SALVATION BY CHARACTER
A Yom Kippur Sermon
James Ishmael Ford
26 September 2004

The Text
We have seen Yitzhak Perlman
Who walks the stage with braces on both legs,
On two crutches.
He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,
Tucking one leg back, extending the other,
Laying down his crutches, placing the violin under his chin.
On one occasion one of his violin strings broke.
The audience grew silent but the violinist didn’t leave the stage.
He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra began its part.
The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.
With three strings, he modulated, changed, and
recomposed the piece in his head.
He retuned the strings to get different sounds,
turned them upward and downward.
The audience screamed delight,
applauded their appreciation.
Asked later how he had accomplished this feat,
the violinist answered
It is my task to make music with what remains.
A legacy mightier than a concert.
Make music with what remains.
Complete the song left for us to sing,
transcend the loss,
play it out with heart, soul, and might
with all remaining strength within us.
Harold Schulwies

As you may have heard, we Unitarian Universalists are notoriously difficult to define. There is that famous joke about the three children standing together in a playground talking about their religions. One child says she’s Catholic, the second he’s a Jew, while the third pauses before saying, “I’m not sure, but I think we’re League of Women Voters.” That’s of course the UU. Several of us like repeating what was heard between two children in this congregation not all that long ago. This is true. Two sisters are walking down the hall, the elder saying to the younger for all to hear, “No, no. We can eat meat, we’re Una-tarians.”

I suggest while our faith is hard to define, nonetheless our Unitarian Universalism offers something interesting and unique among western religious traditions. Not only that but we offer a way that is desperately needed to heal hurt in individual hearts and which points to the reconciliation of the world itself. So, taking some effort to understand this emerging tradition that is ours, to clarify it and to find how it can guide us in our choices today, is terribly terribly important.

In that spirit I feel the need to address three things which may at first seem rather disparate. I want to talk about Yom Kippur. I want to discuss that nineteenth century Unitarian assertion about “salvation by character.” And I feel a deep need to address that human horror currently raging through the Darfur region in the Sudan. I suggest in fact these three things wind together into a thread we can follow through all sorts of situations and conditions. And if we follow it all the way; will lead us true to what it is we really are about. A rather grand assertion, I know. Let’s see.

First let me lay the ground. If you walk into a Unitarian Universalist congregation as a stranger it is immediately obvious we’re culturally Protestants. Our particular building, while at first glance seemingly Catholic or at least Episcopalian upon close examination reveals its Protestant and specifically Unitarian Protestant nature, the robes our choir and ministers wear, so many of our musical choices, and even the weekly Order of Service found in most UU congregations betray our Protestant heritage. Indeed if one came to most UU Sunday worship services and didn’t pay close attention to what’s said they might think we were Congregationalists or Presbyterians.

But, then there is what is said. As most here know, somewhere along the line, I’d say before or at the latest shortly following the Second World War, following a long progression we in fact shifted from being a liberal Christian church to being a liberal church with Christians. We saw how while we owe much to our Christian heritage, and indeed continue to be a viable home for many liberal Christians, as a living spiritual community we have become something different.

Ours is a way of life, marked by reason, freedom and tolerance. This way of life is predicated not upon the revelation of scripture, but through the evidence of our human senses rendered through the furnace-like fires of engaged hearts and minds. Through that process we discern a mysterious reality where the individual is precious and unique, but who exists only within the undulating currents of the natural world. We know how we rise and fall within each other’s arms. Our way teaches how we and all of nature are one.

This certainly doesn’t mean we can’t continue to learn from the traditions that gave us birth and which are still so precious to so many of us. Indeed a close examination reveals within Christianity and Judaism the very elements that have come together and been given new prominence within our tradition. We can look to aspects of Christianity, particularly the moral teachings of Jesus and such scriptural texts as the Epistle of James, or within the vital and compelling Jewish Wisdom tradition enshrined within such texts as Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and most notably Job; and find the sources of our way. Also within such engagement we find challenges and corrections. If we engage with humility we find the traditions of Judaism and Christianity pushing us toward our own destiny.

As a concrete example I want to speak briefly to one of the greatest of the Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah and especially Yom Kippur. I think it should be easy to see how this ancient holiday season casts light on our Unitarian Universalist perspectives. This can be a correction, showing some of our shadows in high relief. And don’t doubt it, we have shadows. But if we pay attention we can see how such open-hearted engagement helps us to clarify our work and our goals; pointing to our own true destiny, our deepest call and purpose.

