Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

 

 

June 1, 2003

 

 

“Traveling Mercies and Hearthcake”

 

 

Rev. Kathy Duhon

 

 

Candles of Faith, Hope, Love, Peace, Joy

 

FAITH            

 

            The journey of faith is a lifelong adventure that brings us and the world greater wisdom, peace and justice.  We pray with Kathleen McTigue, “May the light around us guide our footsteps, and hold us fast to the best and most righteous we seek.  May the darkness around us nurture our dreams, and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world.  Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.”

           

HOPE             

               

            Each new beginning reminds us that a world of hope is always opening before us.  Denise Levertov wrote, “How could we tire of hope? – so much is in bud.  How can desire fail? – we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy…We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.  So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture, so much is in bud.”  In this community of memory and hope, we are the keepers of an unfolding dream.

(Last line adapted from Brandoch Lovely) 

 

LOVE             

           

            If religion has purpose above all else, it is to nurture love, and yet religious differences inspire such hatred.  Universalist Hosea Ballou said, “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”  Let us infuse our differences with love, and join with Frederick Gillis in these words, “May the Love which overcomes all differences, which heals all wounds, which puts to flight all fears, which reconciles all who are separated, be in us and among us now and always.”

 

PEACE           

 

            As we center in our many forms of spiritual practice, we seek the healing of the mind, body and spirit, along with peace in the world, remembering these words of Thich Nhat Hanh:  “Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.  Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves….With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.  Amen.”

 

JOY                

 

          May we always seek joy in our hearts, though they are made for breaking, and share joy with the world, though it is broken asunder.  We offer this Jewish prayer, “Grant us the ability to find joy and strength not in the strident call to arms, but in stretching out our arms to grasp our fellow creatures in the striving for justice and truth.  Amen”

“Joy, gentle folks, joy and fresh days of love accompany your hearts.”

 

 

Traveling Mercies and Hearthcake

 

 

            “Traveling mercies” is not in the Bible passage today, though there is both traveling and mercy for Elijah.  Nor is the phrase elsewhere in the Bible, as far as I can tell, as “tender mercies” is, but it is a phrase that I love. “Traveling Mercies” is the title of a recent book by Anne Lamott.  In Anne’s church, the older people bid folks “traveling mercies” when someone goes away for awhile.  She says it means “love the journey, God is with you, come home safe and sound.”  It reminds me of other phrases, like the Spanish words they said to us as a farewell in Latin America – “Via Con Dios” – “Go With God”.  Or what my parents say when we leave them, “Don’t forget who loves you.”  A journey, no matter how joyfully anticipated, always brings a little anxiety – things are new and different and a bit unnerving – and the assurance of Beloved Belonging, of God or loved ones accompanying us, no matter where we go, is so precious.  Though we as a congregation have not traveled far, we are blessed to have had the assurance of traveling mercies along the way, brought by all of you who are our guests and witnesses and well-wishers, and by others.  We return the blessing, bidding you all traveling mercies on your journeys through life.

            Elijah is a traveling prophet, like Moses in that way, only Elijah travels in a big circle instead of forward to the promised land, which makes him a little more accessible, a little more like us.  Our congregation is traveling around and about Great Barrington, but more to the point, many among us here have journeyed through the ups and downs and roundabouts of life, like Elijah, sometimes circling back after failures, to begin again. 

Unlike with Moses, and many other prophets, we do not hear that Elijah begins his prophethood with questions and doubts and a lot of humble answers to the divine call –  ‘oh, no, not me, I’m not good enough’ – no, Elijah seems to just appear full force, striving heartily for his Lord.  Only a little while later in the story, though, Elijah wants to die, and slinks off to a cave, and this happens after his huge success at Mount Carmel, which was then followed by disappointment.  There he had brought the people of Israel to Yahweh and away from the god Baal by challenging the prophets of Baal to a kind of a sacred dual.  They were each to appeal to their understanding of God in their own way, and the one who would be answered with fire for their sacrifice would win the faith of the people. 

Within this narrative is the first joke I learned about in the Bible.  When the Baal prophets were having no success after hours of dancing and crying to Baal, Elijah asks if their god “has wandered away?” or “gone aside?”  This is a euphemism, in other words: “Did Baal have to go take a leak?  Is that why he’s not paying attention to you?”  Elijah wins the hearts of the people with a magnificent demonstration of his faith and God’s power, only not really.  The people are dazzled, but don’t stay faithful, and Queen Jezebel wants him dead, so he flees for his life.

