[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 2nd of January 2022]
(Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 and (an extract from) Desmond Tutu’s Hopes for a New Year)
Our first reading today comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes, said to be by the pseudonymous author Qohelet [Koh-HEL-ith] – this is a very odd book of the Bible in many ways. I never cease to be amused by the stances various biblical commentaries have on this book. One of the Anchor Bible commentaries on the book opens with the following: “Ecclesiastes is the strangest book in the Bible.”
While it might be one of the strangest books of the Bible it does provide us with some very beautiful readings. One of the best of these is, in my opinion, the reading we heard today. Not just because it has been cemented into popular culture by Pete Seeger and The Byrds!
It is also a very personally significant reading for me. Candidates who wish to train for the Unitarian Ministry must present a small period of worship, if I remember rightly only 10 or 15 minutes in length, to the denominations Ministry Interview Panel. This reading from Ecclesiastes was the reading I chose for mine.
How appropriate then that it is the first reading for this service today – my first service as your minister.
Yes passages like this, especially the list of “there is a time fors” can raise interesting questions about God’s providence – how God intervenes in our lives and in the world around us. If God has pre-ordained times for things to happen then why do we need to try and do anything? If God wants the leaves taken out of the chapel gutters, then surely God will arrange a time for that to happen. Why do we need to spring into action now?
I recently found a good response to this mindset in a fable told by the medieval Persian poet and mystic Saadi Shīrāzī that goes something like this:
A man walking through the forest saw a fox that had lost its legs and wondered how it lived. Then he saw a tiger come in with game in its mouth. The tiger had its fill and left the rest of the meat for the fox.
The next day God fed the fox by means of the same tiger. The man began to wonder at God’s greatness and said to himself, “I too shall just rest in a corner with full trust in the Lord and he will provide me with all I need.”
He did this for many days but nothing happened, and he was almost at death’s door when he heard a voice say, “O you who are in the path of error, open your eyes to the truth! Follow the example of the tiger and stop imitating the disabled fox.”
Sa’di, ‘The Disabled Fox’, in The Song Of The Bird, ed. by De Mello (New York: Doubleday, 1982), pp. 79–80
The truth contained in that short fable is why Ecclesiastes states that God has given us all something to be busy with. Even if we do not quite know that that is yet or what exactly our tasks will look like.
This is where our hopes and dreams come in. These are what we can use to discern what we should be busy with and what we should be aiming towards.
If talk of hopes and dreams sounds a bit wishy washy and rather impractical to you, don’t worry you are, I’m sure, not alone. Yet I do urge you to take dreams seriously.
Lenin was a revolutionary leader who was not widely recognised as being the sort of type for fluffy wishy-washy idealism. Hard-nosed practical materialism is more widely recognised as his jam. Yes in his famous pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Lenin quotes someone by the name of D. I. Pisarev at length on the subject of dreams:
“There are rifts and rifts,” wrote Pisarev of the rift between dreams and reality. “My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men…. There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the sphere of art, science, and practical endeavour…. The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.”
Lenin, V. I., ‘What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement’, in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, ed. by Victor Jerome, trans. by Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), v, 347–566 (pp. 509-510)
We also heard today words that Desmond Tutu wrote for New Year’s Day 2002 – 20 years ago. In this Tutu expressed his hope that “right will prevail, goodness will prevail, compassion will prevail, laughter will prevail, love, caring, sharing will prevail.” These words are easy to read as the naively idealistic ravings of a serial optimist – but I think that would be to fundamentally misunderstand Tutu. He was a man who knew what it was like to suffer under the boot of oppression. I think these words of his were less an optimistic wish and more a practical blueprint that he lived by. This was a man who worked at manifesting compassion, laughter, and love whatever way he could, no matter how little, every day of his life – sometimes at great cost to himself. Here is someone who worked “conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies” if there ever was.
This year our congregation celebrates its 300th anniversary – its tercentenary. This is a huge achievement but one we can not afford to rest on the laurels of.
If I am honest, I live in hope that the day will come when we do not need this chapel or any other place of worship because the love that it is this church’s mission to exemplify will have been made manifest in all the world – a day when people will live in the sacred presence of love, laughter, compassion, and sharing for all the days of their lives and so will not need a chapel in which to catch a fleeting yet precious glimpse of these sacred things. That will truly be a day when our Spirit inspired work is complete, when simply living will be as worship to the Divine.
Yet, until that day comes, it is vital that we work together to ensure the continued presence of this congregation and this marvellous place of worship as a much-needed asset in our community. This asset may well be of vital need for the next 300 years and its existence in the future begins here and now with our work today.
This means that your hopes and dreams for this congregation and this place have never been more needed.
You have all hopefully had or are soon to have an email from me asking if you would like to have a half hour chat with me. This will be your time to tell me anything you would like me to know about you from the offset of my ministry here. As part of this please do bring with you any of your ideas and hopes for this place and this congregation. As I have mentioned in my little piece for the January edition of the ‘Calendar’. Above all else, this is going to be a year where I plan to learn from all of you. As a result, this is a year that I am looking forward to getting to know you all, as well as your hopes and dreams.
Amen.
A well crafted sermon, I would have liked to have been there, All the best