Probably it would be wise for me to give the quickest review of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: As the majority of us know it is a week long observance of the New Year in the Jewish calendar, and has just concluded. What is most important for our purposes is how it is a time of reflection and renewal. As my friend and colleague Joel Miller succinctly puts it “Traditionally, this week is a process of self-evaluation, acknowledgement of guilt, then of repentance, and finally a plea for forgiveness.”

Frankly, I think this particular discipline is something we UUs need to call ourselves to. Pretty much all of us know that famous line from Starr King the great nineteenth century Universalist who served the Unitarian pulpit in San Francisco in the years running up to the Civil War. When asked about the differences between the two denominations which would eventually merge and become us; he replied the Universalists believe God is too good to damn humanity, while the Unitarians believe they’re too good to be damned. While we’ve inherited much that is good from both traditions, we tend also to have inherited that terrible shadow of the Unitarian way, the sin of pride – often, it seems, as a core value.

This is not a good thing. We need to notice our hurt, our wounds, our shadows. For one thing we have them. To deny this is foolish. To not notice only aggravates the hurt we feel and can cause for others. But, more importantly, we can’t change if we don’t allow ourselves to see who and how we are. Here’s where I want to bring that old Unitarian chestnut “salvation by character” into our conversation.

As most everyone here knows I’ve been on a tear of late trying to summarize our faith. In the spirit of clarification I’ve been trying on a couple of phrases, old and new that seem to me to characterize our way. One is that line “we are a way of life.” That is we’re more about what we do than what we say we believe. Two others come out of our historic traditions, one from Universalism: “love over creed” and the other from Unitarianism: “salvation by character.” Both of these spiritual slogans, bumper sticker summations if you will; have been met among us, how can say it, with mixed reviews. But I persist in asserting their importance.

“Love over creed” we’ll come to at another time. Today, in the spirit of Yom Kippur I’ll stay focused on “salvation by character.” As I’ve raised these words “salvation by character” in various venues I’ve found people have expressed, again how shall I put it, strong feelings. Often these feelings have been negative. Frankly this is nothing new. Some years ago someone did a Unitarian Universalist values survey. In this survey a sample population was asked to order rank such terms as peace, love, beauty, truth, wisdom and salvation. As UU minister Richard Fewkes commented on this survey “salvation was ranked the lowest of all the values and some even wrote it in the margins at the bottom of the page upside down and said it was a negative value…”

This has been confirmed in my own conversations with members and friends of this Society. We tend to be very uncomfortable with that word “salvation.” While the dictionary meaning has to do with “healing” there is little doubt in many of our minds that the word really stands for going to a hypothetical heaven that some significant majority of us simply don’t believe in.

But I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t just drop the term. I think we tend to resist the real underlying point here: we are hurt, we are wounded, we are incomplete. And we need healing. I believe this is the real point in that word salvation. Hell is here. And so is heaven: right here. And I suggest at least some of our resistance to the term salvation is found in a pride that blinds us to this possibility of finding the heaven that pervades the cosmos. So, in the spirit of Yom Kippur let’s hold ourselves to what the term might mean. Here that delightful poem by my friend and colleague Lynn Ungar might be helpful.

“By what are you saved? And how?/Saved like a bit of string./tucked away in a drawer?/Saved like a child rushed from/a burning building, already/singed and coughing smoke?/Or are you salvaged/like a car part – the one good door/when the rest is wrecked?//Do you believe me when I say/you are neither salvaged nor saved,/but salved, anointed by gentle hands/where you are most tender?/Haven’t you seen/the way snow curls down/like a fresh sheet,/ how it/covers everything, makes everything/beautiful, without exception?”

I suggest the saving healing we can find is not a covering over, but an uncovering, a re-discovery of our essential at-one-ment – that magnificent pun we find in the English word atonement. Atonement; the essential aspect of Yom Kippur. This really is simply a calling us back to our own true selves, to our essential nature: how we are precious and unique and at the same time how we are woven out of each other. When we surrender our pride and allow ourselves to be full within our own hurt and woundedness; the work of healing truly begins. We must work on our own character, looking honestly at our shortcomings, foolishnesses and even how we are complicit in various evils. And at the same time we must engage the world from where we are.

