This morning we are dedicating a flaming chalice in memory of one of our members, Vernon Shepard, whose life was a symbol of our faith tradition and an expression of the spirit that surrounds the history of the flaming chalice within Unitarian Universalism. We are also adding the lighting of this chalice to our weekly liturgy, as a reminder of our faith community’s enduring connection to other individuals and communities throughout history who have found the free mind and the large, inclusive heart to be essential to the life of faith.

“The chalice and the flame were brought together as a Unitarian symbol by an Austrian artist, Hans Deutsch, in 1941. Living in Paris during the 1930’s Deutsch drew critical cartoons of Adolf Hitler. When the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, he abandoned all he had and fled to the South of France, then to Spain, and finally, with an altered passport, into Portugal.

“There, he met the Reverend Charles Joy, executive director of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). The Service Committee was new, founded in Boston to assist Eastern Europeans, among them Unitarians as well as Jews, who needed to escape Nazi persecution. From his Lisbon headquarters, Joy oversaw a secret network of couriers and agents.

“Charles Joy felt that this new, unknown organization needed some visual image to represent Unitarianism to the world, especially when dealing with government agencies abroad. Deutsch was most impressed and soon was working for the USC. He later wrote to Joy:

There is something that urges me to tell you... how much I admire your utter self denial [and] readiness to serve, to sacrifice all, your time, your health, your well being, to help, help, help.

I am not what you may actually call a believer. But if your kind of life is the profession of your faith---as it is, I feel sure---then religion, ceasing to be magic and mysticism, becomes confession to practical philosophy and---what is more- --to active, really useful social work.

“The USC was an unknown organization in 1941. This was a special handicap in the cloak-and-dagger world, where establishing trust quickly across barriers of language, nationality, and faith could mean life instead of death. Disguises, signs and countersigns, and midnight runs across guarded borders were the means of freedom in those days. Joy asked Deutsch to create a symbol for their papers.

“Thus, Hans Deutsch made his lasting contribution to the USC and, as it turned out, to Unitarian Universalism. With pencil and ink he drew a chalice with a flame. It was, Joy wrote his board in Boston:

…a chalice with a flame, the kind of chalice which the Greeks and Romans put on their altars. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice.... This was in the mind of the artist. The fact, however, that it remotely suggests a cross was not in his mind, but to me this also has its merit. We do not limit our work to Christians. Indeed, at the present moment, our work is nine-tenths for the Jews, yet we do stem from the Christian tradition, and the cross does symbolize Christianity and its central theme of sacrificial love.

“The flaming chalice design was made into a seal for papers and a badge for agents moving refugees to freedom.” (“The History of the Flaming Chalice,” by Rev. Daniel Hotchkiss)

This symbol arose out of people of the Unitarian faith giving their lives in service to freedom and to a love for all souls. It arose out of people of the Unitarian faith willing to risk their own personal security and to sacrifice their own lives for these noble religious aims. Today it is the official symbol of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, our international service organization, and the Unitarian Universalist Association, the national organization of our churches. But it will always be something much more than a mere symbol for two organizations. When we light this chalice each Sunday morning, a symbol born of sacrifice, it is to remind us that the living spirit of freedom and love unites this congregation and its members to others of different cultures and different historical epochs. And freedom and love are fulfilled by our sacrifice and service to the cause of humankind, which is our form of the life of faith as Unitarian Universalist.

As we did this morning, each Sunday morning following the Invocation spoken by our worship leader, and before we recite together the church covenant that binds us to one another in the fellowship of this particular spiritual community, a member of our congregation will light this chalice, reminding us that through our larger connectedness and by the religious life of service and sacrifice, freedom and love emerge in creation. After lighting the chalice that member will recite these words, and then lead us in reciting the covenant of our church:

This candle is lit to remember a truth,

Consecrated through the ages by the service and sacrifice

Of individuals and communities:

There abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit,

Expressed through a love for all souls.

 

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, thou knowest.” Again he said unto me, “Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath (or wind or spirit) to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.’” So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. Then said he unto me, “Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, ‘Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.’ Therefore prophesy and say unto them, ‘Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, and shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it,’” saith the LORD.

