help shape and co-create that transformation.  We must acknowledge the river’s flow, the pull of the tide.  Whatever we do today, it is not possible to stop the tides from happening.  Valuing transformation, we work with the tides, we work with the river’s flow, and become part of what happens next, whatever that will turn out to be.  Valuing transformation, we explore how we got to where we are, and how we might participate in what happens next.  

Making ready for transformation is an act of faith.  

May we covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. 

May we be open to change. May we cultivate openness to possibility.

May we appreciate where we’ve come from.

May we know we dwell in the impermanence that is Buddha Nature.

May we know we are never complete and never perfect.

May we accept the discomfort and challenge of change.

May we revel in the transformation and growth of who we are.

May our transformation be in the direction of wholeness and justice.

May we transform with and into love.



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