In so doing, as that nineteenth century saying of our tradition goes, we discover the world of healing of saving of salving occurs within us – within attention to our character, to how we stand in the world. Our saving is found in how we are, in what we do. Broken and incomplete, nonetheless everything we do counts. Gloriously, our attention to how we act in the world, how we step up to the plate, how we give ourselves to the matter at hand is the secret hope of the world.

We need to engage at a number of levels. I need to assess how I’ve failed myself and my friends. How have I failed as a minister as a husband as a friend? What do I need to do to repair various hurts? Each of us need such personal assessments every now and again, and this week is a particularly good time to do something like this. But this evaluation also needs to extend beyond our private lives. We are woven out of each other and the world itself. We are inextricably connected with everything that is going on.

And that, my friends, brings us to the situation in Darfur. At the end of August our denominational president, the Reverend Doctor William Sinkford joined a number of others to protest against the horrendous genocide committed against the people of Darfur in western Sudan by their own government. He was arrested in this demonstration. And in that act I believe Bill Sinkford was manifesting the depths of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, bringing who he is, limited and hurt to a process of growing and healing. He put it on the line: a witness before the world. A witness to the hurt and a witness to possible healing.

In that spirit of healing through not turning away I’ve written two letters. One is to President George Bush. The other is to Secretary General Kofi Annon. The text is essential the same. Here is what I’ve written to the president. “We the undersigned members and friends of the First Unitarian Society in Newton are writing to you to thank you for the administration’s leadership in calling the devastation occurring in Darfur by its correct name: genocide. We are deeply concerned that these crimes against humanity are continuing. You are familiar with the litany of horrors. There needs to be immediate intercession, both in terms of aid and to protect the people from continuing assaults of the government and particularly their agents, the Janiaweed militias.

“We ask that you put every possible pressure on the government of Sudan to cease its actions against its people and to allow humanitarian aid to reach those who so desperately need help right now.

“In support of this we ask you exercise your leadership within the Security Council to provide a real deadline for action with consequences for failing to do so that includes the placement of international monitors and (as provided within Chapter VII of the UN Charter) peacekeeping forces on the ground in Darfur.

“And lastly, we urge you support the creation of an international commission of inquiry, or at least a referral to the International Criminal Court, to research and punish those responsible for these horrors.

“We ask that you act quickly. Without significant international action many more innocent people are going to suffer and die. This is a humanitarian crisis that calls for all people of faith and good will to act. We urge you to do everything within your power to stop the killing.” I thank them and include space for as many of us who wish to sign this letter to do so. We’ll send copies of these letters to our senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and Congressman Barney Frank. The two letters will be at the Social Justice table. I hope you will seriously consider signing them.

But, what does this mean? Why is this a spiritual act? It can be nothing more than the flourish of pride, of people far away from something terrible making a symbolic gesture of no real significance. Or, it can be taken up within the spirit of Yom Kippur, as part of a process of self-evaluation, acknowledgement of guilt, then of repentance, and finally as a plea for forgiveness for what we have done and what we have left undone. This deep self-examination and full engagement with the world is a central part of a way of life that says healing, indeed salvation, is found within how we live our lives. Dong this allows another strand in that thread which can follow and which will lead us from sadness to joy, from hurt to healing. It is that important.

St Theresa of Avila once said every step to heaven is heaven. What we are about here in this gathering is a commitment to each other and to the world. We need to look into our own hearts, to see clearly, and to act: all at once. I think I can describe what happens if we do this. Well, I can’t. It’s contained within a poem by Rabbi Harold Schulwies in Miriyam Glazer’s book Dancing on the Edge of the World.

“We have seen Yitzhak Perlman/Who walks the stage with braces on both legs,/On two crutches./He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,/Tucking one leg back, extending the other,/Laying down his crutches, placing the violin under his chin./On one occasion one of his violin strings broke./the audience grew silent but the violinist didn’t leave the stage./He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra began its part./The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings./With three strings, he modulated, changed, and/Recomposed the piece in his head./He retuned the strings to get different sounds,/Turned them upward and downward./The audience screamed delight,/Applauded their appreciation./Asked later how he had accomplished this feat,/The violinist answered/It is my task to make music with what remains./A legacy mightier than a concert./Make music with what remains./Complete the song left for us to sing,/Transcend the loss,/Play it out with heart, soul, and might/With all remaining strength within us.”

This, my friends, is our work within this place.
It is good, it is holy, it is a saving grace.
So, see you at the Justice table.

Amen.