O God, there are people all over our world who are weeping and crying out for loved ones whom they have lost this past week. At the dawning of the New Year be with them in these grieving days of wild unreality. There are people all over our world who are seeking a peace beyond human understanding in the midst of a great tragedy that is beyond human understanding. At the dawning of the New Year help them secure a peace that passes all understanding. There are people all over our world who are reaching out for the embrace of another, for the comfort and security another can give, for survival through the basic needs that others can provide them. Move within the hearts of men and women that gratitude and graciousness might be our response to this wonderful and fearful gift we have been given. Stir our hearts to noble service and holy sacrifice, that by our efforts others may have life, and have it more abundantly.

AMEN.

The Irish 1970’s super group Thin Lizzy had two hits that are among my all time rock ‘n roll favorites, “The Boys Are Back in Town” and “Jailbreak.” I was listening to the second one, “Jailbreak,” last November while driving to Missouri, when it struck me how it embodies the quintessential characteristics of modern popular music. The restrictions of culture and the order of everyday life are like prisons from which modern artists offer release through chaos, a breaking out of restriction and order like a jailbreak. The sound of the song is chaos. But, unbeknownst to many, over the past 40 years the disorder of countering the culture has gradually become itself a convention and imposition. It’s such a routine expectation today that Thin Lizzy’s other hit, “The Boys Are Back in Town”, instead of presaging the threat of impending anarchy, is now relegated to being the cover song for credit card companies hawking low interest offers that keep at bay the anarchic barbarians of high monthly payments. It may be inevitable in culture that the battle of order and chaos is learned so well that people intuit the uncertain feel of disorder without ever really having the security of that order threatened. So “the boys” who are now back in town are not the romantic revelers of testosterone driven rock ‘n roll upheaval, those you would never want your parents to know about; but the fake barbarians of high credit card interest! There something false in crying out, “Beware!”, while claiming to have identified a chaos that threatens order.

Jobs order our days. Family obligations and responsibilities order our days. Children’s needs, neighborhood expectations, errand running, and keeping physically healthy and active order our days. Our schedules are shaped by television and radio shows. Nature’s dawn and dusk, seasonal changes, and weather patterns and expectations and surprises regulate what tasks fill our activities. The sudden catastrophic appearance of the Tsunami in the lives of unsuspecting folk, regardless of cultural origin, ethnicity, religion, or any other characteristics, turned the various orders of all those lives into chaos. The Truth that event revealed includes the human need to have order, and the extent to which the order our lives have come from outside our own consent.

And sometimes we allow our lives to be ordered in such a subtle manner that the origin works upon us unsuspectingly.

In the 2002 movie “About Schmidt” these “orders” around us that compete for arranging our understandings of things, come directly in focus. The movie is about an individual confronting the reality that we moderns allow our lives to be ordered by outside agents in certain ways that we are not aware of until they are removed. Jack Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, who “has spent his entire life selling insurance, coming home every evening to his pleasant-enough family…” (Moviefone Review) His 8-5 job orders his weekdays. The family’s needs and activities ordered the evenings and weekends. But these orders are not eternal, but very, very finite and transient. The movie begins on the day of his retirement, as Schmidt sits in his bare office, denuded of his desk, his files, his paperwork, the photographs on his desk, all the symbols of what ordered his weekday life. He is staring at the clock, the only thing of this order left in the room besides the chair he sits on. His co-workers, still unsuspecting prisoners of the imposed order of the insurance business, envy what they think is his freedom. But, absent the order he allowed to be imposed upon his day, Schmidt is lost. His wife soon dies too, and with his grown daughter halfway across the country, he’s lost the order of the family as well! He fears the meaninglessness of chaos, that slow disintegration of self when the things we’ve allowed our days to be ordered by, disappear.

We exist in the chaos of a creation we did not make and exercise very little control over. It’s part of the significance of the devastating tsunami. Human beings make sense out of existence by placing upon it an order, derived in part from our capacity to see structure in our world and our imagination’s capacity to create powerfully emotive metaphors from our world. Our newest national poet laureate, Ted Kooser, a Nebraska insurance executive, would for decades rise at 4:30 in the morning to compose poems he would rewrite as many as 40 times before declaring them finished: “Sept. 11 happens,” he said, “and tens of thousands of people try to write poems about it. What it is, is our need to find order in an extremely disorderly world. Poetry is sort of a small piece of order.” (Stopping by the Prosaic on an Autumn Day, Francis X. Clines, NY Times, 12/04)

Worship is another small piece of order.

