So . . . here we have gathered on this first Sunday of the first month, of the second year of the new millennium, 2002. (A numerical palindrome, you know!) It is good to be gathering together. To put our faces into the winds of this new year, the winds of change.

Of course the date, January 6th, 2002, is an arbitrary, cultural one, having no sidereal benchmark in the universe as we have come to know it through the science of astronomy. And yet, we need rituals, we humans. And rituals that bring us round in a circle of ending and beginning in the great cycles of nature have been especially compelling tools to bind us to the earth¹'s powers---to deepen the relationship of the human psyche with the flow of life. And so . . . here we have gathered, gathered side by side, once more, to ritually celebrate our appreciation and awe of life.

It is a pivotal point, the beginning of the calendar year. It raises a Janus consciousness: one face looking backward, one looking forward. Looking backward yields a time for reassessment. A time for evaluation, and a determination of the impact, the effect the past period of hours, days, weeks and months has had upon us. It can, and perhaps should, also be a time to evaluate how we have fallen short, how we have not done what we had hoped. I must admit such evaluations have been hard for me to undertake. I spent many years warding off the assault of negative judgments, that first came from the adults in my childhood, and were later adopted by me as a form of self management, which then became a form of self identity. I created finely tuned internal responses that I often used whenever I felt I was facing errors I had made, or faults in my character. One of my cruder but more powerful defensive responses was simply not to look at all. The problem is, avoiding self-review caused me to loose accountability with my self, with my own conscience. If I wasn't willing to look at my short comings, what good was it for me to commit to any attempt at change or growth?

I've spend many years working with my defenses, and I've made some credible headway. This year has helped a lot. Part of the difference has to do with returning to California where I feel most at home. Feeling more grounded, I can relax more. Relaxing, allows me to be more courageous. Part of my new willingness to evaluate my past errors seems also to have come about because evaluation of our pasts is a natural psychological process, a life task, that evolves with special potency in the last half of our lives. Part of it, too, has to do with you . . . all. You seem willing to engage, here, in this room, on these Sabbath mornings---engage in hearing at deep levels, engage in receiving hard won truths, even if their edges cause discomfort. I am greatly helped by all of this.

The other half of the Janus consciousness is looking forward. Looking forward in the time we now stand in, especially if we have been willing to do the hard evaluations of how well we have negotiated our path, brings us into a radically different consciousness. It is the consciousness of commitment. The new year offers us the opportunity to recommit to our path, to our work, to our relationships, to the deepest desires of our selves.

For me, this year, one major recommitment has to do with speaking truth from the pulpit: The truths I am able to discern, and have learned through good effort and pain, through courage and loss, through heartbreak and success. One of those truths is that I have a hunger for unity, unity with . . . the fountainhead energy of life . . . call it God, or just Life, call it Spirit or God/Goddess, call it Truth or light, call it the Enlightened path . . . however it is named (and many of those names work for me in one moment and not in another), however it is named, the hunger I feel within to come into a deep and direct experience of these forces has grown as I have passed into the second half of my life---and it continues to grow in intensity and in its demand upon me as the years go on.

So what has all of this to do with patriotism, perilous or not?

To answer that, I need to say a few things about sermons. What they mean, to me. What I believe you can legitimately expect from them.

A major purpose of sermons is this [inhale deeply: visibly, audibly]. Sermons are meant to offer inspiration: the inhalation of a rarefied air---the air that exists where we come to sit in rooms like this, where through honoring the sacred, the sacred becomes palpable to us, and in us. Sermons are meant to be visitations into the depths: of intellect and heart, of desire and courage, of insight and peace: depths unfortunately not usual in our everyday experience. Or, as one southerner used to say to me when talking about entering sacred space, It's okay to 'get different' in here. So here we are 'getting different' together.

Sermons are also meant to create pause; pause in our busy lives, pause in our thinking, pause in our habits, pause so that the depths can surface---or so that we can drop down into the depths. Sermons are meant to bring us into the oblique view, the view that finds a different angle on the issues of our time that pound on us in unrelenting psychic blows. This different angle is, as in the words of our first Centering Thought taken from President Bush's inaugural speech, like an angel that rides the cultural storms that beset us, speaking to us with a view more comprehensive and wiser than we have been muddling along with.

So . . . these are among the many things that sermons are intended to do. (Now over the course of a year of Sundays there will be many different kinds of sermons, and many more facets of their value will be expressed. If you don't already, you might consider attending for the long term!) Now this is the job I have when I sit down to write these sermons and when I get up here to deliver them: The job is to reach in somewhere in the territory of my heart-intellect, that hybrid place where my own deeper desires lie, and invite the words to come. (The better part of that work, then, simply becomes to get out of the way, so the words can say what needs to be said.) Sometimes I don't like the words that I hear, that fill my mind. Sometimes I don't like the places they lead me, places that make me vulnerable to criticism, that set me against the culture, of the church or, God forbid, the nation. Even after I apply my best reasoning and analytical editing to the words that come, sometimes I don't like to hear them.

But that's not the point---whether I like the words or not. The point is to represent the truth as best as I can. To wrestle with what is unclear, what is untrue, what is unknown---but that is in need of knowing. That is what I have been called to do.

And that is what patriotism is all about.

Here are the words of Adrienne Rich, one of the most profound poetic, and prophetic, voices of our times: "A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being."

The implication here is that the soul of her, of our, country, is at risk. It must be wrestled for! And of course, that is the case today, not only because our times are so perilous, but because that has always been the case in the history of countries---a wrestling must be done to keep the center of such a powerful human creation true to its purpose.