That’s when the passage that was read begins – he heads into the wilderness, wanting to die under a tree.  But an angel comes with hearthcake and water and some motherly advice, “Get up and eat.”  Hearthcake sounds like home to me – it’s an old translation of the word, not in most Bibles, which have cake instead, as our new Bible does.  In the midst of his traveling, of the geographic and emotional circles that Elijah is going in, he gets a taste of the home-hearth, of nurturance, of stability and strength.  The oldest, simplest form of bread in the Bible is a type like this hearthcake that we hear about in 1 Kings.  In a cookbook I have that tries to re-create recipes from the Bible, I found a recipe for hearthcake, and here it is.  In the Bible, bread is the staple of the diet, and is used in religious practices.  The psalmist says that bread strengthens the human heart.  Still true.  We will share this hearthcake today with you – and other bread and other food at our potluck – we will share with you who are a wonderful interfaith community, to strengthen all our hearts for the journey together.  We especially hope the Methodists will be fortified for the days ahead.

Elijah is strengthened by the hearthcake to go on a long journey to a cave at Mt. Sinai, also called Horeb, perhaps the same cleft in a rock where Moses had been, and seen the backside of God.  Elijah listens for God, and many loud things happen outside the cave, but God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire.  In other words, God, unlike TV, does not do re-runs.  Elijah is not going to find God the same way that Moses did, or that Elijah himself did, previously.  Now a new way of experiencing the Holy is introduced to the zealous prophet Elijah – stillness, silence.  He goes back to his prophetic work, but he also commissions Elisha to help him, no longer trying to do this hard work alone.  Elijah’s encounter with the still, small voice has given him a new understanding of the sacred journey, which is long, bumpy, but much better with the accompaniment of others, and at times with a bit of quiet and stillness.

            Elijah’s prophethood recalls Moses – the journey, the fire of the Spirit of God, the cave at Mt. Sinai.  When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, their first roadblock was the Red Sea.  They were pursued by Pharoah’s charioteers, and all seemed doomed.  Then Moses raised his arms and his voice in prayer, but nothing happened – at first.  He had raised the hopes of the people, however, and one among them had enough faith to put his foot into the sea, and then the waters parted.  Now that version is not in the Bible; it’s a midrash, a story, made up to accompany the Biblical account, that helps us to understand better.

            We here are not being pursued, but we know the importance of sharing our hope and faith, of being able to go forward because others have spoken, prayed and done what was needed, including tested the water.  We know the precious grace of traveling in accompaniment with others.  We have journeyed with St. James, the patron saint of pilgrims, and with St. James Church, just down the road, for 7 years, a great blessing.  We appreciate so much the traveling mercies and the feeling of being at home which we have experienced at St. James.  Now the Methodists have been willing to dangle their toes in the water and invite us to this beautiful sanctuary, where we seek to share hope and faith and community.

            We have just come about a thousand steps from St. James to here.  Lao-Tzu, the great Taoist, wrote, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”  We are well begun.  Although this Taoist wisdom is often quoted, it is almost never heard in its original context.  The Tao teh Ching first says “Tackle things before they have appeared.  Cultivate peace and order before confusion and disorder have set in.”  In other words, you need to start, even with a small step on the very long journey of peace, or else you will have chaos.  The other choice besides taking the journey isn’t to stay home – it’s to lose the possibility of home – the journey is what takes us home.  We have been on a journey as a congregation that seems a thousand miles long sometimes, as we grow and build toward what we are seeking in a church home.  Yet each time we take a step forward in creating a religious home, or, each time St. James or the United Methodist Church or Hevreh or South Berkshire Friends Meeting or Clinton AME Zion, or any of the other congregations around here, take steps in their journeys of creating religious community, they and we are also creating peace.  Were we not all engaged in this sacred journey, the world would be less whole, less kind, less a home to our people.  The religious journey of peace is a thousand miles long, but at least we have begun with these few steps.

            The congregational and community journeys we take are joined with all the individual traveling mercies.  For a personal perspective, I turn to author Michael Crichton, who wrote, “Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.  There is no mystery about why this should be so.  Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines,…you are forced into direct experience.”  We don’t actually have to travel to get direct experience – it also comes when we are stripped away by pain or terror, and it comes more tenderly when we seek prayerfully, or center meditatively.  A Buddhist expression says, “Every wakeful step, every mindful act is the direct path to awakening.” When we leave the day-to-day concerns and distractions, the seeming ‘center’ in the belly of our self, then we are able to take a wakeful step, to be on the journey of discovery, of Truth, of Holiness, of Peace. 

             Home is where the heart is, where the hearth is, where the hearthcake is.  We are still on the journey, blessed with traveling mercies, and at the same time, we are indeed home.  Blessings for the journey, traveling mercies.  Blessings for the homecoming, with hearthcake to strengthen us, and joy, gentle folks joy, and fresh days of love accompany your hearts.  Amen.