A Sermon Preached 1 January 2006 by Deacon Dave Skidmore
Good morning and Happy New Year! I trust you didn’t over-indulge last night. I, myself, did not over-indulge. But -- don’t press me on the definition of over. I suspect that if you had over-indulged, you might not be here. You’d be home, sleeping, or maybe sipping coffee. Today, of course, is New Year’s Day, so I’d like to offer some musings I hope are appropriate for the occasion.
The first is that there seems to be two ways to approach this holiday: We can look backward over the past year or forward to the coming year. Actually, many of us do both, in succession, looking backward on New Year’s Eve and forward on New Year’s Day. I don’t know about you, but, depending on how I am feeling on a given New Year, I gravitate toward one perspective or the other: backward toward the past or forward toward the future. What I can’t seem to do is look forward and backward simultaneously. Of course, we could, like Buddhists, strive to always live in the present moment. There’s a lot to be said for that. But, the problem is we do have memories of the past and we do have expectations and hopes for the future. Hence, the title of this sermon: “The Virtues of Being Two-Faced.”
Most of you, I suspect, have heard of the Roman god, Janus, after whom the month of January is named. He is the god of beginnings and the guardian of gates and doors. He is represented on Roman coins and in statues as having two heads, back to back. In his right hand, he holds a key. And, perhaps, thinking about this two-faced Roman god will offer us a key to how we can pass through the door to the new year, as individuals, and as a congregation.
I’d like to proceed by examining how we look backward, whether with nostalgia or bitterness, and then consider the sometimes facile ways we look ahead. Much of New Year’s Eve is about nostalgia. Last night, did you sing, “Auld Lang Syne”? -- a Scottish dialect phrase meaning, “old long-ago”? I’m almost certain you at least heard it being played. I heard it twice, just this morning: a bluegrass version on WAMU on the drive in and just now by our guest soloist, Jason Ryland. Thank you, Jason, and thank you, Sophia Vostak, for your musical gifts this morning. “Auld Lang Syne” seems to encapsulate all the nostalgic longing for the past that can come up during the holidays.
Part of us may long to return to some idealized holiday -- when we were children, when our children were young, when our friends lived nearby, when our parents were alive. We miss loved ones who can’t be with us; we may even miss ourselves as we once were -- before the divorce, or the career setback, or the serious illness, or before we graduated and took on the responsibilities of mortgage and marriage, or before whatever ghost of the more-recent past seems to hang over Christmas present.
Then there’s the “all things are new” school of celebrating New Year’s Day. We want a fresh start, without a hangover, either real or metaphorical -- and gosh darn it, we’re going to have it, at least until January 2. It’s easy to poke fun at those too-ambitious lists of New Year’s resolutions pledging dietary stringency, diligent aerobic effort and kindness to all people at all times. They seem to ignore the fact that on New Year’s Day we are essentially the same people we were the day before, with the same foibles.
Two adages summing up this “all things are new” attitude come to mind: “This is the first day of the rest of your life,” and “This is the end of the world, as we know it.” Both are indisputably true, though I’m not entirely sure whether they’re meant to be serious or satirical. In any case, I love that modifying clause, “as we know it.” That’s a big loophole. In answer, I could quote Janis Joplin as quoted in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same (bleeping) day, man.”
Now, I understand her impatience with the perennially optimistic among us, but perhaps Janis was a touch too negative. A better way out of being either overly focused on the past or overly focused on the future, rather than the Janis way, might be called the Janus way, or the two-faced way: a cultivation of a simultaneous awareness of the irrevocability of the past and the possibilities of the future -- while living in the here and now. Easier said than done, I know. So, rather than becoming captured by our past, either in sweet sentimentality or in sour bitterness, or attempting to shed our past, the better path is to proceed ahead, with the past firmly in view. Instead of shedding our pasts, we need to shed both extreme ideas -- that we can remake ourselves overnight with a list of resolutions, as well as the idea that nothing is ever new and that we cannot grow and we cannot change.
Two more aphorisms come to mind. But, unlike “the first day of the rest of your life” and “the end of the world as we know it,” these strike me as less satirical and more realistic, yet still hopeful: “You have to start from where you are” and “The world is always turning toward the morning.” These seem to recognize that change -- personal change, community change, societal change -- seldom occurs all at once, rather it evolves organically. It grows. It is informed by the past, but not bound by it.
I came across a quote from Maya Angelou that, I think, is relevant: “History,” she writes, “despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” In fact, the Christmas season offers a wonderful example of what Angelou is speaking about in the character of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. Long before psychotherapeutic ideas became part of our daily lives, Dickens’ character experiences a personal rebirth by taking an honest look at his past and reliving the pains and pleasures of his youth. But, he doesn’t remain mired in looking back. He then looks ahead and recognizes where his life’s path is leading. And, he makes changes as a result, to a better life path. Dickens in his fictional account of a single night in Scrooge’s life, telescopes what for most of us would probably be a process of years.
So, how might this process of change occur for those of us not visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley? The search for an answer to that question, I think, is central to what draws us to this church, or to any religious path for that matter. There is something that is ever-living -- that which here we call God. Seeking an awareness of God, for whom, as the psalmist says, a thousand years are but a watch in the night, puts into perspective our temporal see-sawing between New Year’s Eve nostalgia for the past and short-lived bursts of New Year’s Day self-improvement enthusiasm. Even a fleeting appreciation of the Eternal, by offering a perspective that sees past, present and future all at once, can, I think, give us something akin to the Buddhist’s awareness of the present moment. God is not bound by time, as is underscored by the two alternate translations, pointed out to me by Jim Morgan, of the Hebrew name for God. Yahweh means both, “I am that I am” and “I will be what I will be.”
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I’d like now to move toward my conclusion by briefly taking what I’ve been discussing out of the context of individual growth and putting it into the context of our community. Like each of us as individuals, our community has a history. We were built as the national church of the Universalist Church of America, a denomination that no longer exists as an independent entity. In recent years, we’ve had some good times, and some rough times. But, as a community we cannot focus wholly on the past, on the Universalism of the 19th century and early 20th century. Instead, we must be mindful of our community’s past as we seek, in becoming what we will be, to define and act upon what it means to be a liberal Christian church in the heart of this city in the 21st century.
I’d like to leave you with a pair of questions this morning -- as individuals and as a church community: Where have you, where have we, been? and Where are you, where are we, going? If, like Janus, we keep one set of eyes focused behind and the other set focused ahead, I hope and trust our journeys will take us where God is calling us to go and into becoming who God is calling us to become.
Posted by at January 3, 2006 10:42 AM