Worship is an ordered ritual designed to express and extol through activity, what a particular faith community discerns is of ultimate concern and is divine in origin. The ordered ritual has a history. It was started someplace and has evolved over the years. And hidden within the ritual is a theological declaration of what is of ultimate worth. The particular faith community is itself an organism of history, with a life that represents a particular historical understanding of theology, God, human nature, the created world, and the meanings of existence; that is, a certain kind of small piece of order. Worship is a small piece of order set off from all the other “orders” that compete for arranging our understandings of ourselves, human nature, and the meaning of our lives.

The liturgy of our worship is old, and is a variation of what came about during the time the Ezekiel reading was recalling. Our form of liturgy is called, “synagogue style” worship, because it displays characteristics in common with this ancient liturgical order.

Originally worship in the ancient Hebrew tradition was in the form of animal sacrifice. From thousands of years BCE up until 586 BCE it was the only form of Hebrew worship, and from around 1000 BCE to 586 BCE it was performed only in the grand and magnificent Jerusalem Temple. Through animal sacrifice the covenant God had made with Moses and the Hebrew people on Mount Sinai was recalled and the sins of the people were forgiven. The Temple was under the jurisdiction of the High Priest, and the priests, familial descendents of the tribe of Levi, were the only ones who officiated over the liturgy of sacrifice done upon an altar. The only place for Hebrew worship was the Temple.

In 586 BCE the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and scattered the Jews throughout the Middle Eastern world, creating the Babylonian Exile. With the Temple and sacrificial worship destroyed, the Jews were left with the question of their religious existence. How could they survive religiously? The “House of Worship” within which worship could occur, animal sacrifice given, and sins forgiven vanished. In this exile, the synagogue was invented all across communities in the Middle East, as a response to this crisis of identity. And in the various synagogues in the various communities, a structure and form of worship arose there that was very different from the sacrificial worship presided over by the priests in the Jerusalem Temple.

Synagogue worship included prayers, readings from the Torah (the book that now expressed religious identity as the Temple sacrifice once did), commentary on the Torah called sermons, and a benediction. It was a more open form worship in that the entire public participated, with the place of worship becoming “a house of prayer for all people.” The priests did not simply do the sacrifices for the people. The outward act of animal sacrifice of worship in the Temple became the internal sacrifice of study and service to others. Knowledge and duty became the means of reestablishing the covenant with God and dealing with human sin, not the blood of the one sacrificed. The reading from Ezekiel chronicles this change in worship and identity, as it was Ezekiel who is credited with leading this change. The dead bones that rise up do so because the synagogue, and its form of worship, breathed a new spirit into faith and an individual’s religious identity. It was a broad based movement intent upon leading the people themselves in living out their faith. The dead bones of a faith and people almost eradicated, became the muscles, sinew, and flesh of a people and a faith resurrected.

By 500 BCE the Hebrews had returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the Temple. Sacrificial worship resumed in the Temple as before, even as synagogue style worship continued in Jewish communities throughout the Middle East. Competition arose amongst these two forms of worship: Temple sacrifice controlled by the priests and synagogue style worship led by rabbis, by teachers, and open to the public. By Jesus’ time this competition is highly volatile, with some 300 synagogues in Jerusalem itself competing with the Temple as the proper place and kind of Jewish worship. This is why the Levites, the priests, and the High Priests, who claimed the only legitimate form of Jewish worship was Temple sacrifice, challenged Jesus, called rabbi.

The earliest religious communities that followed Jesus after his death, made up of Jews and Gentiles, used synagogue style worship. Knowledge and service to others were the forms of the religious life most emulating Jesus. It was the path to a freedom to become as children of God. It is only later, by 150 ACE, when the church becomes exclusively Gentile, that Mass becomes the form of worship. Mass was a sacrificial form, modeled after Temple worship, and communion replaced animal sacrifice. An altar was erected inside a building built to recall the Temple. Jesus became the sacrificial lamb, and his death and resurrection are understood to be the blood sacrifice atoning for, that is, forgiving, human sin. This is not our tradition of worship. Ours is synagogue style, like the Jews from the Babylonian exile, and the earliest Christian communities made up of Jews and Gentiles.