But a question arises: what are the rules of this wrestling match? If a patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country, what guidelines, laws and commandments, exist for the wrestling she must do? And who sets them? And who evaluates them and, as it were, polices them?

The current Presidential administration in Washington, D.C., enjoying some of the highest public affirmation in the history of the republic, is itself engaged in a wrestling match to safeguard the soul of this country. I am awed by the struggle. And . . . I am concerned about the rules they have set up, and for how the match is going. I have written a letter to President Bush. I want to read it to you.

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Mr. President:

I am writing to you with mixed emotions. I am certain that the execution of a fight against terrorism, that has been thrust upon you from out of the depths of unspeakable tragedy, would be a formidable task for any individual to undertake. I am awed by your willingness to step confidently into that role. It is clear that we need confident leadership to deal with such a complex, globally extensive and violent problem. Yet in my heart my appreciation for your resolve is overshadowed by my concern for where your decisions and the decisions of your cabinet members are leading us.

I am one of the ministers of a Unitarian Universalist Church in California, a state, polls say, that has recently demonstrated enormous support for your presidency, though it did not support you in the presidential election. Many of the members of this congregation are among them. Our faith tradition is profoundly committed to the processes and the efficacy of democracy, both within our congregations and in society at large. And it is in the practice and the ideals of democracy that my concerns about your administration's decisions are centered.

As I am sure you are aware, Congressman John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary committee stated the following in a November 16th press release: "Today we stand on the verge of a civil liberties calamity in this country. The Administration and the Attorney General have taken a series of constitutionally dubious actions that place the Executive branch in the untenable role of legislator, prosecutor, judge, and jury. When Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism bill last month, I was concerned that the Attorney General would unilaterally and unjustifiably seek to expand the government's powers. But I never dreamed he would make me a prophet so quickly. Since then Mr. Ashcroft has dealt one hammer blow after another to the very constitutional values he repeatedly promised to uphold at his confirmation hearings.

As you are also aware, Congressman Conyers, like two members of your Cabinet, is an African American; he speaks out of the experience of one whose people have been tragically targeted throughout American history; that is, he speaks with confidence about what it means to face sustained marginalization, oppression, terrorist violence and discrimination---both in the 350 years prior to the events of 911, and, lamentably, still continuing after.

I believe that you would do well to lay the confidence you have evidenced in quickly moving to act to protect the United States against further terrorists attacks over against the confidence with which Congressman Conyers speaks. He knows first hand how laws meant to protect can instead be used to oppress Americans; he knows how a government of laws can become a government of personal agendas, agendas that exploit many for the profit and power of a few.

Early in your efforts to combat terrorism, you stated that anyone who is not for us (the U.S.)is against us. In a similar vein, in a Senate hearing early in December, Attorney General Ashcroft questioned the patriotism of those speaking out for civil liberties: "Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," he said. "They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends." Both of these expressions, yours and Attorney Ashcroft's are alarming because they run directly counter to both the spirit and the practical functioning of democratic governing.

History has repeatedly shown that when democratically appropriate dissent has been suppressed, even in war time, it has only resulted in harm to our system of government; it has only resulted in wounds to the body politic that have taken many years to mend and have been far more costly than intended or imagined, or than any gain they might have originally accrued. I implore you to pay attention to the history out of which we have come, even as we are plunging into a history of our own making in these very difficult times.

Clarence Darrow another American attorney once stated about nationalistic patriotism, True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.² My religious values affirm that assertion. I ask that you take these words to heart so that your leadership can affirm the deep love and sacrifice so many have shown for this country that you serve.

May your decisions be blessed with the strength of compassion, the light of truth, and the courage of the good heart.

Respectfully, Rev. Kurt A. Kuhwald Unitarian Universalist Minister

I have shared this letter because it comes from the discerning and the dissenting power of my own heart and intellect . . . which is one of the functions of the sermon.

Sharing this does, however, raise a few questions, which I present to you in closing.

What are you doing to be engaged in the governing of our country, here at the raw and violent beginning of the second millennium? What you do matters. And you participate in the governing of this country whether you act or not. Silence and inaction are as powerful votes as any made in the voting booth. Our faith teaches that you are each inherently worthy and called to speak your voice and opinion. Our faith proclaims that the democratic process is the rightful statement of our worth, and we are called to act upon it. What are you doing to express these values in the governing of this country?

And, in a less politically oriented question . . . what is your heart's desire for this year? What is it that you most deeply want to reach, to see, to accomplish, to realize?

And . . . as you look out from your own Janus consciousness, both backward into the lived experiences of your journey, and forward into the vast unknown facing our civilization and our earth, what, in you, in how you live, needs to be changed, and what commitments will you make to undertake them?

It is a time of change. None of us will get out of here without being changed. None of us will get out of this room, out of our present personal circumstances, out of our lives, without being changed, deeply, irrevocably.

Let me end with the words of none other than, who else? . . . Tom Brokaw. You know the guy, he's the managing editor of NBC Nightly News---a fitting voice, it seems, when much of this sermon has focused on public issues and statement. He writes about change:

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I was a young reporter working in Omaha. I was a true child of the 50's, innocent and conventional in my ambitions. I remember thinking then: "This doesn't happen here. This will change us." But I could not have anticipated the cataclysmic change that followed, from Vietnam, through social upheaval, to Watergate. Almost 40 years later I feel as uncertain as I did then, knowing only that change is coming again in forms we cannot foresee.

May the changes sweeping our world, our country, our Unitarian Universalist community, deepen your resolve to live fully, and your confidence that you can do so with realism, dignity and love.

Ashé. Amien. Shalom. Blessed Be. Namasté.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Kurt Kuhwald