The Transient and the Permanent at the Holidays

A sermon offered by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia
Unitarian Universalist Church, Lafayette, Indiana, December 17, 2000

So let me turn first to Hanukkah. When I think of the festival of lights this is the scene I see in my mind’s eye:

It is late afternoon in the month of Kislev, 164 BCE, and a large dusty band of weary and wounded men are carefully moving through the rubble and trash strewn through the old Temple.  Around their feet are scattered broken flasks, torn altar cloths, and broken benches.  They have reentered their Temple after years of hard oppression and suffering at the hands of King Antiochus and the Syrian army.  Somehow I see them wandering through this mess and moving toward the inner wall of the temple.  As they arrive in the heart of the temple they push aside the symbols of the tyranny that has ruled here.  They clear a space on the remaining altar and set down the clay oil lamp they have carried in with them -– the lamp which they have carried across miles, hidden from the authorities, and protected through battle.  Then they search the temple for oil for the lamp that should hold the sacred Or – the eternal fire.  When finally they find oil it is one small flask – only enough for one day and they know that the fire on the altar must be kept burning. It will take eight days for their brothers to arrive with supplies and more oil but they know they must consecrate the altar by the light of the lamp.   The sun is going down.  So ... they light it and  -- miracle of miracles – as they pray day upon day, as they rebuild their broken temple and their community, the oil lasts and the fire remains burning.  And the scene I see again and again are their faces, as sundown takes the light, their faces radiant with the first light of that lamp.  All the trappings of religion are gone around them, the community has been emptied and displaced but this small flame burns reflecting the hope and faith of these fierce men gathered around it.  I’m a little uncomfortable admitting that the story of Hanukkah is not moving to me because a fierce battle was fought and won and it’s not centrally moving because there was a miracle of light in the dark – it is somehow inspiring to me because the flame and the humans around it were all that remained and the people were determined and carried within them their living faith as the fire carried a fragment of the sun and the brilliant power of fire.  Simple and spare.  No codes, no hierarchies, no dogmas -- for a moment.  It stands for me for all that is enduring and transcendent – beyond dogma or creed, beyond sect or idea – something deep and simple.  I know that these Maccabees – the sons and troops of Mattathius – were rising up in the face of terrible suppression –their practices of worship were declared illegal and their holy places were defiled.  And the enduring passion to preserve a tradition moves me – but what moves me even more is the enduring passion to preserve a people, a spirit, and to see the reality of that beyond temple or dogma. 

For Jewish Kabbalists it means even more -- for the Menorah, itself, is the tree of life and holds in it the first light, the first emanation of life -- Ohr HaGanuz -- the first and hidden fire -- the fire that is revealed in the time of redemption... 

In Hanukkah or in our chalice -- humans seek in the fire something enduring, nourishing.  Using symbols and rituals -- seeking what is permanent and ineffable embodied for the moment in the transient -- the passing.  Sometimes it is called the truth but that word can be ominous -- for the notion of a truth can be too easily trademarked or frozen or carved in stone -- more dangerous than the marble of temple or churches it can be carved into the hardened heart.  That is why  -- the transcendent is often perhaps almost always found in that moment when all has fallen apart -- destroyed like the temple -- because for that moment we are free.

This freedom -- the freedom to seek the sacred -- is the religious project-- or should be.  The search for what is at the foundation -- the core -- the fiery heart.   It is the search spoken of by our  sages -- often labeled heretics.

Over the last months we’ve been sharing their stories -- their pilgrimages of seeking that precious flame -- seeking even through the flames.  I think last week Martha Gipson shared the story of the unfortunate meeting of John Calvin and Miguel Servetus.  It was Servetus, in the 16th century, who was unwilling to uphold any dogma that seemed to obscure the true nature of the Jesus he worshipped. From his ideas life-giving flames were kindled around Europe that fed the reformation and spread early humanism.  But that’s another story.  Much later -- in the nineteenth century, it was Theodore Parker who preached the sermon from which the name of this sermon is taken.  And this isn’t another history sermon but it is worthwhile to revisit for a moment Parker, his time and the words he has set into our foundation -- words that live now -- even as all else changes around them.

It was three years after Ralph Waldo Emerson gave that address to the Harvard Divinity school that caused such an outcry -- the one he wandered over to Bronson Alcott’s to discuss.  The one where he accused the Unitarian movement of winking out like a dying fire -- where he begged the new ministers "to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar."