Any form of worship is a small piece of order, and this is where the history of our form of worship, our liturgy as Unitarian Universalists, comes from. We do not represent the religious idea that it is through the atoning, sacrificial death of an animal or another human being that human sin is forgiven and a relationship with God is reestablished. Our liturgy embodies study, knowledge, and wisdom - and duty and service to others - as expressions of ultimate concern and the path towards reconnecting with what is divine in origin. Discovering these is the trajectory of our worship time together each week.

Our liturgy has both an intellectual and an emotional component. It contains words that are repeated every week, and words that are spoken once in any given week. It has both variation and routine. It is meant to be dramatic; that is, it is meant to move the individual worshipper such that at the end of it he or she knows something more about themselves and their world; and worshippers are rededicated to serve the cause and prospect of humanity. The aim of liturgy and worship at All Souls is to liberate the mind of its ignorances, narrownesses, and prejudices, and cultivate in the heart a love for all souls. The aim is to liberate and cultivate the spirit.

Our liturgy is divided into three parts. In the First Part the community gives praise together in gratitude for the gift of life. We sing together, the worship leader reads the Church’s Invocation, and after this morning, the chalice is lit by a member of the church in remembrance of this community’s larger connections to a faith tradition and history. The religious community recites promises to one another, the bond of affection and fellowship that forms this particular church, and together we conclude the communal portion of worship with a sung variation of this previously spoken covenant.

In the Second Part, through reading and reflection, each individual begins, in the context and support of the spiritual community, to examine his or her life for a knowledge of life’s meanings and for one’s responsibilities and duties to others. It is a time for introspection, for the individual to think upon successes and failures, triumphs and burdens, and memories and hopes; to seek forgiveness from God directly, in the depths of his or her own soul, however that is understood by the individual. And, it is a time to prepare for seeking direction through a liberation from ignorance and shortsightedness. With preparation complete, we break momentarily to welcome the public and offer our financial gifts to the work of the church and the needs of our times.

Part Three invites the individual into a deeper contemplation of life through an internal conversation with the spoken words of the preacher, an event called the sermon. In it the called spiritual leader (the minister) of the community delivers a commentary witnessing to his direct spiritual engagement of the world. It is not designed for the speaker to tell the listeners what they should or are required to believe, as in orthodox Christian settings. Rather, through the individual minister speaking truthfully in love, in deep reflection upon what he thinks and believes, the mind and heart of the hearers will be invigorated such that each might come to a knowledge of what each one individually thinks and believes. All of us might become liberated towards love. That liberation, and the love it manifests through our activities in the world, is the sign human beings have reestablished a connection with what is holy and sacred, with God.

There is no communion in our Sunday worship service to suggest that it is by the sacrificial death of another living creature that our lives are made meaningful and whole. There is no hint that any sacrifice that human beings make is to appease a God whose commandments we have broken. In our churches when communion takes place, it is a service of remembrance of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as the supreme example of the likeness to God in which all human beings are created. Any sacrifice that is suggested or recalled is one where freedom, a unity of the human family, and a love for all souls has been inspired in others.

Worship is a small piece of order. It is an order participants voluntarily place themselves under to gain meaning in a new way. By choosing to worship here you consent to experience the values, understandings, and ideas that make up this “order” as ultimate ones, shaping your life perspective and activity. In our faith tradition as Unitarian Universalists, an over 500 year old church with, as you can see, a form of worship now 2500 years old, the aim of worship is simple. We seek together a liberation of the spirit that reveals to each, in his or her own way, a unity within creation that yields love. Our faith is that a unity within creation exists. It is a Spirit that is alive in our world right now, as individuals of all differing cultures, ethnicities, creeds, faiths, countries, sexualities, genders, involve themselves in the healing of others who have suffered so greatly from last week’s catastrophe.

And for those who claim it is necessary for a living creature to be sacrificed to recall and remember and reestablish that Spirit, we would instead recall words nearly 2500 years old that announced a new way, a new order, to human fellowship and the meaning human life can have. The human family has yet to fully realize that new order whereby through knowledge and wisdom - the fruits of the free mind - and service to others - the evidence and yield of a heart grasped by love - the dying human prospect becomes resurrected into the new life of faith and promise in what creation can become, and what this world can be.

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, thou knowest.” Again he said unto me, “Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD… Behold, I will cause breath (or wind or spirit) to enter into you, and ye shall live...’” So I prophesied as I was commanded: and.. there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them… and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

They lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army of freedom declaring a unity amongst all peoples, an exceeding great army of love.

AMEN.