Emerson claimed that it mattered little what forms we used but that we had to reach below the forms and seek the mind, the soul, reach the transcendent that lives beyond form. He outraged his Unitarian brothers in the clergy but it was only a prelude to the more radical statement that Parker gave at an ordination sermon 3 years later -- a sermon in which Parker continued the same argument.  Now it may be helpful to know that Parker was a transcendentalist firebrand and an abolitionist.  He smuggled African Americans from slavery to freedom and wrote his sermons with a pistol on his desk in order to defend them, if discovered.  He was inspired by a religious fervor, he was a Christian, but he was certainly a heretic for his time.

So it was in Boston in 1841, in his sermon entitled "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity", that he said "transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as religion... there is no ... sect which does not fetter a man.. that would not make all men think alike...but this is ephemeral... it will pass off and be forgotten -- some new form will take its place, suited to the aspect of the changing times.  Truth is entrusted for the time to a perishable ark of human contrivance.." Parker questioned doctrine and current belief.  Well, as he himself later wrote in his autobiographical fragments "even the Unitarian ministers, who are themselves reckoned but the tail of heresy, denounced me as an infidel and struck my name out of their Almanac -- the only Unitarian form of excommunication."  It went rough for him -- though not so rough as for Servetus.  And, in truth his words and message became the new direction of Unitarianism -- and today we remain faithfully skeptical of the transient in our practice of religion. 

This is what enables us to sit together on such a Sunday morning as this -- to worship together and to seek that fiery heart, through and at the same time below and words and ideas and actions.   It is a rough project but a worthy one.  So, as we honor Hanukkah or Solstice we both honor their forms and look to them for the less transient beneath their forms.  We hold on and let go at the same time.. we hold  with love, to the many positive human expressions of awe that we find -- this chalice, these candles, this tapestry, our words, that flag -- but more deeply, we seek to touch what lives in us and in them that is enduring.  This is our great gift as Unitarian Universalists.  It is a worthy gift -- particularly at this chilly time where the soul deep need is great to look beneath the glitter to the genuine radiance.

To the radiance that transforms lives.  That makes me want to emphasize that this is a deep and spirited enterprise that embraces not only public religion, but the private souls of people.  When we were talking on December 3, I mentioned the personal suffering that touches our lives and I affirmed how much is to be learned in those times and from those sufferings.  But beneath that there is something firmer, more enduring even, a certain radiance, hard to touch -- harder to find but burning deep within, almost but not quite beyond, the transient.  Certainly it is one of the lessons of this season to trust to that deep radiance hidden beneath the snow and the cold -- enduring.  It is the strength of a person or of a people -- the power that brought the Jews back to the Temple, to rekindle the fire on the altar.  The first and hidden fire.

It is the same fire that erupted into the holiday of Kwanzaa -- a fire banked – burning like an ember within the hearts of African Americans – waiting… hidden and then bursting into flame.  It was in 1967 that Maulanga Karenga created the holiday of Kwanzaa.  It’s a holiday not about a religion – though it has its origins in ancient African religions -- from the same region of the world as Hanukkah -- it’s not about any one vision of God.  It’s a time set apart to strengthen the spirit of a people.  Kwanzaa -- First fruits.  And, of course the first fruit is the spirit of the people -- it burns beyond any altar and brighter than any host of candles.  Though it’s not my holiday -- it belongs to and is for African Americans, I am inspired by the principles it affirms:

Umoja (oomojah) -- Unity of community and race.
Kujichagulia (koojeechahgooliah) -- Self Determination
Ujima (oojeemah) -- Collective Work and Responsibility
Ujamaa (oojama’ah) -- Cooperative Economics -- to nurture and share the fruits
Nia (Nee’ah) -- Purpose -- to make this the covenant of the community
Kuumba (Koo oom’bah) -- Creativity -- To impart beauty and healing
Imani (eemahnee) -- Faith -- to believe in the people and the community

Malenga derived these principles from a communitarian African philosophy called Kawaida.  He wrote:  "Values produce and sustain thought and practice which either diminish or enhance human possibilities -- in other words, what you define as important and put first in your life defines your possibilities."   Of course we know that Malenga was on the money here -- what you value is what you do.  The principles of Kwanzaa are deep values -- far stronger than any dogma about the nature of a god or an afterlife.  Kwanzaa is a holiday of both depth and simplicity and intentionality.  Each year African Americans -- at least those who celebrate the holiday -- light the candles on the seven branches of their kinara and affirm principles that transcend any one notion of the nature of the sacred.  Their seven principles take the fire and guide it -- take the spirit and lead it toward the common good.  As the Kwanzaa candles are lit, the people look into these flames and are transformed by that which endures.  And they light these red, black, and yellow candles, which affirm their ancient heritage and they touch a bedrock of another related sort -- another enduring foundation-- a sense of place and history, of belonging in time -- such a sense gives a people power to endure and more -- to generate, create, to flourish.  It takes principles that inspire and enliven souls and grounds them here, on earth, where the work is.

The Adult Religious Education Committee, here, is in the process of reading a book called Common Fire.  The authors interviewed more than one hundred people who work for that ever-elusive common good and then they searched for the deep patterns -- the elements that transformed these lives into lives of vision and service.  I’m sure that we will be talking about the ideas in this book much more in the future, but, among other things, as the team interviewed people they found that a bedrock sense of belonging -- of tribe was essential for the spirits of people.  A sense of tribe -- can you reach into your own history for your sense of tribe?  It may be one -- or many.  Here we rather cherish our feeling of being a tribe of skeptics.  In any case, some sense of tribe is essential for a person or a people to feel grounded enough to move creatively through the world.

Of course, it reminds me of that band of dusty warriors who rekindled the oil lamp in 164 BCE.  It was their strong sense of tribe coupled with the deep flame of their living faith, that enabled them to win back their Temple.  And two hundred thirty years later, it was this that enabled the Jewish faith to survive after that Temple was finally destroyed by the Romans.  To survive the holocaust.  But, as the authors of Common Fire remind us -- we have, also, to move beyond our sense of tribe.  For with a sense of tribe can come a belief of otherness.  And the fear of other, the hatred of other is a dangerous force.  So -- it’s a great gift to know who one is, where one is loved and has a hearth but it’s a further gift to know that one is a citizen of the whole.  In Common Fire this is called "Living within and beyond tribe."  Tribe, too, is transient. Vital, yes, -- but a way station on the pilgrimage to something broader.  The cosmos reflected in the community. 

So there’s this amazing balance -- one we, in particular, celebrate here -- this balance between the outward forms of things -- real and valuable -- and the enduring but unchained truth that lives within them.  This dance that carries a person or a people from the hearth to the greater world, from self-serving to service.  It is a knowing that seems to enable people to see deep purpose --  Nia -- and to carry forth a larger sense of tribe -- the survival and flourishing of our communities and our world.  Or someplace smaller... like our own church.

Here we’ve got a particular sense of tribe -- more a sense of hearth -- where the fire burns.  We know that fire in lamps lit throughout our tradition, in our local history in greater Lafayette, and in this deepening, growing community, continuous for fifty one years.  Because of the legacy of people like Theodore Parker we do not need to tear down dogma to reveal the enduring -- we know we can each reach toward it directly.  Further -- we live and work with principles that will certainly develop over time and a covenant that has carried us to this time.  To live in this way is to hold loosely to what is transient and to reach toward what is enduring -- what carries into the future.

And we have a yearning for the future as sure as any other tribe -- a yearning to be enduring.  This yearning has carried you and will carry us into new places, beyond tribe, into discussions and decisions great and small -- such discussions as will happen this afternoon at the congregational meeting.  Maulanga Karenga wrote: Everyday is a donation to eternity and even one hour is a contribution to the future.  As we meet this afternoon, we will shape the future together -- shape our way of being in the world as a congregation.  Through the transient we will touch and embody the enduring.  What is transient is this wall -- or that ceiling -- they need care and upkeep but they will pass.  What is enduring is the love between us -- our hope and our forming vision. 

In each of us is the first and hidden fire -- the enduring and unchained -- the blazing dust of the stars and the flame of the soul.  May we light our candles this winter -- for Hanukah, for Solstice, for Kwanzaa, for focus and for light.  May we be drawn far beyond the flame we see to that fiery heart that awakens and sparks  all of life and that moves through our lives and in our hands and endures throughout all time.